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For the ninth episode of Drafting the Past, I interviewed historian and novelist Nishant Batsha about his debut novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022). We talked about the connections between his training as a historian and his work as a novelist, the bad habits he had to break from academia, and writing for character and story, whether in fiction or non-fiction.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
- Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History
- Joyce Carol Oates (see her book The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art)
- Nishant's piece on The Awl, "The Condition: Existential Googling"
- John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
- Nishant on The Millions, "Write What You (Don’t) Know: Graduate School, Research, and Writing a Novel"
- Han Kang, Human Acts
- Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
- V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men
- Zadie Smith on the two types of writers (as featured on The Marginalian)
Here's Nishant Batsha's complete bio from his website: "Nishant Batsha is a writer of fiction and histories. He is the author of the 2022 novel Mother Ocean Father Nation (Ecco/HarperCollins). He is currently at work on A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (Ecco/HarperCollins, February 2025), a novel set between California and New York at the dawn of World War I.
He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University, as well as a master's frobm the University of Oxford (on a Doctorow Fellowship and ESU-SF Scholarship) and an undergraduate degree from Columbia. His academic research focused on Indian indentured labor in Trinidad and Fiji.
Nishant's writing has been supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Prelinger Library, as well as fellowships such as the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his wife and two children."
TRANSCRIPT
Nishant Batsha 0:01
Everything else is just a series of anxieties sandwiched upon fears. And the writing is the only space of freedom.
Kate Carpenter 0:12
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast devoted to the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. And in this episode, I am so delighted to be talking to novelist Nishant Batsha.
Nishant Batsha 0:24
Thanks for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:25
Hold up, a novelist? Isn't this a podcast about writing history? I promise that it still is. But I'm excited to have the chance to talk to Nishant because after earning a PhD in history from Columbia University, he has instead focused on writing fiction. His debut novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation, came out just a couple of weeks ago with Ecco/HarperCollins. And the research he did for his dissertation provides much of the historical context for the novel. I loved this book. And I was fascinated to learn more about how Nishant's career evolved. In this episode, we'll dig into the relationship between his PhD in history and his fiction writing, how he approaches research now, and much more. I had such a good time talking to Nishant about his work. And I hope you get as much out of this conversation as I did, however you write about history.
Nishant Batsha 1:17
Well, I started writing for publication around 2011 ish 2010 2011, I want to say, and I was living in the United Kingdom at the time, and I had finished like a one year master's. And I had this whole summer, where I was doing nothing before I moved to New York to go to graduate school. And for some reason, I submitted something for publication. And it was published on this website called The Awl which no longer exists, but many writers passed through The Awl. And it was the first time I felt like, whoa, all these little things that I have been writing on the side actually have an audience. And, of course, you know, a couple of months later, it's like, I'm gonna try a novel just since I was young and ambitious, I suppose. And so I actually went to graduate school with this whole new, almost trajectory that I didn't know about or didn't even consider until months prior. And it came to a head in the first semester of graduate school where I was like, I think I'm done, I'm going to drop out, this is not for me, I'm going to, you know, take a little bit time, focus on my writing, maybe apply for an MFA, and then just sort of start over. And something for some reason, kept me in graduate school, I don't really know what the magnetism was. But I ended up reaching out to some folks, some writers who had PhDs and were, you know, out in the world writing and asked them for advice, which was very earnest of me and very, you know, sort of bright eyed and bushy tailed. And all of them were just, you know, aghast at my thinking, just they said, you know, you're young, you don't understand this, you need to stay in graduate school, you need to keep your health insurance, to keep your stipend. And if you're bored with your project, you know, find something different, find something that will interest you. But being in graduate school is a perfect place to hide while you finish your book. And so I took their advice pretty seriously and stayed in graduate school and changed my project completely. I was working on educational policy in late 19th century, North India, and then decided I was going to work on Indian indenture in Fiji and Trinidad and kept working on my writing and publishing and kept working on the book. And one book led to another book led to another book led to another book. And then finally, you know, a little bit after graduate school I actually ended up with a manuscript for Mother Ocean Father Nation, and that's where I am today. So just sort of a haphazard, I think, like most careers that happenstance are sort of a path that finally led to a book.
