‘Sita in Exile’: A novel about gender expectations of women in the Ramayana (and the modern world)

Rashi Rohatgi’s debut novel Sita in Exile is slim and elegant, delivered in lyrical prose. Sita is married and having an affair with her husband’s colleague, so there is all the intrigue of an Elena Ferrante novel, the material dialectic pitched against feminist consciousness and desire, and the dialogic relationship between women as both journey and destination. However, the form is deliberately counter-narrative, muting action, prose that flows like poetry, with leaps in memory, continents, and time without warning. The sentences are economical and compressed. When I started to read like that, I started to gulp the sentences, the flow and the gaps. I read lying down, late on sleepless nights, alone, with Sita.

Sita in between worlds

As a South Asian immigrant in the US, I have experienced so much of the alienation and constant introspection of the protagonist Sita of the novel. Life can box an immigrant into tiny spaces, and building relationships takes a great deal of effort. My family and I often feel completely alone, as if all we have in this country is one another! Sita in Exile is unique among diaspora novels, as the setting is Europe rather than America.

The protagonist Sita was raised in America by immigrant parents but later married a...

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