Everyday People in Extraordinary Circumstances (with Nishant Batsha)

In this episode, we hear from author and historian Nishant Batsha. We discuss Nishant's journey from historian to novelist, inspired by the challenge of accessing individual lives in historical archives. Nishant shares insights into the concept of 'critical fabulation,' which blends historical knowledge with creative storytelling. The conversation covers Nishant's latest book, 'A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart,' set in 1917, which explores themes of revolution, love, and forgotten histories. 

00:00 Introduction to the Liberationist Lit Podcast

00:18 Meet Nishant Batsha: Author and Historian

00:40 The Power of Literature in Shaping Worldviews

01:28 From Historian to Novelist: Nishant's Journey

01:46 Challenges of Writing About the Global South

02:24 Critical Fabulation and Creative Writing

04:28 Personal Stories of Literary Awakening

06:30 Historical Fiction and Humanizing the Past

09:55 Nishant's Upcoming Book: A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart

16:55 Balancing Writing with Physical Hobbies

19:57 Current Reading and Research Projects

22:44 Supporting Local Arts and Literature

24:40 Conclusion and Farewell

Nishant’s Books

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart

Mother Ocean Father Nation

Other Books Mentioned

No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 

Sold by Patricia McCormick

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Where to find Nishant

nishantbatsha.com

Thank you for being part of the Liberation is Lit podcast! If you have stories to share, want to suggest topics, or just want to connect, find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok @liberationislit or visit our website at liberationislit.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a review! Remember, your voice matters, and together, through the lens of stories, we're making a difference in the world.