Kate Carpenter 3:58
I have found in grad school that even if your goal is not sort of the tenure track, professor, academic path, it can be really hard to kind of stick to your guns in terms of what it is that you want to do in the future and not sort of be pushed in, pushed maybe is the wrong word. But I don't know, go along with that direction. Was it hard for you to stay focused on being a writer, and especially a novelist?
Nishant Batsha 4:23
There definitely was, you know, I can't go more than a few days without writing. And that's been writing fiction, especially. So that's been something that's been with me for a long time. So that's always been part of my writing practice is to you know, write at least a little bit every day, otherwise, I feel thrown off. But I would say, you know, my fantasy of being a tenure track historian, you could really easily graph it where it peaks around year three of graduate school and then like precipitously falls and then ends up back where I started in year one by the time of year six. I was actually pretty lucky in graduate school and that I had outside funding from this great fellowship of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, which meant that, you know, I only taught for one year. And then after I came back from my fieldwork, my advisor had moved from Columbia, New York, to UC Berkeley. And so while I didn't transfer institutions, I was like a visiting student at Cal. So I was completely detached then from my cohort at my home institution, but was never really integrated into the Cal history department. So I was just sort of, on my own for from, I guess, year three to year six, I had no contact with anyone else. So that made it actually very easy to consider myself a writer, it's a very sort of fantasy life almost, because I would just write every single day, and it would either be my dissertation, or it'd be the book I was working on. And so I could just alternate between the two. And I actually miss graduate school for that reason, it's the only time in my life I think, where I get to where I was able to live that sort of dream, right, or life, or all you have to do is write. That being said, you know, the anxieties and terrors and fears of graduate school are always there. So I'm not sure if I really want to go back. But I guess to answer your question, you know, there was always the magnetism towards the traditional path. But I think because I was in this sort of abandoned state, it made it a little bit easier to focus on my own writing. But in retrospect, it kind of meant that I wasn't going to be a historian, because I'm not doing all the conference papers and, you know, working with colleagues, I was just sort of almost the life of an independent scholar.
Kate Carpenter 6:38
When and where do you do your writing?
Nishant Batsha 6:40
This was a much easier question before I had children. I'm sure, it was. Really all questions are easier to answer before you have children. Before I had children, it was always in the morning, usually, for a couple hours every morning, before work, really. And I am a writer that loves word count goals. So it'd be I had my two hours in the morning, and you know, had to get my 500 words done. And if I get more than 500, that's great. But I have to at least get 500. And that was, you know, a really great way of writing. Ever since I've had children, it's whatever little bit of time I could find in the day. So I am not picky about where I get to write as long as I get to do it. So that means you know, either home or coffee shops, which has become an option, again, after many years, libraries. So really any place I could find a little scrap of not even quiet, a scrap of my own space, and a little bit of time to be able to get those 500 words on the page.
Kate Carpenter 7:45
How do you do your writing? How do you approach it? Are you an outliner, or do you kind of wing it as you go? bit
Nishant Batsha 7:49
A little bit of both. I don't like going completely in the dark, I like to have some sense of where I'm going so I often sketch a kind of a skeleton outline of either a chapter or more usually the whole arc of the story, which is always subject to change, because with fiction, especially when you start writing, everything kind of goes out the window, the moment you start writing. So it's almost like a little like my little teddy bear almost to have an outline in front of me, it just it's a false sense of security. But then I am definitely an A to Z writer, I like to start in chapter one. And end with the end. I know many writers pick and choose from different parts of the book and write scenes as it comes to them. I am definitely a-- Zadie Smith had this typology, and, in an essay or speech she gave, and she divided writers and to those who could, you know, pick and choose from moments and writers who need to start at the beginning and end at the end. And I'm definitely one of those. So it has its pros and cons. But I definitely liked the sort of linearity in that method, because it allows me to sort of think through the totality of a story before moving on to the most important part, which is revision, because for me, all the writing really happens in revision, I think the word count goal actually ends up helping because it's like, just get the words on the page, just get it out, you know, get whatever first draft you have into the world onto the computer. And then the real writing happens in revision. So you get to rewrite and discover new connections, think through character more deeply, often, by the time it reached the end. It's like I realized, oh, that's actually the primary motivation of the character. So now I get to go back and write that in. Or, you know, maybe that scene actually doesn't work because the climax is this, whereas I thought it was gonna be something else when I did that outline. So it's often just like a race to get to that first draft. And then, you know, it's n drafts after that, you know, where n is a number between anything and infinity.
