Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries

by Sumana Roy

An enchanting and joyous exploration of life and creativity at the geographical edges of the modern world

Who is a provincial? In this subversive book, Sumana Roy assembles a striking cast of writers, artists, filmmakers, cricketers, tourist guides, English teachers, lovers and letter writers, private tutors and secret-keepers whose lives and work provide varied answers to that question. Combining memoir with the literary, sensory, and emotional history of an ignored people, she challenges the metropolitan’s dominance to reclaim the joyous dignity of provincial life, its tics and taunts, enthusiasms and tragicomedies.

In a wide-ranging series of “postcards” from the peripheries of India, Europe, America, and the Middle East, Roy brings us deep into the imaginative world of those who have carried their provinciality like a birthmark. Ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to William Shakespeare, John Clare to the Bhakti poets, T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul to the Brontës, and Kishore Kumar to Annie Ernaux, she celebrates the provincials’ humor and hilarity, playfulness and irony, belatedness and instinct for carefree accidents and freedom. Her unprecedented account of provincial life offers an alternative portrait of our modern world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

352 pages, Hardcover

Published March 26, 2024

About the author

Sumana Roy writes from Siliguri, a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal.

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

I do not believe that cosmopolitanism and provincialism are antithetical. The forest, which is the most cosmopolitan space I know, one perhaps even more accommodative than the human heart, is also, by virtue of being tied to a place, genetically provincial.

There's been a trend of "selection does not imply support" type codicils that various social media entities ranging from random listmaking individuals to popular Bsky accounts have been qualifying their posts with. Yes, the credit card companies are forcing the Internet into Hayes Code 2.0, but I still can't see that this borderline preemptive legal jargon, not too different from what continues to crop up on various fanfictions long after Anne Rice laid waste to her fandom, is helping. Still, the sentiment comes in handy here with this book, which I love in a manner that I know draws as much sympathy as myopicity from its circumspectly conniving roots. Not the best way to start a five star review, but it helps me sleep at night.

If something was stopped abruptly, such as a game of cricket interrupted by rain, they said "intermission"; if someone broke up with their girlfriend, they called it "intermission"; if someone had a heart attack, they called it "intermission," so much so that when I met one of them years later, Bappa asked me whether I'd watched the film Intermission Impossible.

As for the book itself, Roy en-calcifies a definition of "provincial" through a myriad of brief exposes and meditative mini-bios, largely drawing from India + Bangladesh of the first half of the 20th c., with the odd Euro (D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Annie Ernaux) and odder US (T.S. Eliot, Faulkner) in order to look at commonalities between the various margins, provinces, "not great to be born there and even worse to try to make a living" writers continue to operate under globalization. I found the subject to be extraordinarily relatable: Roy's prose is exceedingly creative and intensely sympathetic, and since my past self saw fit to randomly read a biography on Rabindranath Tagore and various other relevant nonfictions ranging in topic from Calcutta to Naxalites, I had more than a little grounding to make my way upon.

Microsoft Word underlines these words in red [...] even when they work efficiently in giving us the sense of the stone: "caen-stone," "enfouldered," "rugas," "foveoles," "foraminous cavo-rilievo," "fiducial stones." The study of these stones becomes analogical to a deeper understanding of the difference in "dialect," in language: "I study you glout and gloss, but have / No cadrans to adjust you with."

-quotations from Hugh MacDiarmad (pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve), "On a Raised Beach"

However, I've been honing my sense of habitus (Roy namedrops Bourdieu, if tangentially) since 2013 when first introduced to the concept during a community college course post-university dropout, and I'm well aware how much of my "comfort zone" draws nourishment from zoned off, police cordoned, white supremacied spaces both physical and emotional. Simply put, my appreciation isn't worth much if it makes it harder for me to kill the cop inside my head. So, as soon as Roy left of the rapturous riffling through the treasure trove of names and ideas just off the beaten path and started bemoaning trends in both academia and social networking that has as much to do with the hegemonic onslaught of raising up the digital at the expense of excess (just look at how she discuses figures during the "socialist" and "Left" eras of India and how it contrasts with everything after "the economy opened up"), I hedged my bets and came to terms with my own equivocation.

God, in being turned into a provincial, becomes a commoner himself. And hence the dissolution of all binaries—pure and impure, here and there, far and near, touchable and untouchable, powerful and powerless, city and province. And rich and poor—for the rich will make temples for Shiva, but the poor's body is a temple itself: the legs pillars, "the body the shrine," the head "a cupola of gold."

