Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Through the lens of history
While historian Nishant Batsha was completing his PhD from Columbia University, on the subject of global Indian migration, he came across several stories of South Asian revolutionaries on the West Coast of America from the early 20th century. Until then, like a lot of people, he too had assumed that Indian immigration to the U.S. began with the arrival of engineers and techies in the 1970s.
In his semi-historical fiction novel A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, Batsha tells the story of Indra and Cora, characters based in part on the life of Manabendra Nath Roy and his first wife, Evelyn Trent, who met and fell in love at Stanford University in 1917.
Roy and Trent
Roy was a radical activist who founded the Communist Party of India and the Mexican Communist Party. Trent, who was an American revolutionary and pioneering feminist, also wrote extensively about the nature of colonialism in India and the Indian nationalist movement; she used the pseudonym Shanti Devi.
The union of Roy and Trent was noteworthy because, at the time, anti-Asian and anti-miscegenation sentiment was strong. The Expatriation Act of 1907 was especially punishing; it revoked an American woman’s citizenship if she married a foreigner.
Batsha first chanced upon the story of Roy and Trent when he was in graduate school. “I thought it was a great story and filed it away,” he said in an interview with India Currents. “I knew it had the elements of a good story.”
The reasons he was drawn to their love story are many. “I think the moment of their meeting on the Stanford campus, their falling in love, and their negotiating of each other, made for a great story, one that’s never been told,” he said, clarifying that it is a love story, not a biography or a hagiography. “I wanted it to be a love story of two people who didn’t know yet that they were going to play a part on the world stage, but had the ambition to want to do so.”
Lost history
A large part of why their story moved him was the “lost history” of Trent. After the couple went through an acrimonious divorce, Roy “wrote her out of his memoir.”
Sadly, several chapters of Trent’s life have been ill-preserved in the archives of history. “I wanted, in a sense, to —for lack of a better way of phrasing it— ‘rescue’ her from history,” he said. “Because there’s no record of Evelyn Trent’s life, it was upon me to open up that space of who she was.”
At any rate, recreating a story from well over a century ago was upon him anyway. While writing, Batsha was mindful about maintaining literary fidelity to that time and place. For instance, he made sure to avoid any mention of chai being consumed in the homes of his Indian characters because coffee was the beverage of choice in San Francisco in 1917.
“The tea market in India didn’t develop in earnest among Indians until the 1920s. To have them drinking tea because it’s part of their cultural heritage would be completely anachronistic,” he said. “San Francisco, then and now, has been a center of coffee production. It was where a lot of the first roasteries were. So I had to write out any mention of tea as a result.”
This is Batsha’s second book. His first novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation (2022), which took him eight years to complete, is set in 1985 and is informed by the history of post-colonial Fiji, Uganda, and the Caribbean.
America as antagonist
It took him two years to write A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart. Though based on different subjects, both his novels have a clear throughline of America as antagonist. “I would say my fiction, between both books, is interested in the way the nation makes its way into a domestic space,” he said. “I think if there’s ever going to be a ‘bad guy’ in my books, it is the nation, it is the state.”
This stance, he admitted, comes from his own ambivalence about the U.S. as the ultimate land of immigrants. “I don’t think I buy into the milk-and-honey aspect of America’s story of itself… I just want to throw a wrench in and say America can be, in many ways, great for many people, but it can also be terrible,” he said. “Since Ronald Reagan, the United States has been increasingly hostile to a lot of immigrant groups.”
According to him, it is the role of fiction to explore these complex realities. He cites as an example Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989), which deals with an Indian woman’s tussle with her immigrant identity. He also quotes Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who, in his book Satantango (1985), described the world as a ‘network of interdependency operating under enormous fluctuating pressures.’
“I think that is a great way of thinking about the nation; you’re connected to every other person in this network, which at times just feels like your daily life but then there’s a small fluctuation in the system and suddenly it’s crushing — there’s a military coo, you have to escape, you’re branded as a traitor and are being deported from the country,” he said. “So there’s this overlapping sense of how the nation seeks to erase its own people, and I’m interested in how this works in our most basic units of domestic arrangement, in how the nation dramatizes the tensions already present within relationships.”
Batsha grew up in the East Bay in California, and is currently based in Buffalo, New York. His parents moved to the U.S. from Bihar in the late 1970s. His father was from the Siwan District of Bihar and worked as an electrical engineer at Bokaro Steel City. In a “roundabout” way, his own experience as a child of immigrants has informed his academic and literary choices; as a history student, he was drawn to both Latin American history and South Asian history.
“He looked at the landscape of migration and he knew off the bat he didn’t want to go to the UK; he had no interest in going ‘back’ to the British,” he said, reflecting on his father’s migratory decisions. “Australia had a ‘white Australia’ policy, and Canada had some exam requirements. So he came to America.”
A new avenue of historical thinking
The process of writing A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart opened up a whole new avenue of historical thinking for Batsha because it made him examine American history closely for the first time. “I’ve never really been interested in American history prior to this book… I studied American history through the lens of other countries,” he said. “There’s a fundamental ‘American-ness’ to this book.”
His next novel, which is set in 1870, in a period soon after the Civil War, goes further back into the country’s past.
