Like his first novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation, Nishant Batsha’s second, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, also leverages the past as a site of “radical otherness” to complicate our understanding of the present. What makes this novel different is that it is a multifaceted American narrative about identity, loyalty, and cosmopolitanism with a diverse ensemble cast of characters—some of whom are recognizable historical figures, while some are fascinating composites. Set in 1917, the story focuses on an unlikely couple based on the real-life Evelyn Trent and M. N. Roy: Cora Trent, a white American graduate student and suffragist, and Indra Mukherjee, an Indian revolutionary. As Indra tries to secure arms from the Germans for India’s independence, their developing love story unfolds against the backdrop of America’s entry into World War I, which leads to increased surveillance and arrests of Indian nationalists as part of a perceived “Hindu–German conspiracy.” Cora and Indra face personal betrayals—including Indra’s initial deception and Cora’s secret abortion—and their journey from California to New York and ultimately to Mexico becomes a symbol of their changing identities. Cora becomes a published writer and activist, while Indra shifts from a rigid revolutionary to someone who embraces vulnerability and seeks “new beliefs” beyond violence.

However, their evolutions are marked with many moments of profound discomfort and disillusionment linked to narrow identity definitions and their reactions to “typecasting.” Indra, for example, moves from a “gunslinger against the British” to a man struggling with mundane tasks like dishwashing and battling self-loathing and humiliation due to perceived failures, while also aspiring to be “cosmopolitan.” He grapples with being reduced to a “foreigner” or a “traitor” by those who cannot comprehend his broader vision, leading to a sense of feeling “impaired” or “useless.” Cora is dismissed as “just a woman” or made to feel “ugly” when her complex self is simplified or constrained by others’ perceptions. She evolves from feeling like a “mewling calf” and being perceived as an “easy rider” to an ambitious writer challenging societal norms and asserting her agency. In the end, their efforts to transcend or resist narrow definitions imposed by society or even by each other significantly contribute to the novel’s central themes of freedom and self-discovery.

In this conversation, we discuss Batsha’s approach for developing such complex characters as “historical cognates,” rather than as strictly historical. We consider how their challenges with conflicting loyalties and an evolving understanding of cosmopolitanism have powerful parallels with contemporary conversations about immigration, racial identity, and the fluid nature of “Americanness.” And, finally, we reflect on what makes this novel “American.”

Jenny Bhatt (JB): The novel portrays early 20th-century movements such as anticolonialism, women’s suffrage, socialism, and racial equality. There are clear parallels between the historical suppression of dissent—such as the “Hindu–German conspiracy,” arrests and restrictions on socialist papers—and current free speech challenges. The story also highlights prejudice against nonwhite characters, including fears of “the Asian menace,” caste issues, and distrust of “foreign matter.” How do you hope modern readers might connect with these historical echoes amid ongoing debates on immigration, racial identity, and “Americanness”?

Nishant Batsha (NB): One of the strangest parts about writing a book is that it takes years to write, so you can never anticipate how it will connect with the moment that exists at the time of its publication.

That being said, I think you could write a history of America whereby every few generations there exists this intense hatred of immigrants, an extreme mistrust of the other, and then politics reforms itself around that idea.

Characters in this book are constantly remarking that they cannot be arrested because if they’re arrested, they’ll be deported, and deportation can only mean death because they’ll be punished for their political activism on the other side of the deportation. I couldn’t have predicted that ICE would be rounding up folks and deporting them to Central American superprisons or South Sudan. That idea, that deportation can mean death, is a thread that you could see throughout American history. One of the side effects of being trained as a historian is that when I write, readers are able to see the terrible echoes of the past, the way our basest instincts continue to have salience over time.

JB: Through the lives of both Indra and Cora (and, indeed, a few other characters, too), the novel explores the complex fluidity of “loyalty”—to a nation, an ideology, a cause, and an individual. Did the protagonists’ journeys, particularly Indra’s evolving understanding of “freedom” and Cora’s commitment to “truth to power,” alter your perspectives on how we might navigate such ever-increasing competing loyalties in our contemporary world, especially now?

NB: I was really interested in how change over time looks and feels for these characters. Both Indra and Cora come into this book with preconceived notions of what it means to be loyal to a cause or a group of people, but that sense of loyalty is challenged at almost every turn.

