Book Summary and Reviews of Indian Country by Shobha Rao

Book Summary

In this fearless novel from the award-winning author of Girls Burn Brighter, a couple from India—so different from generations of white colonialists who came before them—move to Montana, only to discover how brutal and unforgiving hubris can be.

Janavi and Sagar were never meant to end up married. Janavi is a wonderfully independent, young modern Indian woman. She works for an organization that helps street children, often lost to the world of poverty and human trafficking. Sagar is a trained hydraulic engineer, an expert in dam construction. He is the least favorite son, his parents never able to forgive him for an unspeakable act from his past. Sagar seeks refuge in his daydreams of one day finding hidden treasures in the fabled Indian river, the Ganges.

Yet the two are forced together into an arranged marriage which neither of them wants. Even worse, Sagar has already accepted a job in America, in a strange place called Montana, where he will be in charge of dismantling a dam.

Montana upends all their expectations. Sagar's white colleagues do not welcome him with open arms, and Janavi finds herself unable to forgive her sister back in India, whose betrayal led her to this marriage and this strange place.

When a colleague of Sagar's is found drowned, Sagar is the obvious scapegoat. But is this death one in a long history of people of color paying the price for the white man's arrogance and expansionism?

Just like the Ganges river that dominates Sagar's dreams, throughout the novel run short historical stories of settlers who conquered both the west and India, and who form the foundation upon which Sagar and Janavi stand.

A bold, ambitious, stunningly beautiful yet brutal novel about colonialism, westward expansion, and the ramifications of both still rippling out today, Indian Country is a tour de force modern-day classic.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. "Sagar was looking at her, but he was thinking about sediment. What moved it from one place to another? Erosion. And what was erosion but the wearing away of something? Something you might've believed in all your life? 'It's not that easy,' he said."
   
   As readers, and as human beings, we all have to give up illusions, adjust to change and sometimes even wake to the wholesale negation of our belief systems. What challenges do we, and Sagar, face when confronted with this kind of erosion in our lives? From a human standpoint, is erosion necessarily a bad thing?
2. "What he knew—he saw his dead wife, he saw Jena—was that each of us carries it within us, this heaviness, this stone."
   
   What is "this heaviness, this stone" ...