Transcript

0:06

Hey y'all. Welcome to the Liberationist Lit Podcast, where the power of storytelling meets the force of social change. I'm your host, Tayler Simon, and in this podcast we believe in the profound impact of stories. And today I am so pleased to be joined with author historian Nishant Batsha to talk about his new book. Hey, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me on. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself as a writer and a historian? I guess before I go into that, I love the name of this podcast, Liberation is Lit but not only because I like a good pun, it just got me thinking about books that I had read at a young age that like changed my worldview, and I don't know what the first book you read was. That made you think about, you know, big concepts like liberation or anti-capitalism. But for me, I was 14 years old and for some reason bought a copy of Naomi Klein's, no Logo. And from then on I was like, my thinking changed, drastically. And it's one of those things that still sticks with me today. So yeah, I just love this idea of, literature being a gateway to, different kinds of liberation type thinking. But that's just a total aside from your actual question. Your actual question was my background as a historian and writer. So I am actually trained as a historian. I did a PhD in history over at Columbia, and while I was doing it, I realized that I wanted to write more creatively and there was a few reasons for that. If you ever write about the global south. And you go into the archive, you'll find that you can never really access individual lives. You're always sort of at a distance and there's so many reading strategies that have been developed to help get closer to, you know, the individual actor. In the global south, I was looking at the 19th century, Indian and indentured labor migration in the 19th century. So it's like really hard to get close to those laborers. And so I was getting more and more frustrated with the fact that I couldn't access people, I could access concepts, I could access the British Empire very easily. I, and then I was introduced to this. Concept called critical fabulation by the amazing writer and thinker, Sadia Hartman, who developed this, when she was looking at the histories of slavery, especially on the slave ship. And it's this notion that there is a leap that you can make as a critical thinker where you are essentially, and I'm butchering this, so if anybody knows Critical Fibulation really well, they're gonna get mad. You could essentially make things up, but that making things up is grounded in an entire critical apparatus of like historical knowledge. And so to sort of get close to people, I realized I had to, write creatively. And this was how I sort of scratched that itch of, of really wanting to write about everyday people in extraordinary circumstances. And so that project, you know, started with my first novel. It's continued with the second one, and I, I often joke that in the, in her brief lectures for the BBC, Hillary Mantel said something like, you know, she started off as a novelist and discovered she wanted to be a historian. And I think that's really present in her books. You read Wolf Hall and you get very fine historical detail that is. Accurate. I mean, she's, she did a lot of archival research and really went into the weeds for a lot of things. And in, in this lecture she talks about why she, she gets so detailed and I think when I was studying history, I realized the opposite. You know, I was a historian and I realized I wanted to be a novelist for those very same reasons that I talked about, and so I think that informs a lot of my work as well, because I am very comfortable with changing names and places and the historical timeline. There's a lot of fudging of facts that occur in my writing, and I think it's because I have this historical base, but I'm willing to depart from it in many ways. Whereas it's like Hillary Mentel has this novelistic base and she confines it within a very particular kind of history writing. I think that's so interesting and to deviate a little bit from the conversation, my awakening story was actually like one of the top band books across the country sold by Patricia McCormick. I read that in high school, and that was the book that. Really put me in proximity to like, okay, it, like the world doesn't revolve around me. Have it hard, but like, like these are things that are actually happening. And that was like the first time a story really catapulted me and started me to thinking about, not necessarily, how building empathy.'cause I was always doing that, but. Build, taking that empathy from, okay, I'm feeling I'm, I'm put in your shoes right now, but I'm taking the next step further. Okay, now I'm fired up because I connect with you in this way, and now I want to do something for all of our collective liberation. And I think that was the first book that did that for me It's an amazing experience as a teenager to not only realize that the vastness of the world. outside your existence, but also had this lens into an understanding that you could change it. There are ways in which you could affect this whole great machine that exists outside of us. It's a, it's a great feeling. Much better than those teenagers who discover like the fountain head and Ann Rand and then go down that rabbit hole. So I feel lucky and for both of us that we discovered books that weren't that and didn't have to go through that phase.'cause so many teenagers go through that phase as well. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And now at this rate, we're just gonna ban all of the books that teens feel like they can do something like in Lexington County here in South Carolina, which is our, is the neighboring county to where I'm located, they have a parental consent form for the Hunger Games. But. Right, exactly. But something else you were talking about. I think it's so interesting because I remember growing up in learning history, they talked about primary sources, like letters and diary entries, and there are, there are all of these everyday people who, they're just documenting their lives and we use that as primary resources, but there's a lot of power and privilege that come to play. So the, when thinking about and researching history around slavery, you're not gonna get those accounts because those, they weren't even considered people versus people important enough to have their every day taken as something as powerful as history. And I think that has speaks to what we're going through now and our stories being silenced. And are the everyday people in extraordinary circumstances living today right now? Are we going to see those people in the future and use. Those people as primary resources history in the future. So I think that is a really interesting commentary about power and privilege and whose experience even gets to be considered history. Yeah, because in the, for a primary source to be preserved in the moment, it has to be deemed of some importance. People have to keep it. So if you ever write a history of, say, the Civil War. There's tons of documentary evidence from individual soldiers because there was a sort of knowledge that this was a world historical event and we're gonna keep everything around it. But, you know, for some everyday colonized folk in,, a, a. Part of the British Empire, you know who's gonna keep that? Maybe you'll get some family histories, but may probably not. Literacy rates are, are not the same as they are in other places, so you have to rely on oral histories. And there's often, there's a great tradition in, in writing in the global south that is looking at things like court cases and those kinds of documents and reading that against the grain. So trying to find, moments when everyday people enter that archive. And then, kind of ignoring the sort of like legal language, 'cause that's gonna be state power talking and then trying to figure out what individuals were actually doing. So it becomes a great detective project, but it's not the same as, you know, reading someone's diary and then being right inside their mind and having that intimacy. And I've been reading, an advanced copy of, one of my colleagues' books and she writes a lot about like healing ancestors, but also healing future generations by retelling the stories of our ancestors or personalizing, shaping them as a whole person and not just a colonized person or an enslaved person. And, I think that's really interesting in historical fiction. You are using this lane to humanize and make somebody a whole person, and even though they're not here to physically or on this plane or spiritual stuff, feel like the healing that is a way of healing history. Hear about your newest book, A Bomb Placed close to the Heart, and how you are humanizing the people in that experience. So my next book coming out in July is a bomb place close to the Heart, and it is set in 1917 between Palo Alto and New York City. Palo Alto was a very different place in 1917, not a single tech company to be found, but it is set on the Stanford campus there and. The way in which I came about this story is that when I was in graduate school, I read the remarkable history of these men. They were all men who came from India to the West coast. Some of them would be on the campuses of Berkeley or Stanford. Some of them would be agricultural laborers, but they formed a revolutionary party. The name of their party literally translated to the party of Revolution, and they were actively trying to figure out ways to overthrow. British power in India and they were doing that from California. And to me that was just fascinating 'cause I, I did not know much of this history at all. And ultimately it's a history of failure because nothing came of this, this moment. World War I broke out, they were sort of broken up. Many of them were threatened with deportation. Those who weren't sort of went underground. There was a, a large court case called the Hindu German conspiracy trials because to be. Against the British, which was an ally meant you were for the Germans. So they were seen as enemy combatants basically. And so because nothing came outta that history, there was nothing. There's very little to write about it. Now there are a few historians who have looked at, some of this material and found it. Connections to wider processes. So it's not a whole total history of failure, but I was always intrigued by it. And part of this history, there was this man named Endra Roy, who was an elder statesman later in his life in the Indian Nationalist movement, but he came to California as well, and he came to secure guns from the Germans. He's literally trying to smuggle arms back to India. And the it was a very convoluted story, but basically the German stood him up and he ends up sort of marooned in California and he makes his way down to the Stanford campus from San Francisco and he meets this woman, Evelyn Trent, and they fall in love. And the moment World War I breaks out and those trials begin, they escape California, they go to New York City and from onwards from there, they'll go to Mexico and they'll found the Communist Party of Mexico. They'll meet Lenin. Trotsky, they become part of the historical record. They then go to Berlin. And they have this terrible divorce and, complete falling out. And Evelyn goes back to California and she lives a quiet life for the rest of her life. She, ends up working at the welfare office in Auburn, California, and in 1962, I wanna say, her house burns down just from an accidental fire. So all of her papers were lost simultaneously. When Endra Roy sits down to write his memoirs, he doesn't mention her at all. She's completely written out of his life. That's how acrimonious her divorce was. So this person, Evelyn Trent, was written out of history because a lot of material around her was lost. The stuff she published when they were in Mexico and in Berlin. Still exists, but it's like just a few published, papers and you know, I think there's been. A