Kate Carpenter 9:42
How do you approach revision?
Nishant Batsha 9:44
Again, it's, I still do it very linearly. I will start in the beginning and read through. I always like to print out the whole thing and do the first revision by hand just with a red Pilot V five pen, my little totemic item. And if I often just have like a running list in the back of my head of connections or minor notes and those I, for some reason, hold in my head until I get to that point in the, in the manuscript. And then I finally get to write them down and put them on the page. It's a lot of faith in my own ability to keep my thoughts straight, which is, again, something I took for granted before I had children, much easier to keep all your thoughts all your ducks in a row, when you're not being thrown in, in various different directions. But so far, so good, I'm still able to keep, you know, the running list in the back of my mind, which then comes out in a revision process. And it's, a lot of it is not only reading sort of, silently, but I really love to read out loud, especially in that first draft, you catch so many missteps or clunky sentences, or missed connections between paragraphs, just by hearing yourself, read your story back to, you know, aloud, because a story is essentially an oral medium, even though it's on the page, and people are reading in silence, it's very much rooted in sound. So having the chance to hear what I've written back to myself is often part of that early revision process.
Kate Carpenter 11:14
Your work really involves a lot of research, how does that play into your writing process? Do you do all your research before you even start writing? Or do you find yourself going back to research as you go?
Nishant Batsha 11:25
I like to do a bare minimum of research, especially now that I'm working on a new project, I kind of got to experience this in a more condensed format, because this book came out of many years of research. And so there is a, you know, there is a diving into secondary sources, forming like a very small bibliography, reading that, and maybe in parallel making a secondary list of a fiction that I kind of want to engage in an intertextual way and reading through those, but it's not a lot. I don't want to do an exhaustive, exhaustive research project. Because at the end of the day, and this is very different from writing history, the importance is not in systematically, understanding the topic, the importance is, you know, story, like the story is the thing, right? And so I need to just sort of get my bearings and understand where I am. And then it's all about the writing from there on out. And once I'm really into, once I'm really on the page, research kind of happens in tandem, because there's always questions. Some of the questions are extremely mundane. Like, you know, I was just writing something the other day where it was 1917. And I wondered if South Asians would be drinking tea at that point. Because had tea actually taken root in the subcontinent? In fact, it had not. So I had to, you know, get rid of a lot of, you know, Google Books and Google Scholar researching, and then determine that tea actually did not become a widespread beverage for you know, about a decade later. So I had to take the tea out of the scene and replace it. So there is that, those sort of small questions. You know, Nabokov called them the divine details, but those if you're writing in the past, those details have to come from someplace. So those that little bit of research will happen, parallel to the writing,
Kate Carpenter 13:12
I'm really curious to hear about how you see the connection between your training as a historian and your work, particularly as a fiction writer, does that inform the way that you write?
Nishant Batsha 13:23
That's the million dollar question for me, sometimes I just look back and I'm like, What is the connection? Why did I do a graduate degree in history? I think it's almost corny. But I find myself thinking a lot about, it's a line early in Ibn Khaldûn's The Muqaddimah, which is, oh, I'm forgetting what century it was written, somebody's going to hear this incorrectly. It was a 12th century, I'm not sure. But it's an old text about sort of the theory and philosophy of history. And early in the, in the book, he mentioned something along the lines of how history really gets at, like a true philosophy of understanding people. And I really appreciate that part of my historical training, because it was a way in which I was able to kind of just immerse myself in a long project of empathy, because there's something that's just so othering about the past. I mean, I think we take it for granted that you know, there are human beings in the past and therefore we should be able to understand them, for the most part, but the past is actually very unknowable, unless you really try to empathize with the currents of the time, you know, thought, place, I think of it its story in a setting, character, and plot, but it's the same sort of drive to really understand the past is to understand people, to understand people is to write so I feel like the sort of core kernel I have my historical training really segues quite nicely into writing fiction. And then the other part is I think I just was introduced to a lot of cool stories that I don't think people write about either in fiction or in history. And it was just sort of reading widely, and reading in the archive that introduced me to this great compendium of human sorrow and triumph, that I think makes for great writing. And so I am very thankful to just being introduced to all this material that I would never have been able to see otherwise, which makes it seem like I'm instrumentalizing the archive or instrumentalizing secondary sources, which maybe I am, but I still am very grateful for that, always. And so I think the ongoing question for me is, is I do want to thread the needle somehow, and I don't know, even if it's just for myself, like lay out a theory of the intersection between history and fiction. And I would love to, like I don't know, teach a course about that. I in my spare time, for some reason, I have this like draft syllabus, the archive and fiction, and it's something I add and subtract text to. And it's this dream course that I don't know if it will ever present the opportunity to teach. But that is like the place in where I imagined everything becomes clearer. And it's teaching that I'll finally figure out what the connection is.
