In conversation with Sanjena Sathian, author of Goddess Complex

The Hindu

25-07-2025

What would you do if you found that there is an imposter out there living the life once prescribed to you? That there are questions about identity that need to be answered and choices that need to be made. You will probably feel lost (and perhaps even a little provoked), like Sanjana, the narrator in author Sanjena Sathian's latest novel, Goddess Complex (HarperCollins India). At once psychological thriller and feminist satire, the story delves into the personal and the political behind women's freedom and their right to choose. Edited excerpts from an interview with Sathian:
Q: How much of your own life in the U.S. is reflected in your narrator Sanjana's dissonance — between being a 'bad brown girl' and feeling 'insufficiently' white?
A: I will politely disagree with your characterisation of the novel. I don't think this book is about 'white versus brown identity'. Insofar as it is about a demographic identity category, it is about gender. That said, race is not something you can ignore in America, and so race comes up — often in comic ways that frustrate Sanjana. But I also have to say that neither the narrator nor I are torn between whiteness and brownness; we are both brown and neither of us has any desire to be white. I think it's important not to reduce Indian American storytelling.
Q: The protagonist reaches a point in the story where she feels 'divorced from [her] body'. What was capturing that like?
A: At the start of the novel, [Sanjana] tells us that she's recently had an abortion, and she then spends the first half of the novel being harangued by people who inexplicably think she's pregnant. I chose this somewhat darkly absurd situation to literalise what many women feel every day: even as we walk around thinking of ourselves as full humans, with desires and secrets and darkness, there are people out there looking at us as wombs with legs. That's uncanny.
Q: The novel employs inner dialogue, retrospection and reflection as tools of storytelling; where the idea of the self constantly disperses and re-emerges. Did you choose this format or did it evolve with the story?
A: I think you're talking about the novel's internal quality: we spend a lot of time in Sanjana's head. She's a first-person narrator, and an unreliable one. For much of the first half, we watch her decline and disintegrate in her own mind. Eventually, we see some of her inner messiness spill over into external messiness, i.e., the character's internal dramas become external plot points. I wrote it that way because that was how I got to know the character. I knew that she was going to be trapped in herself and that in order for the novel to have the alchemical effect on the reader, which novels can and should have, I would need [that to happen] at some point.
Q: Between the Shout Your Abortion Movement and the recent shift in U.S. reproductive policy, where does 'Goddess Complex' fit in, in defining a woman's right to choose?
A: Goddess Complex is a social novel; it's cognisant of social movements around reproductive rights, and the narrator is often reacting to those social movements and finds that some of the brave, social justice language of social media doesn't exactly work for her real life. [While] I do have characters talking about [these] social and political issues, the novel is set pre-Dobbs (the overruling of the fundamental right to abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022).
Ultimately, it's a really personal story about one woman having a breakdown and going through some really weird stuff. It's not a book that can or should have to define a person's right to choose, because novels are not about defining rights. Novels are these radically hopeful objects that have to take for granted certain freedoms — freedom of thought, freedom of choice. Novels are too subtle, politically, to win rights for us. They can only give us insight into the private selfhood that political rights are there to preserve.
Q: At what point do you feel womanhood becomes synonymous with motherhood?
A: I don't think womanhood and motherhood are synonymous, but if you live in a society where the assumption is that all women are either potential mothers or people who should have been mothers but failed to be, then you lose the ability to understand womanhood outside of motherhood. Personally, I'm not even that interested in defining 'womanhood' at all. I'm interested in the self, and all the ways that our arbitrary social stories interfere with knowing our true selves.
The interviewer is a freelance writer. Instagram @read.dream.repeat