movement lately to, to rediscover her. I've been working on this book for years, but last year in Jacobin magazine, historian said, Evelyn Trent needs more, airtime. And I emailed him. I was like, yes, she does. And I'm writing a book. So that to me was super interesting on multiple levels. One, two people from vastly different worlds meeting and falling in love, and then in this sort of powder keg time. Developing a notion of who they are, not only for themselves, but on the world stage. That, to me, was a captivating human story. Another part of it was rescuing someone from history who is forgotten and lost. And so I really wanted to write her story as well to sort of get into her head. And so ultimately inside this book, the characters are fictionalized. Their, their names in the book are Indra and Cora. But they're based on these actual real life people. And one of the reasons I fictionalized them is 'cause I really wanted to get inside their heads and, and, and figure out who they are as people, not only as individuals, but as people who kind of rush into a relationship. They fell in love, but they are now together and because of historical circumstance, they're glued to each other. And maybe they were a good fit, maybe they weren't. But how are they gonna negotiate that? How are they gonna negotiate their own ambitions with. Trying to protect and love the other person in the relationship. So that to me was like a deeply human story that I was really interested and wanted to explore. So it began with this real life, historical moment and really turned into, I like to call it a socialist coming of age, love story, no socialist, anti-colonial coming of age, love story.'cause there's all these different, things happening in parallel. I love that so much. I think that's just such an interesting, like taking something so mundane that happens to people all the time. Just people from that, that trope of, oh, people from different worlds falling in love, but setting it in this backdrop of, you said, them coming to age. With all of this historical, moment happening in the background and how they are influencing it and how it's influencing their relationship and, and really just, I feel like that's a, it's a really good angle to humanize our leaders because we do tend to idolize them and. we hear about like the flaws, it's like, what do we do now? they've fallen off their pedestal, how do we, like, are they still great? Do we cancel them? But just showing that at the end of the day, these are still people and they are flawed, flawed even though they're doing great things for. Like the global stage, but as people, they, they may not always get it right and that's okay. And that's what keeps us, keeps us human. And I know it can be really difficult. Well, I don't know, maybe it could be really hopeful exploring history and just seeing how were build resilience and resisted. And seeing how we can take some of that in our current times. But I can also see how it can also be overwhelming in that, what you said about like a moment that failed or. Didn't achieve its goals in the way that we see a win for history. So, I can see how that could be a little bit like, thing on top of that's going on now. So I definitely would love to hear what keeps you like grounded in this work as an author and a historian. I mean, I think what I do is so textual and sort of up here it's like the, the top. 12 inches of my body are kind of always firing. And I remember when I was doing my field work for graduate school, I was living in Trinidad for about two months and I was really lucky to fall in with a group of authors and poets and artists and the editor Nicholas Loughlin, who's is a super nice, individual. He is a poet and an editor. We got talking once about the ways in which writers can stay grounded. And I think I mentioned something that I was taking up woodworking just as a little hobby and he was just like, writers need something that's lightly physical. You need to use the rest of your body. Otherwise you're too much in here and you're gonna lose the train of thought. You're gonna lose, you know, connection to the fact that we're writing about people in the world. You're gonna spend too much time in your own head. And that stuck with me. That was over a decade ago. But that idea that writers need to have a hobby that's slightly physical, not something that's so tiring that you can't go back to your desk and and write. So for me right now. I am, my house in Buffalo is, it's 135 years old and nobody's cared for a lot of the parts for it, and I think 50 storing doorknobs and locks and mortises and doing something that like, feels very physical, but it also is historically grounded. It's like scratching all these various itches like I am taking something from history and making sure it. Exists in a sort of historical and functional way, making something beautiful, figuring out what needs to go where. So I think if anyone takes anything from this conversation, if you're a writer, find that thing that's slightly physical that gets you out of away from your desk, out of your head.'cause I think that keeps you grounded in the work. You could return to the work. Much fresher. When you've done something, you've, you've been in the world a little bit, and you're refreshed. So maybe, not exactly the answer you're looking for, but that's like, you know, my pre prescriptive advice for everyone taking it from Trinidad and broadcasting it around the world, I. Oh no, I totally get that because I. Am all like when you said writers in their head, that is me all the time, and so I do like to run and be outside. That's my one time outside. So definitely adding some physical components and living in your body and experiencing the world so you're not living so much in your head all the time, which it's a fun place sometimes, but get a little too. Yeah, it's, it's sometimes maybe too fun. You gotta like, you gotta take what's, what's the great que Oh. As a parent, I, I sometimes see my role as taking the punch