Kate Carpenter 16:28
Oh, man, I love that I want to take that course. Did you find were there habits, you had to unlearn from the PhD? In order to be a successful novelist?
Nishant Batsha 16:37
I think there is, there is one big habit I think, when writing, either historically or writing for an academic audience, you really have to set the scene so to speak, there's a lot of background and pre-history that you have to sort of engage with, or you know, the literature review, before you get to the point. And so you're sort of, the point may not occur if you're writing a 20 page article to page 12, and you have 11 pages before that of just synopsis or background or, or what have you. And I would write I think old drafts of this book, had that inclination, where it's just like, the actual story would not start until page 50. It's like here, I need a front load you with all the information, you need to understand exactly where you are. And I think that was the historian in me, I think it was it was the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who read something that I wrote. And she said, you have this sort of, she called it the ontic voice. And it was this voice of authority. And she's like, I think that's the historian's voice and you need to like move more towards your character's voice, sort of leave the ontic voice behind. So I think those two, those two aspects of the writing as such, you know, the inclination towards backstory, and the inclination towards like, authority, in, in tone and presentation, were things I definitely had to unlearn. And Mother Ocean Father Nation is told in a third person close, so you have to really give up the sense of authority and universality and engage directly with what the characters are thinking. So that becomes a lot more unreliable, in sort of the authorial voice that's being presented. And that was something I definitely had to unlearn. Those are, those are hard habits to break. The beginning of Mother Ocean was at one point, I think, page 40. So I literally cut 40 pages in the heart of the beginning, was very deep into the book. And so that was how bad my addiction to background. I buried the the beginning of the book, 40 pages.
Kate Carpenter 18:47
And that may be an answer to a question that I had. But you know, your dissertation really is the research for the historical background of this book, it seems like, did you feel like you knew too much, you know, did you, you know, have to kind of set aside the like, massive amount of information that you learned in the process of doing the dissertation?
Nishant Batsha 19:07
It actually, it became a problem because, well, the book is set in a fictional South Pacific island nation. And I had amassed an understanding of the post colonial politics of Fiji, of Uganda, of the Indo Caribbean. So Guyana and Trinidad and a little bit of South Africa. And I have found bits of history from all those places to be quite compelling. But it just doesn't work that way in historical time, and you can't just put it in, say, Fiji and then, you know, suddenly there's an Idi Amin type character, and you know, it does it just doesn't work out. So I had to sort of use that sort of masked information for my dissertation research and just put it in a made up place for lack of a better word, in order to free myself from the bonds of the historical timeline, I can now move things around it doesn't I don't have to have a fidelity to date, they don't have to have a fidelity to people, I could just really take from all sorts of places and put it in one location. And that was actually extremely freeing the moment I realized I could do that, it's like, I could take everything that I've learned over the last six years plus from when I started graduate school, and then synthesize it in a brand new way. So I was really excited when that finally clicked into place. So they didn't have to be beholden to history anymore, that it can actually truly enter the space of fiction and, and create and it starts with politics and places and people but there's also you know, very minor things that I don't know anyone will see in this book, but flora and fauna have been combined from all these countries. So it's like if you you know, know your snakes of Guyana, you'll know that you know, there's a reference to the fer-de-lance snake which does not exist in the South Pacific but only exists in northern South America. So it was just like this, I think I went a little overboard and like I can combine places I can make a new place and, and so it really features in all parts of of that world building.
Kate Carpenter 21:18
To learn more about how he does that kind of world building, I asked Nishant to talk me through the opening to Mother Ocean Father Nation. Here's Nishant reading the beginning of chapter one of the book.
