To escape the vaulted absurdism of modernity, we often retreat to the mountains and the suburbs to experience Time in a new form: where it spreads its wings like a falcon in high skies—not flapping them too much to ascend higher, but in steady motion, charting its way forward. In Sumana Roy’s exceptional new book Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, this is the form of Time one encounters. But more than simply allowing us this sense of Time, the book confronts our tenuous but essential relationship to Language. We know that if the former is a leveller, the latter is the lifeblood of cultural hierarchy.
The book is a report on the rhythms of provincial behaviour, intellectualism and identity. Roy explains her ambition in this breathtaking sentence: “When a leaf begins to dry, it is the edges that start curling first. This book is a history of those curls.” Plodding through the literary, aesthetic, as well as cultural and social histories of the provinces, the book establishes a record of vanishing forms of imagination and intuition. The most resounding thesis is how “places give shape to the personality of our intelligence”, which is, in Roy’s opinion, “as obvious as the impress and rhythm of water on stone or the wind on branches and leaves.”
Locating the provincial
The locus of the book is deeply personal. Roy begins by writing about her own provincial life in Siliguri. She grew up, in her own words, “without any real sense of an immediate literary culture.” For Roy, the act of reading and writing were like countless hours spent in word mines, “collecting words to fit the collage that was our life.” While we (mis)understand the provincial as peripheral—and hence, secondary—the book registers rather a history of decentering the metropolitan.
In effect, this protest is initiated by a reclamation of eminent provincials. The “spiritual climate” of Rabindranath Tagore’s stories, Roy suggests, is a consequence of his provincial immersion. If the city is a “habitat of power,” the province is a “habitat of energy.” Roy quotes from Rathindranath Tagore’s biography of his father: “He would pass the whole day in the tiny study perched on the roof of the house from where he had an uninterrupted view… of field after field of mustard in blossom shining like molten gold…” Tagore wrote Gitanjali in the uninterrupted solitude of the province.
Many other provincial writers are enlisted, whose work is informed by the windiness and flow, as well as the patience and ambition of provinciality. From JM Coetzee to Agyeya, and John Clare to Bhuwaneshwar and Kishore Kumar, Provincials is a stunning biography of the provincial mind and its limitlessness.
In recording these lives, what Roy achieves is a timeless and holistic estimation of the provincial. The provincials, in their aspiration for the faraway, are always in motion, deriving their force from a sense of deprivation; they are fed by autodidacticism and rebelliousness. Roy notes how language becomes a tool for these pursuits and how it enables the provincial to write themselves into the annals of history, often against the grain of cultural hegemony to “commit to art what was on the verge of disappearance.” The objective is to redeem their own stories and realities.
Writing history against history
Provincials is ingenious not only for its restorative celebration of that which is disappearing but also because it is a lament for—as equally as it is a confrontation with—the systems of knowledge that gatekeep academia from the percolation of “marginal” voices. Roy uses Jacques Derrida’s intellectual life as a case in point. It is fascinating to read how deconstruction emerged from a provincial sense of deprivation and alienation—in essence as resistance against the arrogance of “the metropole and its ascription of meaning to language alone.”
At the heart of the book is a realisation of the author’s vulnerabilities. Roy writes about her relationship with English, which came to her “like it did to many others in the post-colony: slightly bitten, the severed parts held together by an Indigenous glue, ad hoc, like spit.” The provincial is, ultimately, bricolage, but the caution against being motley gives it its integral gumption. Roy relates various personal episodes wherein her education and affiliation as a provincial have been questioned by the enterprising urban elites; from faulty pronunciations to her decision to continue living in Siliguri even after achieving success... This book, straddling memoir, literary criticism and a cultural archive is her robust and resounding response to all these questions.
Language is indeed powerless to capture Roy’s genius. It is a rare, enriching experience to witness her unseconded felicity with words. Each section in the book catalyses countless thought currents: an increasingly difficult task for a book in an overexposed and exhausted world of screens. If hidden inside the word provincial is a “sense of deprivation, of a history of neglect, of a life lived out of the spotlight,” it inherits something else too, which Roy patiently proves in her distinctively rooted journeys in the book: “that inside small is hidden all.”