In many ways, this book is about ambition and failure as much as it is about success and achieving one’s dreams as initially conceived. As a result, there’s a lot of fluidity to one’s loyalties, a sense of being open to change. I think that’s quite important. When Indra or Cora fails to achieve what they wanted, that in itself becomes a moment of possibility inside the narrative. Directionality ceases, and in that space, there’s a series of choices and chances that are opened. From there, they can explore alternate futures for themselves that they hadn’t initially envisioned.

That’s the sort of growth that interests me because it is organic and, frankly, truer to life than the straight line of success. I think if the reader wants to create a parallel to his or her own life, it’s that if one is an ambitious person, failure is going to come more often. There seems to be much more dynamic growth resulting from that failure.

JB: The novel explores the idea of “cosmopolitanism” through the evolving experiences of multiple characters, not just Indra and Cora. What aspects of the early 20th-century period interested you in engaging with a re-examination of this concept? I imagine this may also have offered some new insights or challenges to your own understanding or appreciation of cosmopolitanism today.

NB: Martha Nussbaum had a fantastic reading of Tagore’s The Home and the World, where she defines a cosmopolitan as a person “whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.” I owe a lot to that essay. I was also, of course, drawn to Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the ideal of a universal community.

In both of my novels, if there is an antagonist, it’s often the nation itself. I’m really interested in how the fractures of the nation make their way into domestic spaces, be it family life or marriage. And if the nation exists as an antagonist, then this idea of transcending the nation, or in this case, cosmopolitanism, becomes the shadow of the antagonist. There’s a current of seeking to move beyond the narrow and repressive confines of the nation-state to find some sort of universal brotherhood.

People were working toward that in the early 20th century. From the Russian Revolution came thinking and action around international solidarity and allegiances. Beyond that, one can think of anticolonial or national liberation as projects internal to individual colonies, but there were always connections to be made. There are Irish Indian connections, for example. At one point, a character remarks that the Easter Rebellion is as important for India as it is for Ireland. There are numerous ways in which characters often try to move beyond delimited spaces to seek that universal spirit.

JB: The epigraph from Marx and Engels describes love as teaching “a man to believe in the objective world outside himself, which not only makes man into an object but even the object into a man … love lives not only in the brain immured,” and suggests a profound connection between personal relationships and broader societal understanding. How did this idea guide your portrayal of Indra and Cora’s relationship, especially given the political and social upheavals they were challenged with?

NB: I first came across that quote in Erich Fromm’s 1961 book Marx’s Concept of Man, which I think was actually quite popular at the time. In it, Fromm reads Marx to find that love creates a connection to the objective world, to the world outside oneself. Human self-realization and love are intimately connected.

What I found so fascinating about this idea is that the book is very much about political awakening. It’s a socialist coming-of-age story. For Cora and Indra, it’s through their love for each other that they can find ways to connect to the world beyond themselves. That’s why I like to think of this book as the interiority of an intellectual history.

JB: Speaking of interiority, the internal monologues and perspectives of Indra and Cora reveal deep emotional and psychological complexity. Cora’s journey involves seeking self-actualization amid conflicts between independence, love, and professional ambitions in a male-dominated world. Indra faces identity struggles, transitioning from Indian revolutionary leader to American “sojourner,” confronting loneliness, and reevaluating strength and vulnerability. Their relationship reveals a mix of connection and friction stemming from miscommunication and differing realities. What strategies did you use to develop these emotional dynamics? How did you handle instances where their personal desires or beliefs diverged from your views or historical facts?

NB: Much of this book draws inspiration from the early modernists. I was reading through a lot of Katherine Mansfield’s early short stories as well as Woolf’s early novel, The Voyage Out. Simultaneously, I was reading modern Bengali fiction as well, writers like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay.

These books and writers are deeply interested in self-fashioning and selfhood. Because this book is so intertextual with modernist literature, both in the West and in India, I think I felt a great ease in exploring the internal life of these characters. Modernist literature is devoted to that internality.

