Ben Jacob: You devoted your PhD in history to the study of indentureship in Fiji and Trinidad, after starting out researching educational policy in late-nineteenth-century North India. How did you come to study indentureship?

Nishant Batsha: The decision to switch to indentureship emerged from a complete boredom with a PhD in history. I wanted to write creatively, and a PhD in history was not the place to write fiction. There was this moment where I was thinking of leaving. In the end I stayed, and I couldn't go back to what I was working on before.

With indenture, I think I always had an inkling that there were Indians in different parts of the world, because when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, my parents would often go to a temple in which the pandit was from Fiji. I don't think I even knew where Fiji was as a child, but there was the idea in my head that there were Indians there. I think I just started reading around that.

It was fascinating because it was a history of labour and migration that was so removed from my parents’ migration story. That quickly led to a comparative project, because the literature at the time always seemed to be looking at indenture as a unified process, rather than looking at connections across the British Empire. I became interested in linking the Caribbean, which is one of the birthplaces of the concept of indenture, to one of the later places, Fiji, where indenture didn't come until the 1870s.

It carried me through the six years of graduate school. It was good travel. I did my research in Fiji, and then I was in Trinidad, so it beats being in the northeast in the winter. I got to spend a couple weeks in Hawaii, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I snorkelled a lot.

BJ: While you were at graduate school, you had these two projects running at the same time: the scholarly, academic project of a history dissertation, and the beginnings of what would become Mother Ocean Father Nation. Mother Ocean Father Nation is situated in the wake of indentureship, on a post-plantation island nation with a large Indian population; your dissertation is a granular study of nineteenth-century colonial power and indentureship. How did these two projects work together – did they overlap, or were they always side-by-side, parallel but never touching?

NB: They were mostly written side-by-side. I don’t see my fiction as having scholarly concerns. There are a series of concerns about big concepts like the nation and identity, and what post-coloniality looks like to an average person, that form a ghostly presence in the novel, but I don’t think any of that is at the top of my mind when I’m writing.

But when I think about it, to reach the book that was published in 2022, four manuscripts were written. The first manuscript was set in California in the present day and had nothing to do with indenture. But as I immersed myself more and more in reading about indenture, those stories soaked into my brain. There was a character in one of the manuscripts who had migrated from an indenture colony to California. She was the mother of the character I was writing about, and I became attached to her. Through a series of revisions, she eventually became the character that is Bhumi in Mother Ocean Father Nation. So they were parallel until they weren't.

I think it was especially being in Fiji, where I was writing an essay about the Methodist Church of Fiji that was eventually published in The Offing. Immersing myself in that community, talking to officials there, and going to services to learn about the fractures of the nation state led me to this series of questions about belonging that don’t appear in any of my work on indenture, but came out of the research while I was in Fiji. So I think they intersected and ran parallel at times, but I don't think they ever were one on top of another. They were always two tracks.

BJ: What was it like doing research in Fiji and Trinidad, two countries in very different parts of the world, yet bound by a common history of British colonisation, sugar production and indentured migration? Were there commonalities or divergences that you became aware of by researching in these two places?

NB: There was always a third comparison too, because I spent my childhood going to India, and I would always also tie these places back to India. I went to Fiji first, so the comparison to India was more immediate. The India of my childhood was a very poor place, and I didn’t see that kind of poverty in Fiji. I just remember thinking, “oh, this is nice”. That idea of Fiji being “nice” kept coming up in conversations I'd have with people, because I would move around Fiji and people would assume I'm Fiji Indian. Then I’d end up in a conversation, and it became clear I’m not from Fiji. I’d often tell people that my parents came from India, and they would ask how India is. I'd tell them, "The place that my parents came from is still very poor", and the conclusion would always be, "Oh, I'm kind of glad I'm in Fiji. It's better here than there."

In terms of comparisons between Fiji and Trinidad, there are a lot of similarities in food that I picked up on. I wrote an essay about what in Fiji is called the roti parcel, and in the Caribbean just the roti. You put the curry in the roti, which is a white flour roti rather than the brown flour roti you get in the subcontinent. Then it's folded up into this compact food that you can take on the go. It's something I never saw in India. You have some analogues in South Asia, but nothing close to that. It was fun to just see that in both places.

There was always a dark side as well with what I observed with race relations. I felt that, in both places, there were two communities sitting side by side. There were gestures towards the other from each group, but points of intersection were few. This may have been born out of my own ignorance, but I sometimes couldn't tell the difference between the political parties in Trinidad other than the fact that one was the Indian party and one was the not-Indian party. That's what feeds into the fiction, seeing this way in which two groups who were brought together as a result of the British Empire sit next to each other in the postcolonial era.

