Through the meddling of her older sister, Janavi, a young woman from Varanasi, India, a city on the Ganges, stumbles into an arranged marriage with Sagar. Sagar is a hydraulic engineer about to emigrate to Custer County, Montana (the “Indian Country” of the title of Shobha Rao’s new novel); he has been hired to remove a dam on the Cotton River.
As the two move from the Ganges to the Cotton River, they notice parallels—mythological, religious and historical—between the two. Both nourished peoples (Indians for the Ganges, and local Native tribes for the Cotton) who were in turn subjected to and brutalized by colonial expansion. These parallels become evident to Sagar when he meets Renny, a member of the local (unnamed) tribe appointed to oversee the Cotton River Dam Removal Project. When Renny drowns in the Cotton River a few days later, her death is deemed an accident, but Sagar is put on leave and his visa revoked; the mayor blames the dam removal project for Renny’s death. In the sixty-day grace period granted before their return flight to India, Sagar and Janavi investigate Renny’s death.
Every character in Indian Country has selfish moments.
Intertwined with Sagar and Janavi’s hunt for the truth are shorter, chapter-length stories spanning various points in the past, occurring either near the Cotton or the Ganges, and involving violence perpetrated by men against women. Within these stories, including the wider one of Sagar, Janavi, and Renny’s untimely death, the murders committed by men are unquestionably evil. Yet Rao also creates sympathetic figures out of some of these violent men: in one such story, Nell and Teddy, a recently married couple, move from Cambridge, England to Custer County, Montana in 1928. After a long drought in the Cotton River Valley, the dust and lack of nutrition results in Nell’s mental decline:
Teddy was examining a line of ants when Nell ran out of the shack and said, “Look, look, look, Teddy. Come inside and look. You have to look.” And she dragged him inside even though Teddy was greatly fixated on the ants—their military coordination, their compact bodies, their ceaseless march toward the killing fields. She pulled him to the table, smiled wide, and said, “Look. Look.” She was pointing to the table on which, in the dust, she’d drawn a large oval. “What is it?” he asked. “What do you think? A watermelon, of course. I grew it just for you, Teddy. Go ahead. Go ahead. Have a slice.” He saw that she was no longer smiling and was waiting, truly waiting, for him to eat a slice. He looked back down at the oval—such a simple shape—and knew it was the most grotesque thing she had ever drawn. And that the drought may one day end, but what had begun with this simple oval would never end.
To put her out of her misery, Teddy suffocates her with a pillow, an act which, at least within this story, hardly seems evil, especially when compared with the other vignettes, which feature human traffickers and rapists. Even when compared with Mayor Dooley, who cruelly scapegoated Sagar and killed Renny, Teddy seems downright virtuous. Teddy, and characters like him, are scattered through Indian Country, and with these figures Rao distinguishes between an evil person and an evil act. Teddy’s evil arises from his own selfishness: he was the one who moved Nell out to Montana, and instead of returning to England to get her medical help, he kills her for his own peace of mind.
The specificity of Rao’s parallel between Varanasi and Custer County is stark.
Every character in Indian Country has selfish moments: Sagar moves himself and Janavi out to Montana for the sake of his career, and Janavi, out of pettiness, ignores her sister suffering in an abusive household. These moments, however, do not persist; they both grew up in environments where they could not constantly get what they wanted, and adjusted accordingly. Janavi contrasts Sagar’s upbringing with that of his younger brother, Sandeep, who was injured as a child:
She’d noticed, of course, that he wasn’t able to fully lift his right arm and though it was certainly an affliction, it didn’t, in her mind, warrant the excessive solicitousness of the mother—as if he were a baby bird in a high nest—nor the nonsensical leniency of the father, who seemed perfectly content to have his adult son sit around and do nothing with his life.
She might be undecided as to whether Sagar was a good man but Sandeep, in her opinion, was not.
Sandeep, as a child, was able to have his every whim fulfilled, resulting in the “bad” man Janavi meets. Sagar’s parents treated him much more severely with consequences Janavi acknowledges:
What startled her, though, was [Sagar’s] depth of feeling for someone he’d so recently met, and she thought again of Lottie’s question. Yes, she answered her, he is a good man.
The truly evil people in Indian Country, across both the Cotton River and the Ganges, are all men, and mostly white. White men, Rao describes, enter a society from childhood that caters to their every whim, as Sagar’s parents cater to Sandeep. Renny is not Mayor Dooley and his friends’ first casualty, but their previous acts were dismissed as “boy stuff”, men “drinking, smoking, goofing off.”
The white men in Indian Country take what they want from those beneath them: women, people of colour, the land itself; there seems to be no end to the vignettes woven between Sagar and Janavi’s story—white men are constantly forcing themselves into the country of India and the Indian Country of Montana, the land belonging to Renny’s tribe.
While colonialism’s impact on native populations is hardly a new topic, the specificity of Rao’s parallel between Varanasi and Custer County is stark; the conditions of postcolonial India breed economic and racial disparity as do the conditions of rural America. Rao’s title, Indian Country, refers to both the land of India—technically free from British rule—and protected Native American land—technically allowed self-governance. In Rao’s novel, white men treat these freedoms as temporary gifts granted to both groups of “Indians”, and infringe upon them at will, resulting in a set of narratives that are as compelling as they are harrowing.
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