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Author and literary critic Alexander Manshel has written extensively about how and why the historical novel has emerged as a dominant form of literary storytelling in the United States in recent times, stating that the American literary canon has found great academic and political value in the historical past, eclipsing other genres.
“I never stopped to think about that but it’s certainly true for my career; I think I am most interested in exploring the nature of human relationships and human capacity within the boundaries of history,” said historian and author Nishant Batsha, in an interview with this publication about his new novel, “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart.”
The book is a work of historical fiction based in part on the story of anti-colonial revolutionaries Indian activist M.N. Roy and his first wife, Evelyn Trent, a pioneering American feminist associated with the early communist movement, who met and fell in love in 1917 on the Stanford University campus. The book’s red front cover invokes the symbolism of love, blood, socialism and Stanford.
Their story is reconstructed through the characters “Indra,” who represents Roy, and “Cora,” based on Trent. When she married Roy, Trent lost her U.S. citizenship due to the The Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped American women of their citizenship if they married a “foreigner.”
Batsha’s book explores the blossoming of their romance on the eve of World War I, which brings with it a rising tide of intolerance in U.S. society. After marrying, the couple moves to New York City.Â
“Trying to find footing in their new life, Cora and Indra must reckon with divergent ambitions that challenge the foundations of their hasty marriage—and their freedom,” as the book’s publisher Ecco describes the couple’s challenges.
Besides Trent, the character of Cora is an amalgam of several other women from history who married Indian revolutionaries, including Swiss artist Frieda Hauswirth (who married Sarangadhar Das), American journalist Agnes Smedley (who married Virendranath Chattopadhyaya) and American activist Mary Keatinge Das (who married Taraknath Das).
“She’s a hybrid of all these white women who married Indian men at this specific point in history and joined the Indian nationalist movement for either a prolonged or a very short period,” said Batsha. “So Cora becomes a vehicle for all those stories.”
Further inspiration for Cora came from a character named Susan Ward in “Angle of Repose,” a 1971 novel by Wallace Stegner, who founded the Stanford Creative Writing Program in 1946. Ward, in turn, is based on the life of American author and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote.
A large part of Batsha’s book takes place in the Professorville neighborhood of Palo Alto at a time when “Stanford is in its embryonic state, still figuring itself out, doesn’t yet have a sense of itself, it’s not yet known for any specific thing,” he said.
In the process of writing the book, Batsha consulted the Palo Alto Historical Society and parsed several city directories as well as primary and secondary source material from that time. To accurately recreate Stanford from over a century ago on the page, he dug into descriptions of the university from “Caste and Outcast,” a 1923 memoir by Newbery Medal-winning writer Dhan Gopal Mukerji — considered the first South Asian immigrant to have a successful career as an author and scholar in the United States, who is also an important character in the book.
Besides Indra and Cora, all the other characters in the book have “cognates in reality” too. One of the characters is based on David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford. Another is based on John Varian, whose sons Russell and Sigurd — also portrayed in the book with their actual first names — founded Varian Associates, one of Silicon Valley’s first high-tech companies.
“I wrote him (John Varian) very closely in the book because it’s sort of a reminder that Palo Alto today is not what Palo Alto has always been; there was a radical, interesting history of people doing bizarre, ‘out there’ things: activists, composers, writers … I do think it’s interesting that that sort of alternate way of living led to the first tech company in Silicon Valley,” he said about a side of the city lost to history. “With Stanford, there was a history and it was an interesting one and it’s sort of been lost, maybe folks in Palo Alto might be surprised to see it.”
The author classifies the book as a literary historical novel. “Sometimes historical fiction is interested in being, for lack of a better way to put it, a sexier history book, a history book with characters and local flavors,” he said. “But I think this book is very interested in the characters, in their movement, in their understanding of themselves and each other.”
Batsha, who grew up in Danville, is currently based in Buffalo. “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart” is his second book. His first book, “Mother Ocean Father Nation,” was published three years ago.
Nishant Batsha’s ‘A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart’ is published by Ecco, part of HarperCollins. For more information, visit harpercollins.com.
