Set in India and Montana, Shobha Rao’s Indian Country tells the story of two sisters, Janavi and Rajni, who are born and raised in Varanasi (also known as Benares), a city sacred to Hindus. They lose their mother when young and become each other’s support. When Rajni falls in love with a colleague, she refuses to marry the man, Sagar, to whom she was betrothed as a child, and compels Janavi to marry him to save the family honor.
Sagar, a hydraulic engineer who specializes in dams, has a new job in Montana to oversee the removal of a dam on the Cotton River. Janavi, a social worker who helps street children in Varanasi, is forced to give up her life and move to a small town in Montana, where they are the only South Asians. She is angry because she married someone against her will, is trying to build a conjugal life with a stranger, and is completely alienated in rural Montana.
Sagar finds himself inevitably caught up in the politics of the dam removal, where Native American rights over burial sites conflict with the town’s white landowners’ desires to keep the dam. Sagar befriends a Latino colleague, Alex, and Renny, a Native American anthropologist with a young child. When Renny drowns mysteriously in the river, Sagar is blamed for his approach to dam removal and fired from his job.
The narrative is part whodunit, with Sagar and Janavi trying to figure out what really happened to Renny. Their investigative journey connects them to the local Native American community and the many instances of missing and murdered women. But this novel is much more than a murder mystery—its major preoccupation is with the ecology of rivers, their cultural significance, and the impact of colonialism on people and the environment.
Sagar’s job reflects his deep spiritual connection with rivers. Not only does he understand the sacred nature of rivers to both Hindus and to Native Americans; he knows that the river both sustains and destroys life. Rao balances scientific understanding with myth and history through Sagar and avoids sentimentalization of rivers and Indigenous cultures. She intersperses vignettes from the past in the stories of both the Ganga and the Cotton River that examines different colonial histories while exploring the human costs of the colonial endeavor. She also successfully balances the portrayal of Janavi and Sagar to understand the gendered nature of familial relationships and to explore domestic violence and the exploitation of children.
At the heart of what could be a very grim narrative is the budding relationship between Sagar and Janavi is the gradual, bumpy-yet-sweet evolution of their romance. Rao is a skilled storyteller—she weaves disparate narratives across time and geography into a compelling story about the legacy of colonialism and the ongoing ecological issues that are rooted in colonial expansion. The characters are compellingly drawn, the landscapes beautifully evoked, and the narrative so well-paced that a reader will not want to put it down.
Shobha Rao, author of Girls Burn Brighter and An Uncensored Woman, will be reading at Elliott Bay Books on August 11 at 7:00 p.m.
Nalini Iyer is a Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches courses in Asian American, Postcolonial, and South Asian Studies. She is the author/editor of several books in literary criticism. She lives in Kirkland. WA.
