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 European and moved to Europe. Unlike stories of other second-generation Americans, this novel moves beyond the angst experienced by South Asian women growing up in America. Rather, Sita assumes her parents’ status as a stable brick. As she grows into a young woman in America, studying theory in school, and plotting with her best friend about the independent young women they will become, she seems confident and unfettered by the anxiety of first-generation immigrants like me, or even the second-generation immigrants of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories. Rather, her angst and disorientation begin after marriage, in Norway, when she is exiled from America.
The novel is multi-textual, interacting with multiple texts, including the political theory Sita studies in school, exploring her condition in terms of race and gender and Hindu mythology. As the title announces, and as most reviewers have noted, the novel is a play on the mythology of Ramayana, which tells the tale of the prince heir Ram and his wife Sita. At his stepmother’s insistence, Ram, the rightful heir to the throne, is banished from his father’s kingdom to a forest. Thus begins Sita’s long exile, during which she is assaulted by Ravana, and struggles to maintain her virtue as a good wife and woman. The novel is a reading of the gender expectations of women in the original mythology, as well as the modern woman.
Born to Indian parents, the modern Sita is an American young woman who plans to move to New York with her friend Bhoomija. Instead, she marries a French man named Pierre following a fast and furious romance and is whisked off to Norway, far from her immigrant parents, her best friends Micah and Bhoomija, and all her plans. Like Sita of Ramayana, Sita is in exile and alone. But here the resemblance ends. Where the mythological Sita serves as an emblem of the virtuous married woman, Rohatgi’s heroine is dissatisfied with marriage, motherhood, and domesticity, and seeks erotic pleasure through an extramarital alliance. Clearly, marriage for the modern Sita is associated with loneliness and despair. While the modern Sita seemingly has strong ties to the stories and rituals she inherited from her parents about practising her Hindu roots, including the story of Sita, she interrogates Sita as an example to all women. As women, we are taught by Sita to be good, married women, to be virtuous, but the modern Sita seems to ask, what’s in it for us?
Despite the obvious reference to Sita, the novel also forges another textual relationship, with Henrik Ibsen’s desperate heroines Nora and Hedda Gabler, strung in a bleak landscape, trapped in domesticity that is happy for their husbands but not for them. Sita’s doting but boring husband Pierre wants a wife, a home, and a child and wants to see her in that role (like Hedda Gabler’s husband!). Reading Ibsen, I had not realised how beautiful Norway is, but Rohatgi gives us not only bleakness but beauty as loneliness and despair. The beauty of the landscape, the fjord like an overturned pot of buttermilk, the mountains, the rose apple, and the domestic intimacy of her life with her husband and suckling infant are not enough for Sita, who wants constantly to take a ship back to America. She sees everything around her through the eye of the mythology of India she has inherited from her parents and her academic eye (a seminar she had taken on kinship structures at her American university). Once, looking at the fjord, Sita thinks of a pot of milk overturned, a Hindu tradition for good luck.
As an immigrant child growing up in the US, Sita’s identity is formed by ties to her religion through all the different ceremonies – Janmashtami, Rakhi, Holi, and Diwali, which take on the tangible markers of her identity. In Norway, she rejects the Norwegians around her because they do not know traditions, fancying herself unknown and unknowable among the people who surround her. They want to give her love, but they cannot even pronounce her name. These are the pages where I felt in company, as if reading a feminist text of healing and friendship, exploring the peculiar isolation of being a woman, a married woman, a mother, but also a foreigner.
Through a conversation with her professor late in the novel, we understand why Sita is so hesitant in her relationship with all the people around her…they are Norwegian, not countrymen. However, Sita did not feel a kinship with the aunties who used to surround her during aarti at Diwali in her American childhood either. This is the double isolation of being an immigrant. You try to form a community with people unlike you, simply because they are like you, South Asian! You are trapped in a tight space of your own making. This isolation is emblematic of being an immigrant, as much as it is of being a woman, a state of isolation in which there is constant introspection and the closest connections are with phantasmagoric figures, like Sita’s long-distance friends Bhoomija and Micah, formless voices on the phone.
At one point, Sita has such an intense phone conversation with Micah that it feels heightened and romantic. Her other connection to life is a mongoose named Nenn, given to her by her husband Pierre, a creature that she fancies speaks to her. Sita travels with Nenn everywhere and when she talks to Nenn, Nenn understands her. After Sita’s husband Pierre takes her away from her family and home, and before he gives her a child to further imprison her in her exile, Pierre snatches Nenn away from Sita, by singing to Nenn a song about murdering birds and taking him to a restaurant to eat Kebabs (Sita is vegetarian), after which Nenn never speaks to her again. It is as if the affable Pierre is slowly murdering Sita and all her connections to living creatures and roots without even being aware of it.