But you also mentioned a divergence between contemporary sensibilities and the historical record. I think a great example in A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart is the multiple conversations around eugenics. One of the minor characters in the book is based on the first president of Stanford University, who was an anti-imperial activist while also being a rampant eugenicist. The characters have these earnest conversations about the necessity of racial purity in the fight for national liberation. I wanted to highlight that these ideas had currency in places you wouldn’t expect. But being a novelist from the perspective of the present allowed me to trouble history a bit. I could focus on the interracial relationship between Cora and Indra, and how that love complicates their own understanding of eugenics—whether such a belief in purity could even be possible given their own love for each other.

It was a monumental undertaking to make this an American book. To be an American book means, to me, to think about the vastness of social experience from wildly different groups of people.

JB: Yes, characters like Dawson, the university president, and Scullion, the theosophist, while historically grounded, sometimes embody contradictory ideologies (eugenics alongside anti-imperialism, theosophy alongside Irish nationalism). There’s also the playwright Rachel Crothers, anarchists and suffragists such as Emma Goldman and Alice Paul, spiritual leaders like Vivekananda and Annie Besant, and political figures like General Salvador Alvarado and the Kaiser. I can imagine the extensive research needed to integrate these historical figures and their ideas into the novel’s world, ensuring they serve the narrative and are more than mere footnotes. You’ve avoided oversimplification or excusing their less acceptable beliefs, turning them into intellectual and moral guides (or counterguides) for the protagonists, offering new ideas and challenging perceptions. Can you discuss their role in shaping the protagonists’ growth?

NB: I’m really glad that you mentioned Rachel Crothers because I’ve done quite a few of these interviews and no one has mentioned her yet!

It was quite an undertaking to engage with Crothers’s work. I took it upon myself to read a large portion of her corpus and then integrate that work as an intellectual foil for the character of Cora. She is a graduate student researching the plays of Rachel Crothers as a way to explore the feminist movement in American culture.

I think all this returns to the fact that I see this book as the interiority of an intellectual history. To do that, you have to engage with intellectual history. As such, there are quite a few characters in this book who would figure in any intellectual history of the time, whether that be if you’re looking at feminism or radicalism or nationalism, or just interesting people in Palo Alto or New York City.

When I tried to think about what it meant for Cora and Indra to grow politically or culturally, I had to engage with the intellectual currents of the time. I took great pains to make that clear and evident in the book.

JB: Beyond the historically verifiable characters mentioned earlier, the novel also includes a diverse cast of minor characters—landladies, train conductors, and others—who add richness to the story’s texture and themes. There are vivid depictions of marginalized communities’ lives, from miners in Cora’s childhood to lascars and factory workers Indra meets in New York, to women in the Tombs jail. While I understand how their stories support the novel’s larger themes of systemic injustice and the fight for dignity, what was your process for portraying the experiences and struggles of these groups and individuals so they truly enhance the broader historical and social context of the story?

NB: Throughout the book, Indra and Cora are thinking about what freedom means or what liberation means. Some of this is a purely intellectual exercise for them. But much of it is interacting with people from wildly different backgrounds and hearing what they have to say. Cora is a different person after hearing all the stories in the Tombs jail, for example. I wanted to ensure that these histories from below were not only showcased to add texture to the novel but also played a fundamental role in the characters’ maturation process.

One of the true pleasures of this project was that every single character, from the most major to those with the briefest of appearances, has an actual historical cognate whom I researched by reading quite widely in primary and secondary sources. Yet, none of them is a one-for-one facsimile of a person from the past. I’m always trying to play around with biography and character to serve the narrative or the scene best. I think that’s what’s important: the book has to stand on its own as a book. As a result, I don’t have a fidelity to the archive. I’m much more interested in fabulation to find the story that needs to be told.

JB: Speaking of research, you’re a history scholar turned novelist. I imagine you must feel a certain tension navigating between historical accuracy and narrative exigency (particularly when crafting the emotional and psychological landscapes of various characters). Could you share an example where you made a deliberate choice to fictionalize or interpret events to achieve a deeper empathetic resonance, and what ethical considerations informed that decision?

NB: I think you can make a distinction between historical fiction versus fiction that engages with the past. I am much more of the latter. I don’t see my works of fiction as having a pedagogical impulse to educate the reader about the past. Instead, I’m interested in the past as a site of radical otherness. When I think of the past, I see it as familiar inasmuch as there are fellow human beings that occupy it, but so much of thinking through history is recognizing that those humans were operating under a set of circumstances and considerations that were quite different from our own. I suppose that’s why I write about the past and not the present: I enjoy this act of empathy as a thinker and as a writer.