Nishant Batsha 21:31
"'It is announced with sadness that Ram Maharaj was burnt last night,' the broadcast began. Bhumi looked at the red digits on her clock radio with a sense of dread. The South Pacific University had set a curfew earlier that day, and now Bhumi felt paralyzed by the evening's emptiness. A few hours ago, she had tried to find Aarti, but she wasn't in her dorm room, so Bhumi had gone back to lying on her bed, finding patterns in the foam of her drop ceiling. And now, at seven in the evening, a bell sounded three times on FM 93.6, Radio Zindagi. Radio Zindagi was the background hum of daily life for the island's Indian community. Growing up, Bhumi's weekday evenings are organized by the seven o'clock bells, and looking back, it was one of the few things they did together as a family. Bhumi; her brother, Jaipal; and their parents gathered around to listen to the radio announcer, elegant in his use of pure Hindi (as opposed to the patois of the street). He would begin the program by announcing "Dukh ke saath suchit kiya jata hai ki…" It is announced with sadness that… Then he would list the quotidian deaths of Indians throughout the country: farmers, school teachers and politicians alike were featured when they passed on. After every name and summary of a life and family left behind, Bhumi saw her parents nod their heads, as if, on this small island, they knew each and every person the announcer mentioned. Brevity was the single rule of broadcast. The announcements tended to focus on the sum total of life's accomplishments. He was a good husband, she a dutiful mother. Loved by all. Survived by so-and-so. For the past few days, instead of reading out the obituaries, the announcer had been talking about the missing: the ones the government said had been arrested yet couldn't be found in any jail. It was a jarring change, but everything had gone to shit in the past couple of weeks. Bhumi had arrived on the South Pacific University campus in August 1983. And now, at the end of her second year, it had all begun to fall apart.
Kate Carpenter 23:37
What goes into writing an opening like this?
Nishant Batsha 23:40
I think what was learned through many revisions was that, you know, I really wanted to start the reader in the place they need to, you know, I didn't want to futz with exposition, I just want to start them at the moment of action. And so the moment of action in this case is this announcement during the coup, the sort of ominous radio program. And so you get that sense that something is wrong, wherever you are. And I think, you know, I mentioned this previously before, this is, you know, at page 40. And so there was a lot of like, this is the history of colonialism. This is the history of the island. And this is the history of the family. And instead, it's like, I just wanted to get the reader as quickly as possible in the moment to just start the story off and really get the gears running. I think it took a while to learn that you only have a first shot to get someone hooked into into a narrative. And so that realization to start as quickly as possible, only came through a lot, a lot of revision.
Kate Carpenter 24:47
These paragraphs really are doing so much, you know, they seem perhaps at the surface to a reader. I don't want to say it's simple but straightforward, but really, when you start looking at them, you know, there's the present scene that you're setting here. There's a little bit of sort of context both historical and cultural, we meet some of the characters, at least in passing. And then you also have the sense that something big is happening, something is changing here. Does it take revision to make that all come together in in such a tight opening? Or do you do that just naturally,
Nishant Batsha 25:16
I wish I did it naturally, that would make me a much better writer probably much more productive. I think it was John Gardner who said that exposition has to be just the briefest amount of information for the reader to understand the scene in front of them. And that's very easy to read from him and took a lot to actually internalize. In this case, just going to take a look at it, we start with a dissect my own reading, we start with the sort of announcement from the radio broadcaster. And that sort of tells you that there's, you know, we're in a place with Indians. But then immediately, the South Pacific University has mentioned, so Oh, we're, in fact, we're not in India, or the United States or anywhere in the West that we might recognize. And so it's just these sort of small signposts that guide the reader towards where we are, I think before it was like, here's a big signpost and this is where we are. And so it's learning how to signpost in the smallest, most subtle way to guide the reader towards exactly what they need to know to understand. You know, exactly what the action that's happening in the scene,
Kate Carpenter 26:22
how do you come to have Joyce Carol Oates giving you feedback on your writing?