Whenever she encounters Pierre, she fantasises about when she will leave him. Her consciousness, suspended between memory and fantasy, is strewn with the possibility “If they separated”. She wonders about “Incoming ships’ previous ports of call, so she might guess what it was safe to dream of.” Will Sita ever act, like her Norwegian literary ancestor Hedda Gabler, or will she recommit repeatedly to the domesticity desired by Pierre? In seeing her as a parallel to Gabler rather than the mythological Sita only, I see Sita as a woman baffled by the force of marriage and domesticity, how it thrusts us down to the earth and ties us down, and the constant decision that women make every day, whether to leave or to stay bound and held down.
A fierce interrogation of identities
This is why I read the novel not only as a connection to Indian roots or a diaspora novel or even an homage to Ramayana but rather as a fierce interrogation of all the identities that are thrust upon us as women, from nationhood to wife and mother. As Sita’s family grows, through marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, she becomes weaker. Lars suckles and latches on to her breast, taking from her, and although these moments feel deeply erotic and satisfying, her son drives her to a constant search for escape. Sita lives more and more in her mind, unable to form even the most superficial of bonds. She has no relationship with Lars’ teachers or playmates or Pierre’s colleague Morten and his wife Mona.
Besides rejecting the Norwegians, Sita also rejects all natural relationships, not only her husband and her son, but also the knitting of domestic relationships around her marriage, including her friendship with Pierre’s colleague’s wife Mona. She rejects Mona’s friendship and is unable to bond with her despite their similarities (they are both foreigners in Norway). Instead, she is drawn into a sexual relationship with Morten because his cabin transports her to her place of fantasy, the forest of the mythological Sita in Ramayana. Every encounter with Morten is described in stills of heightened passion. “He crouched down in front of her and took her foot, slid it from its boot and into the bladed on between his legs. Then the other.” While the mythological Sita must remain sexually pure and is consumed with shame, the modern-day Sita sleeps with as many strangers as she can to escape this sense of shame bequeathed to her by the mythological Sita, that inhabits her and shapes her decisions to be wife, dependent, foreigner, and mother.
In one scene, Morten takes Sita skating. He spins her in the air, and it is in this moment of flight, with her feet off the ground, that Sita is transported to extreme romanticism. “I’m going to pick you up. When his hands touched her waist, she lurched forward, and he tightened his hold. For a second, she was removed: her feet could feel nothing below, and when she looked up the stars beckoned, the ornis promising, maybe, to keep their distance.” What is it that Morten gives her? That heady feeling, that feeling of unmooring that cuts her ties with all that is normal, her normal life with Pierre and Lars. She constantly dreams of leaving, on every page almost, but she never does.
Unlike Ibsen’s Norwegian heroines, Sita finds herself unable to escape her domesticity, perhaps because she carries within her the mythological Sita, the lesson taught to South Asian women to be happy in marriage. Even in the end, it is not clear if she leaves, or she merely wants to dream of leaving. It is not just that the novel uses Ramayana symbolically, but Sita herself cannot comprehend her life beyond the mythology and the academic studies by which she understands life.
Another level of textuality is the novel as a journal of the pandemic. Although this aspect is muted, we know that the novel takes place during the pandemic, which throws Sita into further exile. Her mother has just died, presumably from the virus. The compressed language and large gaps of time heighten the internal monologue and sense of deep isolation, a time without speech, conversations over phone lines, and a loss of language and identity that we all remember as our shared history of the pandemic. At one point, Sita says that there is the “shankh cry of the military planes amassing were here to mourn the crashed American plane,” which maps to the crash of a US military plane in Norway in 2022 during the pandemic.
At one point, Sita may be on a ship that might perhaps carry her to the airport if she wishes, away from Pierre and Lars. She fantasises about a new life in America with Bhoomija, Micah, and a new mongoose she will adopt, as well as a child Bhoomija will have. It is not clear if she will leave. This moment when she dreams of this alternative life feels more filled with joy and possibility than all the pages that come before it.
There are other literary references. Like Homer’s Penelope, who is also in a sort of exile, Sita is constantly knitting, but she unravels the stitches of her marriage every day. “She would take nothing from this house but for a bag full of yarn, for today, she celebrated Holi by unravelling each tiny scarf, the colour bursts of unmade mischief against her skin.” Like Penelope, who seeks an escape from her impending marriage to one of the young courters by delaying the moment her work is complete, Sita tries to escape the life she has so gracelessly created through the unravelling of her yarn.
Sita in Exile, Rashi Rohatgi, Miami University Press.
