Editor’s note: This is the twenty-third entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Nishant Batsha (@nishantbatsha on Twitter) is a writer of fiction and history, and the author of the novel Mother Ocean Father Nation. Here’s how he does history.
What’s your current position?
It has been this particular question that has sent me into a little panic every time I’ve sat down to answer this questionnaire. I know what the answer is supposed to be: I’m supposed to say that I’m a novelist. But I know that’s not an occupation or a career. Sometimes I think that being a writer is an anachronism: the number of books the average American reads every year is at an all-time low, for example.
That being said, there’s nothing else akin to the act of writing. It’s a solitary act in a world that has fewer and fewer of them, but it’s also a way to observe the world at a complete remove. That doesn’t seem to me to be an occupation—perhaps more of a quiet way of being.
When I was in my early 20s, I knew that there was one thing I wanted to do with my time. I wanted to be a writer. I had started out on a different path, and ultimately stayed on that path for a little while (I completed a PhD in history). But it was writing fiction and essays—that’s what I wanted to do.
What I learned quickly, is that there is no pay in this sort of calling. I’ve held a series of jobs (currently I work at Words Without Borders—a magazine of translated literature) to support myself and my family. Is that my primary occupation? It takes up a lot of my time. But in those fleeting moments where I’m able to sit down at my desk in silence for five minutes or for two hours, I’d like to think that I’m a writer.
You started a new job at Words Without Borders. What does the organization do and what will you be doing there?
Words Without Borders is a wonderful digital magazine that focuses on literature in translation. They do an amazing job finding and publishing literature from all around the world and supporting the careers of the translators who bring this writing to English-language readers. I support their engagement and communications efforts.
What’s your workday look like?
The last year or so has been a little bit of chaos. There are no more average days because the pandemic has sent child care into a complete disarray. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the pandemic has exploded all the fissures already there: the low pay, the paucity of care choices, the ways in which the United States completely lacks a social safety net. My daughter’s daycare shut down completely in April with only a week’s notice, so we’ve been piecing together things ever since.
Until about eleven in the morning, I help take care of our two kids. At that point I start to work my job at Words Without Borders until three or so in the afternoon. I have about an hour to myself for writing. Sometimes I’m able to cobble another hour in the morning right before eleven. It’s in those two hours that I try to write.
Writing is more or less a simple process. I open Scrivener, I switch to the full screen mode (so that I don’t get pulled into the Internet), and I write. I write feverishly because I know this is the only time I have. If I get to 500 words, I’m pleased. If I get 1000 words, I’m quite content.
I am happy to say that our children are starting full-time childcare again in about a month, and in my imagination, the day will look the same, only with a bit more breathing room.
Columbia University’s Butler Library, where Nishant studied as an undergraduate, at night (Wikimedia Commons).
Have you always been interested in history?
My interest in history was almost completely by chance. I had to take a medical leave during my first year of college. I had contracted some sort of flu-like illness, but was unable to shake it—what was perhaps a post-viral syndrome. When I came back to campus after nine months, I had no idea what to do.
I took a history course—Latin American History I, taught by the wonderful Caterina Pizzigoni. It was a large class, over eighty students, I think. But my TA sent one of my essays to the professor, and she pulled me aside after class and said that I had some talent for history. I began to take more history classes, and found that I enjoyed it.
It’s strange to think how much of one’s life is determined by chance. I honestly think that if I had the same experience with, say, an English class, or an Anthropology course, that I may have set off on a completely different path.
What’s your earliest memory of a historical event?
I don’t think I have ever been asked this question before—of course, I turned around and began to ask a few others it as well. From my extremely brief and very unscientific study, I found that seven or eight years old seems to be when people begin to grasp the concept of a historical event occurring around them.
For me, I remember being eight years old, and for some reason having a pager that no longer worked. I think my father had it for his job and no longer needed it, so he gave me the pager while he waited to give it back to the employer. I can’t remember how or why, but the thing would get breaking news alerts.
I remember getting a page about the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. I don’t think I knew at all what it meant at the time, but it looms in my memory as the first time I became aware of a world operating outside my own home. And I think that feeling never really left from that point on because I can clearly remember the 1996 election, for example.
So perhaps readers could try this at home: were you seven or eight years old when you first committed a historical event to memory?
St. Edmund Hall at Oxford University, where Nishant completed his master’s degree (Wikimedia Commons).
Where did you study as an undergraduate and later graduate student? What did you study?
I attended Columbia University as an undergraduate, where I studied both history and South Asian Studies. I tend to have a monomaniacal drive, so when I was in my third year, I made it a goal that I would somehow get a scholarship to study at Oxford for a master’s degree—I’m not sure where the desire came from, as I had never before been to Oxford, or had thought much about the United Kingdom as a destination for my education. But I suppose that’s how desire works: it appears as if external to us, and then proceeds to consume. I ended up at Oxford doing a master’s in what they called Global and Imperial History. From there, I returned to Columbia to pursue a PhD in history.
In my PhD program, I was trained as a South Asianist and focused on Indian indentured servitude in Fiji and Trinidad. Despite being filled with all the stress, angst, and terror of graduate school, it was a great experience: I traveled a lot (to Fiji, Trinidad, the United Kingdom, Hawaii) and had a lot of time to write. It was a fantasy life for a bit: I would wake up, and I would either work on my dissertation or on my fiction. I’ll never again have that kind of freedom.