bowl away before the party gets too fun. So you gotta do that to yourself too. Yes, definitely. So has there anything that's really caught your attention that you've been reading lately? So right now I'm working on my next project. So whenever I'm knee deep in a project, my reading gets really weird because it's just for the sake of that project. So just briefly, this, this thing I'm working on right now is set right after the Civil War. On a shaker colony in Maine, and it's a soldier so disillusioned by the death that he saw in the war, but also the sort of paucity of reconstruction that he decides to leave society behind and join the shakers. But the shakers at that time, their numbers were only, they were a celibate sect, and their numbers were only supported by the fact that they willingly took an orphans. And so he develops a friendship with an orphan, in the shaker colony. And through the relationship with that child, he's sort of trying to reckon with whether he wants to return back to the world, be part of American society, or whether he's content to to really be away from it. And so as a result, I'm just reading a lot about the shakers, but also because I don't know much about it, like Christian theology, so I'm reading a lot of Ki Guard right now. Like I said, it just, the reading gets more and more bizarre and out there, and once I feel like I've read enough, that's the moment I get to start writing. But until that point. It's like, oh, I'm reading the book of Deuteronomy. Oh, I'm reading Ki Guard. Oh, I'm reading like this Civil War history. Right now I'm reading about reconstruction. So it just becomes, everything catches my eye at this moment. But none of it is, I think, interesting to a popular audience. But I am just like knee deep in that right now. I love that. And again, for me, when I go into research mode, that is definitely a time where I need to take the. Is stuck in research forever. It is fun. Kudos to you for knowing that, like that's, that's the only thing that's like really stopping me from really doing historical, historical work because I know I would research forever and not write anything. You know, it's interesting that you say that because I was reading this interview. With Paul Harding after he wrote this other Eden and it was like an interview for the Booker prize or something. And he on in that interview just said, I only read one or two books 'cause I didn't wanna get stuck in the research and I didn't want the research to influence me. And I found that to be. Maybe when you like win a Pulitzer Prize, you get to have that sort of bravery and that sort of chutzpah. But I thought that was like, that was a bold way of going about it. Like I am gonna have a general sense of the historical context, but I'm not gonna be wed to it. I'm just gonna do my own thing. I thought that was very brave. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And I'm not that brave yet. I am not either. Don't worry. and lastly, what advice would you offer listeners who wanna make a positive impact in their communities? Is so the, the zone has been flooded, so to speak. There's just so much going on right now. It's hard to. Grab onto a single thing, but the single thing I'm going to grab on right now as a piece of advice is, you know, the arts are under attack right now. In Buffalo where I live, we have this great literary organization called Just Buffalo, and they bring in authors, from all over the US for talks and they do a lot of, activities with high schools in the area. Around books and reading and you know, they had their NEA funding cut, they had their NEH funding cut. And so they're in a financial crisis right now. And at museums, you know, their IMLS funding has been cut. So I think, you know, get involved with your local arts organizations. They need your help right now. They need dollars, they need folks on the ground. You know, there is a. Budding crisis for the arts. The arts in the United States were already funded in a really piecemeal, poultry way, and that funding is now completely under fire, completely under threat. The rug's been pulled out. So I think, you know, if there's one thing you could do around books and the arts and culture, it's just find your local organizations and, and ask them how you could support them. It might just be dollars, but it might be, you know, being a boots on the ground type, volunteer for them. So, but they, they need your help. Definitely because all of the things that provide education, access to education, critical thinking and arts are under fire. So do what you can to protect them and. There may not be much we can do for the national things, but definitely looking into the local organization, statewide organizations, and see how you can support. Awesome piece of advice. Well, thank you so much, Nishant for being on the podcast. Where can people find you and keep up with you and your work? I am a little old school. I don't exist on social media or have a newsletter or that stuff, but my books are sold at your local bookseller, so please support your local bookseller. For, for both my work and the work of countless authors and I always love hearing from readers, you know, my email's on my website, nishantbatsha.com Send me a line if you've got anything to say about this book or the last, or just wanna chat. I always love hearing from readers. I will link the website in the show notes so you can keep up and send a message of love and light. thank you so much for being on. Thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. And thank you listeners for being a part of the Liberation Is Lit podcast. If you have stories that you wanna share, wanna suggest any topics or just wanna connect with us, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at Liberation is Lit or visit our website@liberationislit.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving your review and remember, your voice matters and together through the lens of stories, we're gonna make a difference in the world. Until next time.