Love in a Time of Revolution

Torsa Ghosal speaks with Nishant Batsha about his new novel, “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart.”

By Torsa GhosalJuly 8, 2025

• Fiction

• History

NISHANT BATSHA’S new novel, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, is a coming-of-age love story about two people who are unafraid to explore uncharted emotional and political territories. Set in 1917, the narrative begins with Indra Mukherjee and Cora Trent lying in separate berths on a train traveling through the moonlit American countryside. They are in flux, journeying together toward uncertainty.

Indra is an anti-colonial revolutionary from Bengal, India, who came to Northern California to secure arms from the Germans to fight the British colonial regime. At a party in Palo Alto, he meets Cora, a graduate student from Stanford who is writing a thesis on the plays of Rachel Crothers. Their lives and political consciousnesses intermingle. Raised in the American West, Cora has intermittently attended meetings of the National Woman’s Party since enrolling at Stanford, and she pushes Indra to reconsider his beliefs around what it means to live and love freely. The American legal landscape—with laws penalizing interracial marriages, prohibiting abortion, and restricting immigration from Asia—forms a hostile backdrop to their border-crossing romance.

Indra and Cora are loosely based on the historical figures of M. N. Roy, founder of the Mexican Communist Party, and Evelyn Trent, an anti-colonial feminist, journalist, and key influence on India’s communist movements. The novel maps their processes of self-discovery while also offering vivid snapshots of anti-imperial and feminist gatherings in early 20th-century California and New York City.

Nishant Batsha spoke with me over Zoom about the intellectual and literary histories shaping his work and his decision to portray revolutionary possibilities through the personal quests of two individuals.

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TORSA GHOSAL: How did you come across the historical material that inspires your novel—the story of M. N. Roy and Evelyn Trent? What aspects of their story made you want to turn it into fiction?

NISHANT BATSHA: I first became familiar with their story while completing my PhD in history. Reading about Indian labor migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries introduced me to the Ghadar Party and the revolutionaries who were agitating for Indian independence from within California. They formed transnational links with nationalist organizations in the subcontinent. The British recognized California as a hot spot for seditious activities following the 1915 Lahore Conspiracy Case trials, and the Hindu German Conspiracy trials began during World War I. As a historian, I’ve always found this fascinating, but the things you could do with that history are limited, since it is a history of failure.

M. N. Roy had come to California to secure weapons from the German consulate. The whole gunrunning saga was convoluted, with many characters and moving parts, but Roy was quickly stood up by the Germans. With the United States entering World War I around the time, Roy’s life was pushed in other directions, as he notes in his memoirs. His friend, Jatindranath Mukherjee (a.k.a. Bagha Jatin), had been killed in India, and Roy was interested in exploring alternatives to revolutionary nationalism. He started experimenting with new ideas in California and the US. What’s interesting about his memoirs is that Evelyn Trent doesn’t make an appearance at all. They had an acrimonious divorce in Berlin, with accusations of political disloyalty against Trent and infidelity on both sides. When Trent returned to the United States, she had to petition to get her citizenship back, as marrying Roy had revoked it under an old American law. After her return, she led a quiet life in Auburn, California, occasionally writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, but her house burned down in 1962 and her papers were destroyed, leaving her largely lost to history.

Now there has been a rediscovery of her life and work. Last year, an article in Jacobin argued that Trent deserves a lot more credit for what she did. She wasn’t just Roy’s wife; she was also his intellectual interlocutor and a feminist anti-colonial thinker in her own right. I agree, and the idea of someone being written out of history was very evocative to me. So, I wanted to write about her. Also, the idea of two people who don’t know they are going to enter the world stage and are just ambitious and in love, while their ambition is at loggerheads with that love, seemed like material for great fiction.

You follow Indra and Cora through a period of waiting and quiet contemplation, which is a striking choice given the historical backdrop—early 20th century, when the First World War and the anti-colonial movements in India and other parts of the world were all unfolding. Could you speak to your decision to focus on this in-between space—on waiting—within the broader context of revolution?

The novel covers roughly six months. If it expanded to even 12 months, there would be a lot more “this happened, then that happened” plotting. It would possibly be more of a spy thriller–type book. But I was interested in the internal shifts that happen within characters who think of themselves as a unit, as a “together,” but who also have raw individual ambition that they don’t know how to channel. Waiting—being in between two or three spaces, both on the West Coast and in New York City—allows their internality to flourish, and as a result, the novel ends up being a socialist coming-of-age love story.

