Immigration
Guadeloupe "Welcoming Land"
Guadeloupe (See map opposite)
1°) A land of welcome for the children of the Bateau "l'Aurélie", and immigrants who arrived by the boats that followed it from 1854 to 1889.
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2°) Land of adoption of the Indians who could not return to the country of their ancestors, and
those who wanted to stay in Guadeloupe
Guadeloupe, land of welcome for the 42,316 Indians who left India from 1854 to 1889, and land of adoption for those who stayed and those who could not return, covers an area of 1,704 km2, and located in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, in Central America.
It is an island of the French West Indies, which is about 15,000 km from India,
"the motherland"
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Leaving the ports of India, the boats had to sail for about 3 months to arrive in Guadeloupe.
Guadeloupe is a land of interbreeding between Europe, Africa and Asia (Middle East, India). Thus the long-erased Indian community wishes to have its identity recognized. The presence of the Indian color whether by the colombo (spice) or by the emblematic fabric of the traditional outfit, the madras, recalls their contribution deeply rooted in the Guadeloupean identity.
La Guadeloupe has just over 405,000 inhabitants whose composition is as follows: 72% of Guadeloupeans are Afro-Guadeloupean, 14% are Indo-Guadeloupean 9% are of European type, 2% from Middle East, finally, the others (the Siro-lybanais, Dominicans, Dominicans, Haitians .....) represent nearly 3% of the inhabitants. In addition, Guadeloupe's population is very young.
Guadeloupe being a French department, French is the official language. Representatives of the oldest generations of the archipelago do not always speak fluent French, but Guadeloupean Creole. Guadeloupean Creole is considered a regional language, an ancient language born from a crossbreeding of French, English and African languages and certain Amerindian words.
Creole was the means of communication of the Indian immigrants, the Indians coming from different villages of India did not always understand each other, and they needed a language allowing them to communicate. They thus very quickly learned Creole in which certain Hindi words such as: (nan ni nan nan, appa, anman) are integrated.
Sugar cane and bananas are the two biggest productions of the archipelago.
Guadeloupean culture is characterized by its diversity. It comes from the mixture of the different cultures that make it up. We can cite African culture, Indian culture, South American culture, Syrian-Lebanese culture. These influences were combined with the European culture brought by metropolitan France, which constitutes the predominant cultural contribution.
Today, with increasing globalization, these mixtures are increasingly present in artistic fields such as theater, music, cooking, cinema, literature.
Due to its archipelagic nature, Guadeloupe reveals landscapes that are as varied as they are contrasting on an archipelago made up of 1704 km2 of emerged land, and includes a multitude of islands, six of which are inhabited.