Buffalo-based writer’s ‘A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart’ will be released next month

By P.A. Kane

Nishant Batsha is an Indian‑American novelist and historian based in Buffalo. His debut novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, long‑listed for the Mark Twain American Voice Award and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2022. He has earned a Ph.D. in history from Columbia and a master’s from Oxford. His academic work on South Asian migration to Trinidad and Fiji deeply informs his fiction.

We talked to Batsha about his new book, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, a pre-World War I historical novel that follows a cross-cultural relationship between two young revolutionaries with radical ambition. The whirlwind courtship and marriage of protagonists Cora and Indra come with unforeseen problems and consequences, leaving the young couple on the run and reeling.  A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart is a story of hardball politics, espionage and new love told with tenderness, soul and profound insight.

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart is set for release July 2025. Batsha will do a reading at Black Rock Books on July 15 at 7 p.m. You can RSVP for the event HERE. The book is available for pre-order at local bookstores such as Talking Leaves, Alice Ever After and Fitz Books & Waffles.

PAK—You grew up in California, attended Oxford and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York City. How did you end up in Buffalo?

NB—When I lived in New York City, the farthest upstate I had gone was to Beacon on the Metro-North. I didn’t know then how big the state actually was!

I moved to Buffalo in January 2020. In hindsight, that was both one of the best and worst times to move. It truly didn’t feel like we entered the city, so to speak, until about 18 months after we arrived.

I ended up in Buffalo because my wife teaches in the Art Conservation program at Buffalo State—truly one of the gems of the city. Before we moved here we were living in the San Francisco Bay Area, near Berkeley.

Our daughter was born in May 2019, and I remember searching for a two-bedroom apartment with a feeling of dread at what we’d have to pay. When the opportunity came to move here, we knew we could land in a place where a novelist and an art conservator could afford to live somewhat comfortably, which is not the case in most of the country. We own a lovely 1890s house in the Elmwood Village and live a sort of charmed life here.

PAK—The second part of that question is—why is bleu cheese superior to ranch? And, how many tables have you broken since you arrived in The Queen City?

NB—I’m a vegetarian, and I believe this question is connected to chicken wings, so the choice may be a little bit lost upon me. That being said, a friend of mine did recently introduce me to the excellent bleu cheese sauce from Extra Extra Pizza over on the West Side.

I haven’t broken any tables yet, but I did recently have to buy one for a backyard party we threw for our daughter. This could be my chance!

PAK—How do you research—in the library, online, or a combo of both? And what is your writing process?

NB—When I was teaching undergraduates while still in graduate school, I would often tell them that they needed to go to the library to do research for their papers. In the library, when you find a book on the shelf, adjacent to it are all the other books on the same subject. It’s a wonderfully fast way to survey a topic, just by browsing. It’s a process that cannot easily be replicated online.

When doing historical research, I find that the internet has very few sources. Most of the material lives offline. That being said, I’m very thankful that the Palo Alto Historical Society and Stanford University’s archives had some online archival material that I could browse without having to go to the West Coast. I am also thankful to the Buffalo Library’s interlibrary loan service!

As for process, I read quite broadly in the subject before I started to write. I wanted to know where I was and where I would be going. But questions would often appear as I wrote.

For example, the characters in this book drink a lot of coffee. South Asians are more commonly known nowadays for drinking tea. I had to look up whether domestic consumption of tea in South Asia had taken root in 1917—and it had not. San Francisco at the time was also known as being one of the coffee-roasting capitals of the world. As a result, most of the characters are drinking a lot of coffee, and tea doesn’t really make an appearance. I’ve always enjoyed that kind of detail-oriented research.

PAK—As far as world conflicts, WWI occupies a smaller place in people’s imaginations than WWII. What made you want to write about this period just prior to the United States entering the war?   

NB—I wasn’t necessarily drawn to the World War I time period. Instead, I was more interested in the possibilities of the historical material I had chanced upon.

Prior to the United States’ entry into World War I, there were quite a few revolutionaries from India who were agitating for Indian independence from within California. I first came across this material when I was in graduate school completing my Ph.D. in history. I’ve always found this history quite fascinating. But because nothing came from this revolutionary agitation, there’s not much you can say about it in a work of history. It was a moment of failure.

What I became interested in were the historical characters. Indra is based, in part, upon M.N. Roy. Roy was a revolutionary nationalist who came to California to secure weapons from the Germans. It was a very convoluted gun-running scheme that eventually amounted to nothing. But while he was in California, he met and married a woman named Evelyn Trent on the Stanford University campus.

The two would later go on to found the Communist Party of Mexico and the Communist Party of India. After a terrible divorce in Berlin, Evelyn Trent would later be written out of history. After she returned to California, her house burned down in 1962. Her papers were burned in the fire, so she was quite lost to history.

