Nishant Batsha | The PEN Ten
Reviving a relationship that was once lost from American history, the new novel A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (Ecco, 2025) by Nishant Batsha is a fictionalized retelling of a love story between an Indian philosopher and an American student during WWI. After the Hindu-German Conspiracy trials began in 1917, protagonists and recently married couple Indra and Cora fled to New York City.
In conversation with World Voices Festival Intern Sarah Ahmed for this week’s PEN Ten, Batsha discusses early 1900s gender roles, why it was important to include the internal conflict that can arise from social movements, and what research was needed to capture such a distinct moment in time. (Bookshop; Barnes & Noble)
A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart explores a tumultuous period in American history and is partly based on the remarkable love story between M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, whose bond persisted despite legislative barriers. What specifically drew you to their story, and how did their relationship shape your approach to the narrative?
I was trained as a historian. I’ve found that fiction, when written with a critical understanding of the past, can fill archival lacunae.
Back in the 1910s, M.N. Roy came to California to try to secure arms from the German consulate. It was a complicated and somewhat improbable attempt to supply the revolutionary nationalists in India with weapons from the enemy of an enemy, as World War I was being fought in Europe at the time. As that venture failed, he met and married Evelyn Trent on the Stanford University campus.
The two then went on the run after the Hindu-German Conspiracy trials began. They ended up in Mexico where they founded the Communist Party of Mexico, and then they went to Europe, where from abroad they founded the Communist Party of India. Here, Trent was not merely Roy’s wife—she was an equal to him and an intellectual interlocutor in the left-wing cause.
The two had a terrible divorce in Berlin, and Roy eventually wrote her out of his memoirs. When Trent came back to the United States, she lived a quiet life in Auburn, California, and in 1962, her house burned down in a fire. The granular details of Trent’s life, and her relationship with Roy, was lost to history.
This book is a way to give that relationship its due. I wanted to explore the interior lives of two people who didn’t yet know that they were going to enter the world stage. At the moment this book takes place, these are two people who fall in love and are brimming with ambition. The book is, in part, an exploration of the tension between that love and that ambition.
Although socialists, Indian revolutionaries, and women suffragists often share overarching goals of liberation and equality, they are not immune to internal tensions. Cora faces sexism when voicing her opinion even within supposedly progressive spaces, and Kesari encounters criticism from socialists who question whether overthrowing foreign rule truly benefits the average Indian when capitalism still remains. What was your purpose in exploring the inner conflicts that arise within these intersectional social movements?
Two principal questions of liberation are: from what? and for whom? These are intellectual exercises—until a revolution is successful. It’s important to showcase these conflicts because they have real-world ramifications. But it’s also important to remember that these internecine struggles are not always emerging from the most noble of inclinations.
Beyond that, these conflicts are constantly stymieing the characters’ sense of forward progression. I find that failure becomes a hinge point where a series of possibilities begin to open up in the narrative.
While Indra waits for the Germans to provide arms for the Indian struggle, Nitin’s death continues to weigh on him, deepening his survivor’s guilt and shaking his commitment to violent resistance. Why did you choose to include Nitin’s character, and how do you think personal loss shapes the trajectory of revolutionary movements?
One of the more interesting parts of writing fiction connected to the past is expanding the possibilities I’ve found in a single strand of memory.
There was a mention in M.N. Roy’s memoirs of how his friend Jatindranath Mukherjee, commonly known as Bagha Jatin, had been killed in India. Roy said that this death led him to want to build a new kind of monument to his friend’s memory, but he didn’t dwell upon the loss in the text.
Roy arrived in the United States as a revolutionary nationalist and left as a communist. The loss of a friend at a great distance, provided a way to try to understand the mechanisms of change inside a person. How does that change work? What does it look like?
I was trained as a historian. I’ve found that fiction, when written with a critical understanding of the past, can fill archival lacunae.
After Cora and Indra’s wedding, Indian revolutionaries in California are arrested on suspicion of a Hindu-German conspiracy. This forces the couple to flee to New York, where they face increasing hostility toward their interracial relationship. Did you always plan to split the novel into two distinct sections? How do you practice pacing in your writing?
From the novel’s earliest drafts, I knew that part of this book would take place in California, and part of this book would take place in New York City. It was a way to externalize the relationship Indra and Cora have to themselves and their marriage.
As for pacing, I find that it’s a feeling that occurs at the moment of writing. Things that have to happen quickly are written quickly, and scenes that must take their time take their time. It’s akin to woodworking: there’s a plan, and then comes the careful preparation of stock, the cutting of the first dovetails. You put together the carcase and then go in to refine the details. But if the carcase is somehow off, the project must be started anew.