That being said, I am a novelist first and a historian second. That’s how the tension you mention resolves itself: I know I’m trying to tell a story. I’m reminded of Tim O’Brien. In “Good Form” in The Things They Carried, he wrote, “I want you to know why a story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” I think that distills it quite nicely.

As I mentioned earlier, every character in A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart has a historical cognate, rather than being historical as such. I think a great example of this is the character of Cora. From what I gathered about the real-life Evelyn Trent, she had a mostly pleasant childhood with eight siblings, moving around mining towns. In my novel, Cora is a motherless only child growing up in the harsh and desolate landscape of the American West. With her, I was interested in how the starkness of an outer landscape could create a character. I’m not writing a monograph about Trent and Roy. I was willing to fabulate for the sake of narrative.

JB: It’s clear how your extensive historical research underpins or inspires your fabulation. However, the archive on South Asians involved in clandestine political movements in the US—and even for American women of that era involved in sociopolitical movements—is still so sketchy and difficult to access. What were the significant challenges (or serendipities) in piecing together the lives of Trent and Roy?

NB: Indra and Cora are based, in part, on M. N. Roy and Evelyn Trent—a great love that’s been glossed over by history.

I always begin a project by reading very widely in secondary source material. And this book was no exception. That scholarly introduction gives me a rough understanding of time, place, setting, and intellectual currents. I think this inclination to read widely in secondary material is a holdover from being a more scholarly historian, where a project begins with a literature survey.

That triangulation has the benefit of priming the imagination. Take M.N. Roy’s memoirs, for example. While the early sections of those memoirs were very helpful in understanding his trajectory through the United States, it’s always interesting to remember that a memoir is written retrospectively and with an editorial inclination. In Roy’s case, he completely excised the real-life figure of Evelyn Trent, upon whom the character of Cora is based. That primary text is thus exercising an erasure of the past. I suppose all memoirs are erasing and rewriting the past to create a text that is serving some sort of purpose—they’re not a point-by-point recounting of the past, but instead are always marked by great elisions.

And then, of course, Evelyn Trent had no primary source material—she was more or less written out of history.

In an interview with the Booker Prize, Paul Harding mentioned that when he was writing This Other Eden, he was not writing a factual history of the island at the center of that book. He was more interested in an imagined version of the characters in the events that take place. I think it’s important to remember that historical fiction doesn’t necessarily need to be documentary truth. Piecing together an intimate life is always going to be a project of fiction. These details are not going to be found through historical methodologies. It’s my task as a writer to take the barest hints of a story and go on from there.

JB: Let’s close on that thought about your “task as a writer.” Works by writers like us, who straddle multiple cultures, are often reduced to simple labels like “Asian American” or “South Asian” literature. This novel intricately weaves together diverse historical and cultural threads, including Indian nationalism, American women’s suffrage, socialism, World War I, and the Irish independence movement. Your deep research and deliberate craft of connecting these movements, while including such a diverse cast of characters, broaden the narrative’s scope and challenge both literary and cultural categorization. Still, I know you’ve had to, much like your protagonists, work hard to transcend or resist narrow definitions of your own identity as a novelist. Talk a bit about that, please.

NB: I think there can be an inclination to see a book that is by an Asian American author, for example, and if that book features an Asian or Asian American character, then that book is immediately consigned to just being part of the Asian American experience.

It was a monumental undertaking to make this an American book. To be an American book means, to me, to think about the vastness of social experience from wildly different groups of people, and furthermore to closely examine and interpret the intersections between those experiences that make up both day-to-day life as well as a much greater picture.

Personally, it’s been difficult sometimes to see this book (or my work as a whole) consigned to a narrow definition of identity, even though I’m trying to write within the context of a larger American project. Perhaps some of that is the result of the ways in which we think about books as objects to be bought and sold in a marketplace, and therefore have to have highly segmented notions of audience. In his now-viral LARB essay, Federico Perelmuter commented that “careerism is the dominant literary style in the United States.” Careerism and capitalist notions of marketing go hand in hand.

I do hope this book is seen as an American piece of literature, or perhaps even transnational, as many parts of the world are finding a home in Palo Alto, New York City, and then onward toward further destinations. 

Featured image: Photograph of Nishant Batsha © Libby March.