Banbas/Exile: A Ramayan Retelling

Rajiv Mohabir first learned of the Ramayan from his grandmother while sitting on his parents' brown-tiled porch, surrounded by the scrub forest of Central Florida. Descended from generations of Indian indentured laborers who were brought to Guyana under nefarious contracts, they receive the ancient Hindu epic poem as a tale of exile in anthropomorphic wilderness, passed along as it was in stories and songs shared vocally in the cane fields.

Here, in a singular gesture of deeply layered translation, this ember of song is passed along again. Drawing on his grandmother’s Creole, Caribbean Hindustani, and the King’s English on his own decolonized terms, Mohabir reimagines the Ramayan anew. Classical in form yet rooted in Guyanese ancestry and its diasporas, Banbas / Exile is a genre-bending collection of poetry, stories, songs, and reflective prose. Speaking through heroes, villains, and animal deities, this extraordinary translation gives voice to lives shaped by exile and to the enduring search for a world that can hold both difference and communion.