As Cora and Indra’s marriage deepens, she comes to realize that their choices are now intertwined, each decision affecting them both. Yet, she refuses to compromise on her desire to begin writing again in New York, believing firmly in her rights as an American woman and the principle of free press in America. How did you balance these conflicting sides within her, as a woman navigating the tension between personal commitment and political conviction?
That tension emerges from a fact that Cora knows well: as a woman in 1917, her avenues for success are delimited by her sex. Because of that, when she has an opportunity to find an outlet for all the ambition that lives within her, she grabs at it and refuses to let go. In doing so, she constructs all these edifices of thought (some of which are highly suspect or exclusionary) to try to hold on to what she’s accomplished.
In the end, unlike Indra, she hasn’t grappled with the monstrous negative capabilities of the nation. She’s never seen the true repressive power of the state.
At the beginning, Indra was excited to find an intellectual equal in Cora, someone who shared his revolutionary spirit and could be his partner. Yet, as their circumstances shift, Indra’s desire for control emerges, complicated by his own insecurity and loss of purpose as a revolutionary. How did you approach writing a character who struggles to reconcile his ideals with his changing reality?
The arc of success can be embarrassingly short. And at its end, there can be a fear that it will never come back, the panic that one has suddenly become a has-been. And that fear gives rise to so many petty insecurities.
Much of Indra’s growth comes from the realization that fixing his mistakes is wholly different from returning to the moments before that mistake was made. He can never return to the man he once was. There’s a freedom in that, and a space to become someone new.
One of the more interesting parts of writing fiction connected to the past is expanding the possibilities I’ve found in a single strand of memory.
Both Indra and Cora are framed as cosmopolitans in your novel — Indra, who wants to transcend the smallness of his origins, and Cora, who moves fluidly between radical circles despite early doubts about her place in them. Why did you choose this image to represent their evolving sense of identity and purpose?
I’ve always been drawn to social theory, but when I was in graduate school, I was taught (quite correctly) that no one cares about such things in the same way I do. The lesson was to refrain from dropping theory into my writing: It either had to be integrated so seamlessly that it was nearly invisible or it had to be jettisoned all together.
Here, I owe much to Martha Nussbaum. In the essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” (which is in part, a reading of Tagore’s The Home and The World) Nussbaum defines a cosmopolitan as a person “whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.”
It reminds me of Kant’s Perpetual Peace, where there’s an ideal of a universal community. In any case, I think the characters in this novel would whole-heartedly agree with Nussbaum’s conclusion in her essay: “the life of the cosmopolitan, who puts right before country, and universal reason before the symbols of national belonging, need not be boring, flat, or lacking in love.” This book takes the spirit of that argument and puts it into each and every character.
Your novel vividly portrays the landscapes of California, New York, and the borders of Mexico, while also weaving in depictions of the secret meetings and written publications for radical causes during pre-WWI America. What was your research process like for capturing these distinct settings and political contexts?
I think Hernan Diaz put it best. In an interview in The Paris Review, he mentioned not travelling to any of the places set in his first novel, In the Distance. When writing, “the landscapes and people and situations were, as much as possible, purely literary, free from any referential anchorage.”
Writing historical fiction will mean that I always have a referential anchorage. It’s impossible to avoid that. But I truly believe that the text comes first, and history second. So yes, I read voluminously in order to triangulate myself within a historical narrative, but I know I have to invent. It’s why in this book every character (from Cora and Indra to the most minor characters) has a historical cognate, but each of them will never be an exact replica of a real person.
In New York, Cora and Indra’s relationship evolves from a passionate union to a strained partnership. Yet by the end of the novel, their bond is strengthened as they reunite and set off for Mexico together. Do you believe that love can be rekindled even when circumstances grow more challenging?
For these characters, as long as they’re willing to sacrifice for each other—to give up parts of the self to preserve the other—their love is safe. I wonder, though, if later down the line their individual ambitions will again get the best of them.
Writing historical fiction will mean that I always have a referential anchorage. It’s impossible to avoid that. But I truly believe that the text comes first, and history second. So yes, I read voluminously in order to triangulate myself within a historical narrative, but I know I have to invent.
One of the central motifs in your novel is the idea that “freedom’s weight is too much for any one person.” What do you hope readers will take away from your depiction of these characters and social movements that persisted in the face of adversity?
This is a time of profound disconnection. Large-scale change and anomie work against each other. This is not a novel conclusion, but instead a reminder: if we are to build a new world, we must do it together.
Nishant Batsha is the author of the novel Mother Ocean Father Nation, named a finalist for a 2023 Lambda Literary Award and listed as one the best books of 2022 by NPR, among other honors. He lives in Buffalo, New York, with his family.
