Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam (18 September 1900 – 15 December 1985), often known as SSR or Chacha ("uncle"), was a Mauritian physician and statesman who led Mauritius to independence from the United Kingdom. He was the colony's chief minister from 1961 and premier from 1964, the first prime minister of independent Mauritius from 1968 to 1982, and governor-general from 1983 until his death. He is widely known in Mauritius as the "Father of the Nation".
The son of an indentured labourer from Bihar, Ramgoolam was born in a village in eastern Mauritius. He studied medicine in London, where he joined the Fabian Society and Indian nationalist circles and met Mahatma Gandhi. After returning home in 1935 he became a leader of the Indo-Mauritian community, co-founded the newspaper Advance and was nominated to the colony's Council of Government in 1940. Elected to the Legislative Council in 1948, he became the leader of the Labour Party group in the council and, by 1958, of the party itself. He campaigned for universal suffrage and ministerial government, both of which Britain conceded in the late 1950s.
As chief minister and premier, Ramgoolam led the parties that sought independence at the Lancaster House conference of 1965. During the conference, after being told that Britain could separate the islands without Mauritian consent, he agreed to the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago, which Britain made into the British Indian Ocean Territory. The detachment led to the expulsion of the islands' inhabitants between 1967 and 1973, a decision taken by the United Kingdom and the United States, not by Mauritius. Opponents, and some of the displaced Chagossians, long accused Ramgoolam of trading the islands for independence. British records later showed that Britain was prepared to detach them regardless, and in 2019 the International Court of Justice found that the detachment had not been based on the free and genuine will of the people of Mauritius. His Independence Party won the 1967 election, and Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968.
As prime minister, Ramgoolam governed through coalitions, including one with his former opponents in the Parti Mauricien Social Démocrate. His governments built a welfare state, introduced free secondary education and promoted the export processing zones that began the diversification of the sugar economy. They also ruled under a state of emergency from 1971 to 1976 to contain strikes led by the Mauritian Militant Movement. He signed the Lomé Convention, which guaranteed a European market for Mauritian sugar, and was chairman of the Organisation of African Unity in 1976–1977. After losing his seat in the 1982 election he became governor-general, and he died in office in 1985. The country's main airport and the botanic garden at Pamplemousses are named after him, and his likeness appears on Mauritian coins and banknotes. His son Navin Ramgoolam has served three terms as prime minister.
Ramgoolam's father, Moheeth Ramgoolam, was an indentured labourer from Bihar who arrived in Mauritius at the age of eighteen and later became a sirdar, or overseer, on a sugar estate. The family's ancestral village has been identified as Harigaon, in the Bhojpur district of Bihar, which Ramgoolam's son Navin visited in 2008. According to biographical essays published by the Mauritian government for Ramgoolam's birth centenary, his mother, Basmati Ramchurn, was a young widow with two sons, Nuckchadee Heeramun and Ramlall Ramchurn, when she married Moheeth.
Seewoosagur Ramgoolam was born on 18 September 1900 at Belle Rive, a sugar-estate village in the Flacq district in the east of the island, into a poor Hindu family. He was known in the family as Kewal, and the locality where he was born is now called Kewal Nagar. His father died when he was seven; accounts differ on when his mother died, but by the age of nine he had lost both parents. He was looked after by his mother and his half-brother Ramlall, a fairly prosperous small planter at Belle Rive.
He learnt Hindi and the rudiments of Indian culture at home and at the village baitka, where Hindu children were taught their language and culture, and then attended a Roman Catholic aided school and the Bel Air Government School, travelling by train. He prepared for the scholarship examinations at the Curepipe Boys' Government School while lodging with an uncle, a sworn land surveyor, and went on to the Royal College Curepipe, the colony's leading secondary school. At the age of twelve he lost the sight of his left eye in an accident. After leaving the Royal College he worked briefly as a clerk in the civil service.
In 1921 Ramgoolam left for Britain to study medicine, one of the first young Mauritian Hindus to attend a British university. According to Simmons he set off "with only a few pounds in his pocket"; his studies were paid for by his half-brother Ramlall until Ramlall, who had backed Rajcoomar Gujadhur against the powerful Pierre Montocchio in Flacq at the 1926 election, lost his position and land, after which Ramgoolam had to interrupt his studies and depended on occasional help from home, including money raised by the Mauritian politician G. M. D. Atchia in 1932. He studied at University College London and University College Hospital, and qualified with the diplomas of Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LRCP) and Member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS). He later recalled that he had also attended economics lectures at the London School of Economics, whose Fabian ideals shaped his political thought. He spent some twelve to fourteen years in Britain.
London gave him what Addison and Hazareesingh call "a useful political apprenticeship". He read widely in contemporary and socialist literature, poetry and drama; T. S. Eliot became his favourite author. He joined the Fabian Society, attended meetings of the British Labour Party and came to know socialist politicians such as George Lansbury, Fenner Brockway and Arthur Creech Jones, who later became the Labour Party's spokesman on colonial affairs; he was also in touch with intellectuals including Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. To earn money he wrote articles and letters for London newspapers, including The Morning Post, the Daily Herald and The Times. He later wrote that Marxism had left "a deep and everlasting impression" on his thinking during these years, before he settled on Fabian socialism.
He was drawn above all into the Indian nationalist movement. For his first six months in London he lived at the Indian Students' Association, and he became organising secretary and a member of the executive committee of the Indian Students' Union, through which he met Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and V. K. Krishna Menon. He worked for a time as secretary to the Indian nationalist Vithalbhai Patel, who, he later said, "initiated me into the art and science of politics", and he was active in the London branch of the Indian National Congress, which he chaired in 1924 and served for a time as secretary. He took a leading part in Indian students' agitation in London for Indian home rule, and recalled that Subhas Chandra Bose, whom he admired most among the Indian leaders, sent him the manuscript of The Indian Struggle to proofread. In 1931, when Mahatma Gandhi came to London for the second Round Table Conference, Ramgoolam met him at a tea party; he also met Rabindranath Tagore and Srinivasa Sastri. Through letters from home and Mauritian visitors to London, he kept in touch with events on the island.
He returned to Mauritius in September 1935 and set up his medical practice at 87 Desforges Street in Port Louis, in the wooden house where he lived for the next thirty years.
Entry into public life (1935–1948)
Doctor, writer and community leader
Back in Mauritius, Ramgoolam soon earned a reputation as a competent physician and began writing literary and social criticism for the newspapers Le Radical and Le Mauricien, and also wrote for Arya Vir. At the invitation of Kissoonsingh Hazareesingh, he joined the committee organising the centenary of the arrival of Indian indentured labourers, and he and the lawyer Rampersad Neerunjun were prominent figures in the celebrations of December 1935. The historian Adele Smith Simmons saw the centenary as the point at which the quiet style of the older Indo-Mauritian leaders gave way to younger, more forceful men.