Anjoli Roy’s nonfiction has been so important to my own creative work in its dedication to narrative, story, and a humanheartedness that disappears in this cutthroat world of people selling their kin and connections out for a book deal. Her tenacity and devotion to healing ancestral wounds of erasure and amnesia have inspired many through her essay craft. In this interview we talked about form, speculative nonfiction, and her conflicted relationship with her ancestry: all themes that she is exploring in her memoir-in-progress that I was lucky enough to read.
In “Revolution in the Blood: A Memoir of Secrets, Spirits, and India’s Fight for Freedom,” Roy uses document, narrative prose, and speculative nonfiction to tell a complicated story of one daughter’s inheritance and the revolutionary spirit–both her freedom-fighting ancestor’s and her own. The complications of the narrator’s positionalities and their intersecting strangenesses and familiairities stun me when I consider the bravery required to lay bare for her readers dispossesion, chronic illness, and failed and thriving love. This is a memoir that is not only timeless but timely, illustrating for readers a path forward as we encounter the violent systems that want to erase us all who dare to challenge Empire, genocide, and colonialism.
At the time of this interview, Roy is querying agents for this deft, brave, and highly needed book.
Rajiv Mohabir: You have been working on a memoir that looks at the history of your own family and the surprises that you have encountered along the path of discovery. You were shocked to learn that your ancestor was a krantikari (anti-Imperial activist) during the 1930s and 1940s while India fought for its freedom from Britain. What led you to wanting to uncover Kali Nath Roy’s story?
Anjoli Roy: Thank you for this question, dear one, and for making space for this conversation about a manuscript you have known all too well, since my first drafts of it a decade ago.
I came across this ancestral story by accident. I was trying to learn more about why my thakurda, my paternal grandfather, first came to the U.S. in 1950. I never knew him. He died when my dad was 20, decades before I was born. I was in grad school when I looked up his name and found him identified as the son of a freedom fighter. I knew that I was descended from a “great and principled journalist,” as my dad had told me when I was a kid, but I did not know this great-grandfather, Kali Nath Roy, was a freedom fighter.
I then entered Kali Nath’s name online the way one might board an unsteady ship, and was soon sped away to the most surprising places, including so many letters from Gandhi singing Kali Nath’s praises alongside documents that stated Kali Nath had been a symbol of the free press during 1919, on the eve of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when he was arrested for seditious writing against the British.
At this point in my research, my desire to learn more about this revolutionary ancestor became an obsession.
RM: A large part of your manuscript deals with alienation from your home stories due to your family’s silence around their history. What is it about diaspora that causes this kind of amnesia? How does writing allow for the space of healing and further fissure?
AR: Right after Kali Nath’s story first started sweeping me up, I described to my friend Nicky Loomis my quest to recover his story. I confided in her too how confused I was that his story hadn’t been passed down. Why wouldn’t my family be proud of this story? Why wouldn’t they have passed it down to us as precious evidence of who we, collectively, have been and, in turn, what kind of revolutionaries we might still have the power to be?
“Why is it that the generations that want to remember so often come after those who are trying to forget?” Nicky said. She was writing about her Hungarian family, the traumas they had endured, and her own quest to recover her grandmother’s stories.
Nicky’s words sunk a stone in my gut.
What had been so bad to make our family want to forget Kali Nath? I wondered. What made our values shift so much from an independence-seeking freedom fighter to make no one care enough to hold his story, to pass it to the younger generations so we’d know who we were? Worse yet, had Kali Nath become a cautionary tale of sorts that was purposefully kept from the younger generations so that they wouldn’t become like him?
I couldn’t imagine it.
What surprised me most, though, was that my family back in India didn’t know Kali Nath’s story either. My cousins were as surprised as I was to learn of him. That mystery of why the story wasn’t passed down to us and the desire to solve that question is what animates the book.
RM: The journey back into story from the world of alienation seems to have been something that you were bringing not just to your American family but also to your Indian side too. How had encountering the translational act of moving from oral retellings of elders, newspaper accounts, and narrative framing into your own personal language and idiom affected or changed your ideas of nonfiction craft?
AR: Storytellers have a huge privilege and responsibility in shaping what can become the official account of a narrative. Because this story of Kali Nath belongs not just to me but all branches of Kali Nath’s family, I have been concerned with ensuring the nonfiction story I was crafting was “true.” To me, that “true” had to do with scaffolding the story with verifiable truth by way of dates, oral histories, and official documents. “True” meant locating emotional truth too, though.