Even when Indra and Cora are moving cities, when they are on trains, the book has the feel of a parlor drama, because we’re really just looking at the evolution of two characters’ senses of self and of the other. That was important for me—to look at that dialectic, which by its very nature has a quiet tension. I didn’t want a lot of noise around it. Will that decision alienate some readers? Probably. But I wanted—for my own pleasure as a writer, I suppose—to explore how small changes add up to big changes in their calculation of the self.

Indra comes into the book with a more kinetic idea of what revolution should look like, one that involves concrete activities that carry significant risks—actions that can result in arrest, necessitate international travel, and even lead to death. Once he is afforded the chance to reconsider his revolutionary approach, he searches for a path that won’t require him to sacrifice himself and the people he loves. The actual M. N. Roy came to California as a revolutionary nationalist, and when he left the US, he founded the Mexican Communist Party, which is a huge change. Monumental transformations have a long prehistory. You can’t become someone new overnight.

Your mention of parlor drama is interesting. I was wondering about your novel’s relationship with the literature of the period when it’s set. “What happens when nothing happens” is the premise of several modernist novels, such as those by Virginia Woolf. Your characters also discuss Rabindranath Tagore, and Tagore’s works of fiction, such as Gora [1910] are Bengali parlor dramas in the sense that characters involved in anti-colonial agitations are frequently depicted as deliberating and debating in drawing rooms and on terraces.

Because the story is set in 1917, I couldn’t reference the high modernism of, let’s say, Woolf’s later work—but there is an homage to Katherine Mansfield’s early New Zealand short stories and Woolf’s The Voyage Out [1915]. The scene of the party at John Scullion’s house was me trying to work through Mansfield’s style, especially in “Prelude” [1918] and “Je ne parle pas français” [1918], collected in Bliss and Other Stories [1920], where she pioneers a roving narration. In the party scene and later in the coda, I use the modernist strategy of object focalization, where a character looks at something, and through that gaze, the narration shifts.

In terms of Bengali literature, there are references to Pather Panchali, both the novel [1929] and the film adaptation [1955], with the scene of characters watching the train pass—the train is both a symbol of modernity and of the mobility of lives. I was looking at books like Sunil Gangopadhyay’s The Lonely Monarch [2013], partly to get a sense of Calcutta in the 1910s and 1920s, but there’s also a wonderful scene where an acting troupe that ends up in New York desperately looks for a bowl of rice. I wanted to weave that very basic form of diasporic longing into my book. When I was figuring out a different name for M. N. Roy—since I’m playing around a lot with his biographical details—I was drawn to a character called Indranath who disappears with a snake charmer and functions as an early foil for the main character in Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Srikanta [1917–33].

Tagore is an interesting figure to engage, not just on a textual level—because I was thinking through some of his literature and ideas—but also because he had an international reputation. He was one of the few Indian writers who an erudite American audience might have heard of at the time. Tagore becomes an anchor point in Cora’s imagination of India. So, yes, literature of the era shaped my writing, but also the characters’ imaginaries: how they envision their own lives and what India could or should be.

While molding characters out of historical materials, do you let the materials constrain or guide you in any particular way?

I have a sense of what a character should do or where they should go, but that has to be, if not constrained, then at least delimited by historical context. Cora is brimming with ambition; however, she is living at a time when women don’t have the right to vote. Her citizenship is determined by her husband’s. So, the question becomes, How do her ambitions hit a wall, and how quickly does that happen?

In her Reith Lectures for the BBC, Hilary Mantel says that she became a novelist first and then realized she wanted to become a historian. For me, it’s the opposite: I started as a historian and realized I wanted to be a novelist. Mantel insists that, in her fiction, even the wallpaper has to be historically accurate. An adherence to facticity makes her literature great. In contrast, I like to depart from the historical timeline and from historical characters almost from the start. This book is inspired by M. N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, but I changed their lives in significant ways. So, they have new names, new identities. The real Evelyn Trent had eight siblings, and her mother didn’t die. But, perhaps influenced by the spirit of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose [1971], I wanted to explore what it would mean to be raised as a solitary girl in a desolate environment. What kind of personality would that create? I’m more interested in the interplay between character and space, and if the historical material doesn’t serve that, I am willing to leave it behind.

Both Indra and Cora grapple with the anxiety that, despite their ambition and talent, their lives may not add up to much, that they may be insignificant. But they respond to this anxiety very differently. Do you see their attitudes as tied to their personalities or shaped by social expectations, especially around gender?

It’s both. Cora recognizes a talent within herself but has no sense of grandeur in the beginning. Once she gets an opportunity, it becomes an addictive drug. She can’t give it up and ultimately puts herself and her husband in grave danger because she’s unwilling to give up the morsel of attention she’s received.