Nishant Batsha 26:26
This was so this was when I was at Cal, and she had retired from teaching at Princeton, and at the time was splitting her time between teaching one semester at NYU, and one semester at UC Berkeley, where she mainly taught undergraduates. And I think I saw that she was teaching a writing workshop. And I immediately signed up, even though I technically was not allowed to. And I did not even know if I could sign up for courses because no one explained what my status was as like a visiting, quote, unquote, visiting scholar, no one told me what that actually meant. But I, I signed up and, and it was, she had to read a story of yours to let you in the class. And I remember on the first day, she had said, I'm a great fan of your writing. And I think I've melted. Because I've never taken a workshop before. I had never interacted with writers of a large stature. And so that was, that was like a very special workshop for me. And there's a sort of lesson in persistence. I think, you know, the one thing that that writing for while it's taught me is that you just stay in touch with people, even if it's just for even if it feels like kind of hackneyed and awkward. And so I did stay in touch with with Joyce, and she's been a great sort of presence in my in my writing career ever since she's always been very supportive of my work. And so I feel very lucky to have built that sort of relationship with her. So luck, I feel like it's so much of our life just boils down to luck and persistence. And so I think in this case, it was, it was both.
Kate Carpenter 28:03
You've also written essays for more sort of popular audiences, how is the approach to writing an essay different than the approach to writing fiction?
Nishant Batsha 28:12
That's a difficult question. I guess I'll answer it in a sort of roundabout way. And that, for one, I love writing little essays, especially when I'm working on a bigger project, because it becomes a break to 2000 word break from whatever I'm immersed in. And I've often dream, my dream job, I think, is dilettantes, I think was one of those things that kind of drove me away from academic history just a little bit was this realization that I'd have to write about one subject. And I know historians do change their topics, especially post tenure, when they're given a little bit more freedom, you know, they, they start, you know, really exploring subject matter that may not been may not hew very closely to their, their graduate degree, but it was just this idea of staring down a career where it had to be, say, a Salvationist. For the next 30 years, like, well, I want to write a little bit about this a little bit, I want to write about food, I want to write about, you know, you know, the craft of writing. And so, I do think it just is that nice, little dilettante break from, from being focused on one thing. And it's funny, because I've just just coming off a period where I've written four essays in a row. When you publish a book, you often write a lot of essays to sort of, you know, get people to pay attention to you. So I just have written in the last week about a wide variety of topics ranging from Uganda to climate change to Philip Glass. And so I think, to actually get at your question, is embracing that sort of dilettante vibe, and one realizing that you're not going to be an expert about anything but I think people read essays because they like your voice and they like the spin that you're putting on. Whatever subject matter the greatest realization I had about writing his Oracle popular essays was, I didn't need to make an argument, you just have to tell an interesting story. I think that's the biggest difference between writing fiction and writing essays. But writing, maybe historical essays and writing popular essays is it's all about the story. Nobody cares about your argument in the New Yorker, I sound like I'm reading the New Yorker, but at least I think nobody cares about your argument if you're writing in The New Yorker, but they just want to find something that's grounded in character, and is interesting, which I think is for many historians, not necessarily how they were taught to write, grounding something in character, you know, I was very much in an academic program that grounded things and concepts. So state power, you know, government Tality, these like big topics that have no human being, to make it a little bit more fun to read, for lack of a better way to put it. So it is, that was like a very freeing realization that I didn't have to, you know, add to scholarship, I could just write the story, because I think you take for granted when you're deep into a historical, either your historical training or your historical practice that everybody knows the story, because you're surrounded by people who know the story, you're giving talks at conferences, where everyone knows the story, unless you're one of the few people who, like discovered a new archive. But mainly, if you're, if you're, if you're making a new argument, it's just that you're making a new argument. But it's that it's that reminder that 99.9% of the world has no idea what you're talking about. So you get to start back from brass tacks and just, you know, weave a tail. And that's really fun. I think I really like that I have not answered at all your question about the difference between writing fiction or writing essays. But I think that the actual mechanics are very similar. And I've kind of been driving at that a little bit. And that the the basis of a good essay is story, and character. And so that is, you know, the same thing for a good work of fiction is that you have a narrative that guides the reader, you have characters that are compelling, and it's all woven together in a, in a story that captures the reader's attention. And so with an essay, you're sensibly doing that, in the real world, I say extensively, because the more you read about like the craft of nonfiction, and especially creative nonfiction, you see that many writers have a somewhat loose relationship to reality. But you are, you know, grounding that story in, in the world around. But otherwise, I think it's it's the same lessons from, from reading fiction apply to those essays, which is to say, again, it's unlearning a lot of historical writing and learning a sort of different set of tools. But I think you get to take all the cool stuff from history that may be in like your introduction, your introductory paragraphs, and turning that into, you know, a longer, more elegant presentation that's just fun, rather than consumed with the anxiety of producing something novel.