I realized/remembered in the telling of this story that the only way to tell a true story was to show my own foibles as a storyteller and to let myself be vulnerable to readerly judgment, including my own family’s. My goal in telling this story couldn’t be to tell a version of the story that everyone would agree to. My goal couldn’t be to tell an official account. I was not writing an old-school history book.
Instead, I present myself as an imperfect narrator and an even more imperfect character in this story. I never met this ancestor. I never met his son, from whom I descend, either. How dare I tell this story? In front of the camera, with my limitations laid bare.
This is a fundamental aspect of my craft in this creative nonfiction storytelling.
RM: There is also a term that we have been using in our conversations: speculative nonfiction. What is it like to blend this imaginative exercise into writing “Truth” about one’s family?
AR: Thank you for this question! And thank you even more so for how you have challenged me to engage with speculative nonfiction in this storytelling.
Prior to your strong encouragement, I was mired in verifiable truth when it came to trying to tell Kali Nath’s story. And, honestly, that version of the story was true, but it was also, we can agree, boring.
It needed a narrative injection. Energy. Time travel. Imagination. At first, I baulked at your excellent (you are never wrong!!) suggestion to write Kali Nath’s life in scene, to write interlocking chapters between Kali Nath’s era and my time in India finding him. I speak no South Asian language, including my family’s, and I grew up primarily with the white side of my family, far from our South Asian relatives. What I knew about India outside of my research projects was what I learned in books. How could I conjure real-life places and scenes set in times I’d never lived through and places I’d never been? As a creative nonfiction writer trained to gather and cite my receipts, the idea of engaging with this kind of speculation felt irreverent at the very least and dangerous or stupid at the worst. So, why do it?
By interspersing speculative nonfiction chapters, where the reader travels to 1919 Lahore, for example, I offer the reader the opportunity to see Kali Nath through my imagination. The story now recognizes that the truth of the story I try to tell and mess up and try to fix and maybe mess up again is in the honest depiction of how I am doing just that.
I am not an invisible director conjuring a believable past filled with receipts to offer my readers. The mistakes in the story are mine. The mistakes are also in the story, as I write and rewrite previous chapters in this text. The honesty, the truth, in this speculative nonfiction is in how I show my hand in the manuscript and spend time on my knees, scribbling in the dirt to find connection, trying to build a bridge to a past I can never truly know.
The act of engaging with speculative nonfiction was incredibly moving for me. I was honestly surprised by this. After spending a decade on how you’re telling a story, I didn’t know there was room still for that kind of surprise. In trying to imagine and write Kali Nath’s life, I was moved by the degree of empathy I felt activate for him as I gazed at him more closely, though the lens of speculative nonfiction.
I found that speculative nonfiction acknowledged that I could not make a bridge to an unknowable past, but it did close some gaps between Kali Nath and me. In this writing, I have felt him near. That’s ultimately what I longed for since I first stumbled upon his name.
We need our revolutionary ancestors near now more than ever.
RM: Great provocation! Yes, we do need them and especially those anti-imperialist revolutionaries who stand against the analogues of ICE and Israel’s continuing, US-backed, genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. How do you find the telling of this story to work towards revolution? What dimensions/species of revolution does nonfiction writing engage with?
AR: Kali Nath wrote against the colonizer in their own language, and he did this from the visible platform of his newspaper, which had a substantial readership. In this way, he put himself directly in their line of sight. He was imprisoned for this. He did this at great personal risk that included his own life and his family’s ability to provide for themselves, since he was supporting many dependents. I find this incredibly inspiring.
For me, Kali Nath’s example demands similar action today. It is vital to speak out, with our unique privileges and platforms, against the terrorizing of brown and Black bodies. We must fight against Israel’s relentless genocide of Palestinians. As a person who lives in and loves Hawaiʻi and has no genealogical connection here, I also must speak out about the ongoing trauma of the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the impacts of the U.S. military on this pae ‘āina, which the current governor is trying to accelerate, against the wishes of ʻŌiwi activists and Aloha ʻĀina who have been in relationship with this place long before the alleged U.S. ever arrived here.
We cannot remain silent.
And, we must tell the stories of how we have fought and won. The people are always stronger than the oppressive structures of colonialism, empire, white supremacy, ableism, trans- and queerphobia–all the false narratives that seek to tell us we are alone and powerless and that resistance is futile.
And we must tell stories of how we will win.