I wanted Cora and Indra to mirror each other. Hers is a rising action, and he comes into California feeling like a hotshot but is humbled constantly, and through that tension, he becomes someone new.

In his notes for his 2004 novel 2666, Roberto Bolaño mentions that there is a hidden center of a book concealed underneath a physical center. The party scene at Scullion’s is a hidden center where Indra begins to think he is bigger than he actually is, and Cora realizes she can prop him up. They’re both realizing they need each other, but they could also go separate ways. It’s a real moment of possibility for both of them. I’m reminded of Barthes’s structural analysis of narrative, where a character’s moment of choice opens a freedom of meaning, which here applies both to the sequence of events in the text and to Cora and Indra’s own maturation.

The novel touches on a complex history of ideas surrounding the fraught notion of racial purity—such as how eugenics discourses were mobilized in support of anti-colonial struggles and how anti-imperial movements failed to break with existing hierarchies of caste, class, and race. How did you begin to grasp these threads as part of the narrative?

It kept popping up in the historical materials. Dawson, the university president in my novel, is based on David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, who was a rampant eugenicist but also supported anti-imperial movements. The two ideas lived in perfect harmony in his head because racial purity meant not mixing with other races in any way, shape, or form. You could dismiss it as a schizophrenia of history, or you could see it as a cohesive worldview. I chose to see it as a cohesive worldview because it appears across the spectrum, including in Lala Lajpat Rai’s memoirs. The character Kesariji is based on him, as Kesariji was Lajpat Rai’s nickname. Lajpat Rai talked about how he hated speaking with Bengali nationalists in New York because they, in his words, could not get over their own provincialism. But from that small-mindedness, you can see how people view themselves as siloed by race or locality while simultaneously engaging in revolutionary activity.

The relationship between Cora and Indra is proof that eugenics theory cannot be put into practice. At various points, they ask themselves, “Is this okay? How do we create a working relationship in this context?”

Cora rationalizes her interracial relationship not by dismissing eugenics but by thinking she’s not going to have a child, so her relationship is fine.

In that decision, I was reminded of Margaret Sanger, for whom birth control and eugenics were part of the same conversation.

Do you think historical context shapes the idea of love and how love stories are written?

In many ways, love is a function of social history. Class, race, and nationality affect if and how two people can meet. For Indra and Cora to come together, a lot needed to fall into place. For instance, Stanford and UC Berkeley were destinations for Indians who didn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge in the early 20th century. The West Coast was new, and there weren’t as many exclusions or prejudices about their admission. M. N. Roy and Evelyn Trent’s is one of four or five love stories that developed on these campuses at the time and in remarkably similar ways. It tended to be a white woman marrying an Indian man and joining into the Indian nationalist movement.

For example, a Swiss American artist named Frieda Hauswirth at Stanford met an Indian nationalist at UC Berkeley. They married, and she moved to India. Some of her famous paintings are about her memories of living there, and she wrote a memoir called A Marriage to India [1931] detailing her life as part of a mixed-race couple in India. They had difficulty setting up a life due to the racial tensions. Indian landlords were paranoid about having a white woman, and white landlords wouldn’t allow an Indian man into their buildings. I could have written this book in a way where the key conflict would be an East-West dichotomy or culture clash, but that felt hackneyed. I wanted to explore what else was there besides basic racial or cultural tensions.

There are several parallels between what was happening in the United States then and now: for example, how noncitizen students were tried for “thought crimes,” and how women were fighting for reproductive rights. Were you intentionally working through these parallels?

When I was writing, Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned by the Supreme Court, so the scene in the novel about abortion and reproductive rights became more significant. I was aware of the ongoing historical conversation about abortion access, and I worked with Lauren Thompson, a historian of abortion and contraception, to make sure the representation was accurate, especially since I saw clear parallels between then and now, with abortion being illegal in both times.

As for seeing “foreign” ideas and students as threats in the campus culture, I was rereading Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire [2000] and thinking about how the empire and its creation of an enemy—or a foreigner—shaped how ideas came to be feared. There was a fear of anarchism and Bolshevism in the US at the time, so the fear of foreign ideas infiltrating and threatening the body politic isn’t new. And throughout American history, people have responded to foreign ideas with heavy-handed repression. For noncitizens, deportation was the primary punishment. The country didn’t care about what happened to people after they were deported. That’s why the characters in the book remark that “deportation can only mean death.”

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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.

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Featured image: Photo of Nishant Batsha by Libby March. Courtesy of the author.