Mauritius yogasana athletes find ancestral roots at Ahmedabad championships

Mauritian youth arrived in Ahmedabad for the first World Yogasana Championship expecting a global test on the mat and found something more personal: a living link to family histories carried across the Indian Ocean. For Chethnaa Reesaul, Parineeti Kalkah, Ganisha Bajah, Aarya Chelumbrun and Dakshesh Sai Joorun, the trip became a reminder that yogasana can be both sport and inheritance.

In the championship format, yogasana is treated as a competitive discipline rather than a studio practice. Athletes perform on the mat in a scored setting, turning balance, control and precision into points while keeping yoga’s movement vocabulary at the center of the event.

The inaugural championship opened in Ahmedabad on June 4 and ran through June 8. Official coverage said it drew more than 400 athletes from over 60 countries, while Olympics.com reported 522 athletes from 79 countries, a sign of how quickly the event scaled in its first edition. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a video message from Ahmedabad, pointed to the city’s UNESCO World Heritage status and said the championship could help yogasana gain recognition as a competitive sport. Sports minister Mansukh Mandaviya has also pushed for yogasana to be included in future Olympic Games.

For the Mauritian delegation, those big ambitions met a much older story. People of Indian origin make up nearly 70% of Mauritius’s roughly 1.2 million residents, and the island’s migration memory runs through Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis, where UNESCO says the modern indentured labour diaspora began. UNESCO says more than 462,000 migrants passed through the site between 1834 and 1920, while the Mahatma Gandhi Institute says its Indian Immigration Archives preserve nearly 2,055 registers covering about 454,000 Indian indentured immigrants who came to Mauritius from 1842 to 1910.

That history gave the championship a different emotional charge for the young athletes, many of whom trace ancestry to Bihar and Tamil Nadu. Some said being in India made family connections feel real for the first time and sparked a desire to return with relatives to ancestral regions later. What might have been a straightforward sporting trip instead opened into a wider act of recognition, where a scored routine on the mat also became a way of placing their own identities inside a much older Indian lineage.

In Ahmedabad, the first World Yogasana Championship did more than introduce a competitive stage for a growing sport. It gave a generation of Mauritian athletes a chance to see their own family stories reflected back through yoga, and to leave with a clearer sense of where those stories began.