Kali Nath’s story acts as a powerful blueprint in today’s era of despair. Action is medicine for despair. And the stories we tell, about what is possible and what must be possible, feeds that action.
To answer your last question here, I’m not sure if nonfiction gets to claim to do this work alone, but as with the broader arts, nonfiction invites readers into feeling that makes action possible. That dimension/species of revolution is vital to bringing another world into existence.
RM: What a moving answer and engagement. You talked about the story structure a little here of interspersed chapters of historical narrative, personal narrative, and researched story. Can you talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of this approach? Do you write the entire story lines that you then chop up and shuffle together, or is it more of a writing in sections as you go?
AR: I first wrote this text as a straight-up memoir that was focused on my firsthand experience of being in India in 2014. Many scenes were of me poring over microfilm and wondering about 1919 through Kali Nath’s death in 1945. As you can imagine, on the plot level, these scenes were pretty boring, even if the wondering had the potential to be interesting.
In my re-visioning of this text, I engaged speculative nonfiction to time-travel to Kali Nath’s lifetime. I replaced those moments in the archives, in the air-conditioned space of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, where I spent much of my archival research, with scene. I took us to the streets of 1919 Lahore, where Kali Nath’s newspaper was located, or to 1926 Khulna, where our family home was and where my father first lived. I conjured Kali Nath writing those editorials I was analyzing. I conjured his home life.
The memoir text is still structured based on my firsthand experience of learning Kali Nath’s stories–the tether is still to my travels in 2014 India–but my growing awareness of Kali Nath’s life grows with the narrative arc the speculative chapters offer.
This process of conjuring and engaging speculative nonfiction helped the story reveal itself to me. It was only through speculative chapters that I was able to see more fully not only Kali Nath as a person and ancestor, but it also made more real the heartbreak of the unforgivable decisions he may have made regarding our family life.
RM: As South Asian American writers we are often told that our stories will not sell in the US, which to me feels racist and pointedly phobic. It’s so soul crushing. What do you do, what strategies have you folded into your writing practice, to help insulate yourself from the steady rejections that we as writers face?
AR: Oh, babes, this question is so real! An aunty of mine who is both a novelist and a poet, Devi S. Laskar, has said, “The only thing every published author and I have in common is we didn’t give up.” What do we need to keep going? For me, the answer is community. How many times have I come crying to you about this book! I’m laughing as I type that, but for reals. I’ve looked to you and other luminous writer loved ones quite a bit to help light the road through. We have to build spaces for each other to pull each other forward too. You’re doing that for me here, in this very interview. Thank you, beloved. Thank you to Tala at Apogee for publishing this conversation too!
Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng, cohost of our literature-and-music podcast It’s Lit, which features writers to love and the music their work plays best around, came up with our first signature question years ago, soon after It’s Lit was first born in 2016. Her question was simple and powerful: “Why lit?” Of all the forms of self-expression out there, why do you move to the literary arts to express yourself? We’ve featured more than 100 writers to date now, and I’ll tell you that the answers our features have given to this seemingly simple question continue to feed me. The podcast may be a way for Joce and me to engage in holding space for other writers, but it takes us to church too, in the best and most agnostic way possible. So that space carries me through too.
Continuing to move forward involves crafting spaces for each other’s stories–South Asian American stories and beyond. That may look like supporting and founding more revolutionary publishing houses. It might mean supporting and starting podcasts that amplify the stories you need. And it certainly looks like supporting revolutionary writers–reading each other, buying each other’s books when we’re able, requesting them in our libraries, gifting them, reviewing them online, course-adopting them, attending and hosting readings for them, and sharing out and lifting up each others’ work online in all the ways we can.
These acts are another kind of medicine against writerly despair. They are important acts of writer-for-writer love too. We’ve got to lift each other up.
It’s such a blessing to get to love you, through your human being and through your incredible work, Rajiv. Thank you for loving me back.
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Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry, the latest is Seabeast (Four Way Books 2025). His books have been awarded gold in Forward Indies and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Anjoli Roy is a creative writer and high school English teacher in Honolulu. Her ancestors are from India, Germany, England, and Ireland. Anjoli has a BA in individualized study from NYU and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a VONA/Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation and a Jack Hazard fellow. Anjoli is the author of the chapbook, Enter the Navel: For the Love of Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, and has appeared in ANMLY, The Asian American Literary Review, Cape Cod Review, Hoʻolana, Longreads, Menagerie, The Pinch, Poem-a-Day, Short Reads, and other places. Find her at anjoliroy.com