BJ: Mother Ocean Father Nation is set in a fictional South Pacific island nation, with an imagined geography that borrows elements from an array of different places around the world. What went into your construction of the setting of the novel?

NB: At first I knew I wanted to set the novel in the South Pacific, because I wanted the place to be an island. Unlike the islands in the Caribbean, I wanted it to be an island that stands on its own. I wanted to dramatise the nature of departure, in that you can’t just leave the country: there’s no land border to cross. Any leaving has to be very purposeful, and leaving can’t be a furtive thing; it has to be part of a greater mechanics of departure.

Already there I’m messing with geographical facts. Fiji is an archipelago of islands, whereas islands of the Caribbean are generally singular islands that are nations. So I’m taking the idea of the island nation and bringing it into the South Pacific, getting rid of the archipelago.

Then I kept wanting to depart from timelines. I knew I wanted to set this book in the mid-1980s. A lot of it draws upon the experience in Uganda, but that happened in the early seventies. Fiji's first coup wasn't until 1987, so already I departed from a timeline. I knew it had to be a constructed place and I knew it had to draw upon a diverse archive at that point. It's a Caribbeanesque island set in the South Pacific, with a dictator who looks a lot like Idi Amin, but also Pinochet, but also Rabuka from Fiji. It's this hybrid figure at the top of the government.

That filters downwards. The capital city is a proto-Swahili word. I took the Swahili word for hilly and moved around some of the syllables to get the capital, Vilamaji. There's some other references to Swahili words in there. There's references to Fijian words. There are references to geographical formations in the Caribbean. There's a Paria Bay in this book, taken from Paria Bay in Trinidad.

There are also various references to plants. Plants play a big role in the book because one of the characters is a botanist. I was already thinking deeply about plants because of her, but then I thought, let's make this a hybrid plant place. So there's references to plants from East Africa, from the Caribbean, from the South Pacific in this place. And also animal life – animals that folks use in idioms are from all over the place. Once I began to hybridise, I wanted to keep going until it was a place that wasn’t readily identifiable.

The jacket copy says it's set in an unnamed South Pacific island nation, and a lot of people assume it's Fiji. I've been asked why I didn’t just call it Fiji, which is kind of missing the point. I think a lot of people want to have their fiction educate them, and they want to learn a history from their novels. I think it's a really terrible impulse that people have, to forget that there are certain things that fiction can do that nonfiction cannot. One of them is make things up, and through that fabulation, learn something new, or dramatise a set of concerns that may have existed, but bringing them to a dramatic height that cannot be achieved in the real world.

BJ: It also resonates beautifully with the way in which indentured workers themselves fabulated their landscapes by bringing seeds and cuttings with them in their jahaji bundles, creating these hybrid ecologies suspended between the memory of home and the desire for comfort in an unfamiliar landscape. Why did you choose to make plants so central in your novel?

NB: I don't know why the main character is a botanist. This is when writers sort of speak in mystical terms, where characters ‘come to them’. I knew that she was a botanist, and that’s how she was formed. To this day I don't know why she was. It required me to learn a lot about plant life.

I found it interesting that somebody who's so attuned to the earth and the growing of things was made to be a refugee and thrown away from her native soil. I think, in the act of dramatisation, that works very well, but I don't think it was a conscious choice. It's just something that had to happen. And then because I was, through her, thinking about plant life, plant life was one of the things I wanted to feature as a part of the world-building in the book. What is this particular plant called? What does it look like? If it's fruit, what are they eating?

BJ: Did that involve a lot of relearning, or were you revisiting your own memories from your time in Fiji and Trinidad?

NB: It was a lot of learning whole hog, because I don't think when I went to those places I was thinking very deeply about plant life. It was a lot of learning, reading and researching. But at the same time sometimes I would think about a fruit I ate, in Trinidad especially, and wonder ‘what was that fruit called’, and then put that in the book.

BJ: Have you had any reaction to the novel from people who are from the various places that inspired the setting of the book?

NB: A friend of mine’s family is Indo-Fijian. He grew up in the Bay Area. It was very meaningful when he said to me that it spoke very truly to an experience that he had growing up. Half the book is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and so I was very moved by that. That felt to me like the highest compliment, to have someone say that it spoke very truly to his own experience.

I did an event up in Toronto and the woman who was my interlocutor, whose family are from Trinidad, just assumed I was Fijian. There was that sort of blurring, and I had to say, "No, I just write about it." I think there was that idea that I was writing from a place of reality. And that to me again is a compliment.