Kate Carpenter 33:02
Are there ways that you deliberately work on your writing craft, you've mentioned a few books and articles about craft. And in passing, I think the
Nishant Batsha 33:11
best way to learn how to write is to just read the books that you love, but then read them with a critical eye just always asking the question, Well, how did they do that? How is that possible? How does it sound the way it sounds? I think that is a very different way from reading fiction, which is often passively for entertainment. It's Then taking your pen or pencil and bringing that to the page that you're reading and underlining, circling, asking yourself questions. There's a lot of marginalia in my books, which is often very embarrassing, because they're all notes to myself. So I don't let anyone borrow my books, because it's just almost like handing someone a journal. It's like, you don't get to see my thought process, you don't get to see the questions I asked myself, these books are mine. And I think I've actually let my wife borrowed some of my books, and she finds it distracting because it's like the web pages where 75% is underlined, or circled. And there are arrows and notes. And so I think that that practice of critical reading really helps. And it also, you know, becomes goal setting in its own right. You know, it's like I admire this writer so much, and I want to see how she did it. And so I'm going to really study her work, and I'm going to try my best to achieve the greatness that that she has. And then I think like, over the course of writing for many years, you just accumulate all these these hippie quotes for some reason that you could just like sort of deploy at random points, like oh, yeah, Nabokov said this. So yeah, John Gardner said, that's where I actually found those original quotes. I can tell you, they were absorbed somewhere somehow and then like, brought deep into my psyche such that like I see them as rules to live by maybe, but I have no idea how they ended up.
Kate Carpenter 35:03
So who do you read for inspiration
Nishant Batsha 35:05
from for mother ocean father nation, there was a few that I really turn to Hong Kong, who wrote, The Vegetarian also read a book called human x, which is set in South Korea during a labor uprising. It is a it's a moving, sometimes brutal book that really engage deeply with politics while also staying close to like, the human spirit, for example, and I thought to myself, if I could, you know, be a 10th as good as this book, you know, then I'll have accomplished something. So I really loved reading and rereading HUMAN ACTS. It's funny, because in this book, I really wanted to focus a little bit on kind of persistence of desire, especially in crisis situations, and I didn't want desire, be it sexual desire, or, you know, just desire for real relationships to fall to the wayside just because you know, bad things are happening in the world. And it was criss crosses, I love dick for some reason that made me think closely about sort of the manifest nature of desire. And that's, like, very unrelated to this book. It's set in sort of, like, an artistic academic milieu, and it's more about, you know, female objection and desire. But it was just the way in which she dealt with it was brilliant. I mean, there's there's that but I really, it kind of just made me focus a little bit of on the importance of desire in our, in our actions. So it was not something that I really anticipated seeing as an inspiration. I think I just picked it up at the bookstore was like, actually, this is genius. This is great. And then I think like, so a lot of people have asked me, you, whenever you write about Indians in a diaspora, especially in labor, Diaspora people ask about your opinions about nightfall. And in my case, actually, I like his work. I'm not sure I like him as a human being, but I don't think anyone does, especially given the revelations about his, you know, abusive relationship with his a woman, the woman who is not his wife, his mistress, I suppose. But like, I think it's because I came from a sort of academic postcolonial background that works like the mimic men were very important for me to conceptualize sort of the almost the satire of post colonial governance. And so I think he really hit the nail on the head in books like that. So I think in terms of books for influence, you end up just, it becomes a laundry list of book after book after book after book. But those three in particular, just at this very moment come to mind for works that I look towards when writing whether Russian what's the best writing advice you've ever gotten? I'm not sure. So this is advice that wasn't given to me. But again, it's one of those things that I've collected, and I have no idea how I've collected it. It was from Toni Morrison, who, in an interview, mentioned that the and she didn't use the word happy. But I think she's word fulfilled, the most fulfilled she felt was when she was writing when she was inside a project. She said that the world loses a little bit of color when she's not writing. And I think just the if there is advice to be gleaned from that, it's to always immerse yourself and writing. Because I, I do understand that I do feel a little bit glum when I am not able to be inside a project. And when you know, there's nothing to write, I feel like when I finished the final edits from other ocean, before I went off into copy editing, I lasted three weeks before I was like I need to start a new book. And then I started a new book. Because it was just such a weird feeling. And I know there are writers who find the task of writing to actually be extremely difficult, and there's a lot of browsing that can happen but it to me, it's the only it's like the only good part. And to really embrace the fact that it's the only good part is I think the best advice that I've tried to internalize like, everything else is just a series of anxieties sandwiched upon fears. And but the writing is the only space of freedom. I am hesitating to use the word happy your joy because I don't know if it's happy or joyful because it is difficult. It's very hard. But it is it does give the day a rhythm and it gives a sense of purpose. And it just it really is a gift to be able to sit for as many hours as one can in a day and think about people other than oneself and be able to write their stories and I think that have to just embrace that. It's perhaps the best advice I've I've gotten.