Tell us about your decision to become a novelist. Was that always the plan or did it happen during your undergraduate or graduate program?
I had always written, but it was only for myself. It was by chance that I discovered that I could write for others. At the end of my time in Oxford, I submitted an essay to a website called The Awl. The Awl unfortunately no longer exists, but many amazing writers had bylines in that publication. The essay was published, and it had a pretty positive response. For the first time I felt like I could write for a public audience.
I spent the summer after my master’s living in Oxford and just writing in pubs. It was a lot of practice writing—taking seriously for the first time something I had always practiced quietly and away from others. By the time I got to graduate school I wondered if I wanted to be there. I wanted to drop out.
I ended up staying in my graduate program, but from then on was living two parallel lives. In one, I would complete the research required for my dissertation. In the other, I would write and work on my novel. I should really say throughout that time I was working on several novels: it took 10 years, five manuscripts, and maybe 400,000 words to get to the version that was eventually published.
This is the church referenced in Nishant’s essay “Cast Your Burdens.” It’s Dudley Memorial Church in Suva, Fiji.
Tell us about your research interests. For instance, what was your doctoral dissertation about?
I researched Indian indentured servitude in Fiji and Trinidad. It’s funny, I haven’t thought about my dissertation in years. I feel like I can’t speak fluently about it anymore.
But that research did take me to archives in Fiji and Trinidad. While there, I would work on other things. For example, when I was in Fiji, I was interviewing members of the Indian Division of the Methodist Church of Fiji—the Methodist Church supported some of Fiji’s many coups after independence. That essay opened up a whole set of questions for me about nation, belonging, political instability, and migration that I really think fed into the novel I was writing at the time. It took my writing into a whole different direction.
I don’t think I would’ve written my novel without having conducted the fieldwork and research required for my dissertation.
Your debut novel Mother Ocean Father Nation was released in June. What is it about?
The novel is set on an unnamed South Pacific island nation undergoing a military coup in 1985. It follows the lives of the brother and sister who have to navigate their lives in the midst of great political and familial upheaval. While the sister, Bhumi, leaves this island nation for California, her brother Jaipal stays behind.
You have written many articles for a wider, more public audience. Can you tell us some of the pieces you have written?
I’m terrible at remembering what I’ve written. After I publish something, I promptly forget about it. That being said, every time I write a short essay on a historical subject, I rediscover my love for history. I think I’ve learned that I am more of a dilettante—I enjoy reading through secondary sources and crafting a narrative, but I don’t think I could ever add anything new to the conversation, and I don’t think I could ever stick to one field for the entirety of my career. But I can hop between subjects—I most recently wrote about the Aga Khan and Ugandan expulsion for Lapham’s Quarterly. That’s perhaps the best part about writing for a public audience: it’s the story that matters the most.
For you, what is the toughest part of tackling a writing project?
To put the thing to rest. I think the act of going through developmental edits, copy edits, first-pass, second-pass, and third-pass proofs taught me that there’s always the chance to change something, there’s always some imperfection to be found. There has to come a moment when it all has to stop. Thankfully, deadlines often make that decision easy.
What’s the best advice you have received or tell people about writing?
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all piece of advice for writing, but for me, all writing occurs in revision. I try to get the first draft on the page as quickly as possible, because I know I’m going to rewrite the whole thing anyway.
Joan Didion, in a review of Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul in the New York Review of Books, had this wonderful line about the literary traveler, but I take it to heart for all writing: “to assign oneself the task, to set down for a finite period on unfamiliar ground and know that one must find the narrative, make sense of the place, interest oneself and someone else, get it fast and get it right.”1
Nishant and writer Kanishk Tharoor, in conversation, for the launch of Mother Ocean Father Nation at McNally Jackson (Seaport), New York City.
How well did your particular history training prepare you for your work as a novelist?
In the first few pages of the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun describes history as a branch of philosophy, a way at understanding truth and subtlety in the endless chain of causation that constitutes the human timeline. In the same way, good and meaningful fiction probes into the subtleties of human action.
While my historical training introduced me to archives, secondary sources, and an incredible array of stories, what was more important was the meaning behind all the argumentation. I found that now, at a remove from my life as a historian, I see it all as a time where I was able to learn how to understand how to plumb the endless depths of human action to piece together a fundamental truth about what it means to be alive.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I’m not sure the public at large thinks much about historians. Perhaps they think about someone lost in esoterica, or worse, someone who studies the past to understand the present. It’s either irrelevant or instrumentalized. In reality, I’d like to think that the study of history is a way of thinking about context, change over time, and contingency. It’s a point of entry to critically engage with the world.
You recently announced your second novel. What is it about and when might it be available to readers?
I feel very lucky that my publisher picked up my next book. It’s tentatively called A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart. The novel follows an Indian revolutionary and white American student who unexpectedly fall in love in 1917 Palo Alto. The two are forced to flee across the country to New York City—and beyond—after they are accused of being spies for the Germans, all while America teeters on the brink of global war.
If you weren’t a writer, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
Even though I do other work to support myself, I’m stuck in a paradox of sorts: I don’t think I could do anything else but be a writer.
- Joan Didion, “Discovery,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 11, 1984.