I was interested in the story of two world-historical figures who didn’t yet know they would become important. This book is their pre-history, in a way: a story of ambitious individuals who didn’t yet know what life had in store for them.

PAK—In the novel, you introduce the religious movement theosophy, some basic Vedic principles and different Indian food staples, like Kachori, bhaat, and masur dal. In writing historical fiction that includes elements from another culture, is it hard to know how far you can go with these elements and concepts that might be foreign to your readers? How do you know where that line is?

NB—When it comes to writing, I truly try to be a solipsist. I write for my own pleasure. I am the reader I am trying to reach when I write.

With that in mind, I don’t need to think about the complexity or foreignness of these elements. What I do need to think about is how well they integrate into the story and what they’re actually doing or trying to accomplish within the narrative. That kind of contextuality is of the utmost importance to me.

PAK—The novel’s protagonists are Cora and her boyfriend/eventual husband, Indra. Cora receives some slights from Indra’s revolutionary friends in California, but generally they seem to respect and accept her. At one point, Indra even compares her to Annie Besant, who was very important to him. Do they see her like themselves, and is there a tradition of strong women in Indian culture? From the little I’ve read, the role of women throughout history in India is nuanced—some agency, but a lot of patriarchal control. 

NB—I find this to be a fascinating question. About 10 years after A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart takes place, the anti-immigrant historian Katherine Mayo wrote the book Mother India.

The book depicted India as a culturally regressive country that treated women absolutely terribly. This sensationalist book was also a bestseller. And a lot of what she said really seeped into the Western psyche. As a result, the book prompted a lot of defensive replies from members of the Indian nationalist movement, including Gandhi.

Now, it would also be incorrect to say that these claims were only sensationalist. There’s a fantastic line that the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi wrote in her short story “Giribala:” “A daughter born. To husband or death. She’s already gone.” That summarizes a lot of the patriarchal control in South Asia.

What really fascinated me about the time period in which the book takes place is that a white woman joining the Indian nationalist movement was not unheard of. There’s Annie Besant, as you mentioned. As another example (of many!), there was also a woman named Freida Hauswirth. She was a Swiss-Californian painter who married an Indian nationalist and moved to India with him. She published a memoir (that’s now out of print), called A Marriage to India, where she documented their marriage and her life in South Asia. Later, after they divorced, she returned to Berkeley, where she continued to paint some of the scenes she saw in India.

This is all to say that the presence of a white woman giving herself to the cause wasn’t completely foreign. There was an intercultural space to fight for freedom and justice—it was one of the reasons why I was drawn to this material in the first place

PAK—In a time of war, when resources are stretched, the British devote some assets to seeking out Indian dissidents in America—the Ghadar party in California and Kesariji in New York. How real was this threat to overturning British colonial rule in India, and how big a news item was the Hindu-German Conspiracy in America? 

It was quite a big news item. It was on the front page of the papers. The arrests that were part of the Hindu-German conspiracy trial took place coast to coast. But the trial’s media attention led it to having a somewhat happy conclusion for the men involved. In and around San Francisco, a lot of the public supported these men, and weren’t as virulent in their hatred as the government. And ultimately that public support led to very light sentences. After they were convicted, none of them were deported, and they were able to remain in the United States following their detention.

PAK—How significant were cultural and ideological differences between the regions of India? Can you draw parallels between Punjab and Bengal like you would between fly over country and the coasts in America?

You can think of India as a single country, or you can think of it as a union of different languages, cultures and religions. There are 22 official languages in India, and 122 languages with over 10,000 speakers. The difference between regions in India is more akin to differences between countries in Europe, rather than states in America. The moment in the book that you’re referencing, when a character comments how provincial certain individuals can be, reflects the profound differences between parts of the subcontinent.

PAK—After Cora and Indra’s whirlwind courtship and marriage, at several junctures in the story, the decision-making process in the relationship is highlighted. Cora and Indra fail to understand that they are no longer singular units, and their decisions affect both of them. Why did you want to emphasize this?

NB—I was interested in the slow changes in the internal world of these characters. Initially, they’re drawn to each other and fall in love quite quickly.

But they also both have a raw individual ambition that they don’t know how to channel, and that ambition is often at loggerheads with their love. They’re trying to develop a sense of self and the sense of the other. I think because they’re so interested in their own individual sense of themselves in this big world, they don’t yet know what it means to sacrifice part of that self for the greater good of a relationship—or if that relationship is even something that they want to save.

Individuality and loving the other. I wanted to explore the quiet internal life of that tension

PAK—What’s next for you and your writing?

NB—I’m absolutely terrible at keeping still when it comes to my writing. Right now, I’m working on a project that takes place right after the Civil War on a Shaker colony in Maine. At its heart it questions what it means to leave American society behind and what it takes for people to rejoin it.