Kate Carpenter 40:04
Are you? Do you consider yourself part of a writing community? Are there people you turn to for feedback?
Nishant Batsha 40:09
I am, I think, well, because of COVID. All of our writing or our physical communities have been curtailed quite a bit. I remember when I was living in the San Francisco Bay area, I reached out to the writer, Lydia Kiessling, who at the time lived in San Francisco, and we got a coffee. And she said something that I'll always remember, which is that writers need co workers too. And so it's just like, I think I was sort of feeling embarrassed that I reached down I was so desperate for human contact, that I was apologizing for asking her to have a coffee. And she was just she just said, No, all writers with coworkers who you need to talk shop, you need to gossip a little bit, you need to blow off steam. And I think finding finding writers where you could have that sort of co worker relationship is it's really super important, I think, for one's mental health. And I say all that. But I moved to Buffalo with my I live in Buffalo, New York now. And we moved here, January 2020, which is like the worst time in retrospect to move anywhere. So I have yet to be able to find my writing community here in Western New York, I hope that will change soon. Because it is nice to have that sort of more quotidian relationship to to other writers. When I was in the Bay Area, it was this this community called the HetLand, Center for the Arts. And you know, we would just have dinner, and we'd work in our studios independently, but then we'd come together from time to time and it was just nice to have that sort of routine interaction. I hope I could, you know, have that again, one day.
Kate Carpenter 41:47
Well, can I ask you what you're working on now.
Nishant Batsha 41:48
So right now I'm working on another novel. And this one is completely different from others. And Father nations actually set in 1917. And on the west coast of California, where they're, you know, actually were Indian revolutionaries, who came to join up with other revolutionary workers. So there were a lot of Sikh farmworkers in North Northern California. And then there were just a lot of mainly Bengali intellectuals who came and were on and around the UC Berkeley and Stanford campuses. And they were just, you know, as one does, trying to plot the overthrow of the British Empire in South Asia, they were being followed by British spies. Most of the time, this is very, you know, there's already you can already see the elements of a book right there. And so I was drawn to the fact that many of these men fell in love while they were in California, and they married across racial lines and married white women. This is a time when interracial marriage was not legal. Across the United States, this was a time of great anti Asian sentiment. So it was not being a South Asian and California was not sort of a welcome identity. And, and being Asian in the United States at the time was definitely quite dangerous. And so I was really drawn to one, that sort of spy story that's being told, and to the love stories that were that were being made at the time. And this was all right before World War One. And so when the war broke out, many of these people were branded as traitors or branded as German spies. They were rounded up and arrested with a due process. And so the story kind of finds its its bearings in this very heady and exciting time in American history that I don't think many people know about. And this is, again, one of those things where I knew this story, I knew the story very well, because I had heard it so many times in so many different books or seminars and I just one of the things you assume that everyone knows something about, but then you learn that not many people outside your small community of scholars knows about this. In fact, they're very interesting stories to be told.
Kate Carpenter 43:47
Well, thank you so much. It's really great. So interesting to hear from someone trained as a historian working working in the fiction world.
Nishant Batsha 43:54
Well, thanks for having me. It was really great to talk to you today.
Kate Carpenter 43:59
Thanks again to Nishant Batsha for joining me on this episode of Drafting the Past. And thanks to you for listening. You can find a link to Nishant's book Mother Ocean Father Nation, and other subjects we discussed at draftingthepast.com. And if you have a minute, please leave a review for the show on your favorite podcast app to help spread the word. Until then, happy writing.