You see, part of why I liked this so much was looking at how easily a person like Roy could be radicalized along the lines of the Hindu alt-right we've been seeing for a few years now. Rather, I took the similarities in sympathies she was able to cultivate in me through her confessional style and looked at how this "provincialism" plays out in a public landscape I have a great deal more experience in: the United States, with all its political slogans that use and abuse the "rural," the "Midwest," the "South," the "working class," and have no real interest in making it possible for everyone to make a living where they were born. Roy paints her dis-junction in classroom insults and adult nostalgia, but for a US white male, it's "what they took from us" and other such dogwhistle demagoguery, where it is more than disingenuous and even a little dangerous to sideline discussions about race and class while complaining about the hegemony of postcolonial nationalism and predatory capitalism. Cause let's face it: your best bet at long term stability is to get that one post to go viral enough to reach that one right person, cause pension? Never heard of her. Health insurance? In this economy? A place to rest your weary head? What, are you some kind of commie?

In that word is the intimation of a way of life that has been left behind, that must be left behind, even though it might be precious.

And yet, at heart, I did truly enjoy this book (and its typeface), as much as for the nourishment it provided my beleaguered brain as well as the bookish respite from ongoing reality it offered my soul. For Roy's conversational intellectualism is just my style, and I hadn't realized how much I had been missing plain old author discussion until she gave it to me in many a variegated form. All in all, it gives me that much more strength to continue to check books such as this, barely a blip on any of the 'important' radars, from the local public library. I just hope that the reception to her writing doesn't encourage her to go down the 'culture is dead' route that she so briefly, yet so tellingly, went down three-quarters through.

...a culture that does not read closely will naturally be dependent on what comes to it in paraphrase.

P.S. Part of my critique is also due to a couple of uncensored slurs, the n-word and h*jra, that even more reinforces my suspicions as to who makes up Roy's ideal audience.

P.P.S. Okay, this will be my final review of 2025. Need to save what critical reflexivity I have remaining for the real world.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal.

[Kartik Chauhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have begun to see that inside small is hidden all.”

One of the best books I have ever read. I will keep returning to it always.

[★彡MeganReads彡★ · Rating 3 out of 5]

The effect of feeling out of the spotlight causes an etiolation of the self, a permanent sense of inadequacy.

This book was WAYYYYY different from what I am used to to reading. I really had to think for a moment there. I will say the way poetry, nature and architecture was used in this to talk about “provincials” really spoke to me.


This one was a hard for me to get through. This was not due to the fact it was a bad read, not at all. In fact it’s very informative and beautiful. I don’t read much memoirs and this is probably the case as to why. I was expecting more of that fictional touch.

I gave 3 stars because as it is a beautiful and touching read, personally for me I will stick to my fictional fantasy characters.

Thank you Netgalley and Yale University Press for this ARC.

[Rahul Vishnoi · Rating 5 out of 5]

In creative industry, print or electronic, there is no dearth of metaphorical love letters to the charm that small towns exude. It is, however utmost curious, that most of the strongest purveyors of such provincial towns, come back to bathe in this lukewarm spring of nostalgia only after they have bid goodbye to their hometowns and provinces. For who will care about your small-town love if you never skipped and hopped out of the boundaries and ties that bound you? It is only in retrospection that we find happiness. More than being fickle, it is an ordinary being, happiness is. Mundane and misleading. And humble too. Happiness never makes you realise its own presence. You may be happy but you will confuse it with the mundanity, with routine. It is only when you lose this mundane existence, through misfortune or mistakes, that you look back at the past with wistfulness and miss the days you considered routine. You may never realise that you are missing the past because you were in fact happy in that routine. It is this cozy routine of a small-town, a province, that Roy writes about.
Roy wishes to capture a fistful of happiness that is now readily supplied by consumerism for an engineered experience. But can anything really touch the memories of one’s childhood? The excitement of many firsts of your teenage? It is this grain of happiness that Roy is searching by diving deep into the small-town sea of nostalgia. She wants to feel it again, roll it between her fingers and feel its warmth on her palms.
Provincials is not really about the nostalgia of her small-town as much as it is about the memories of the writer’s earlier years. Aren’t we all chained to our firsts? Chained to the first house we lived in? Chained to the first school we went to? Chained to the first intimate touch of skin? Chained to the first laughter we shared with a friend on our first outing? This book is a list of many such firsts.
Split into 6 ‘P’: Postcards, Place, Pedigree, Poetic and Pran, ‘Provincials-Postcards from the peripheries’ by Sumana Roy, acclaimed author of How I became a tree is a love letter to all the frogs who jumped out of their proverbial wells in search of a current of a stream that would take them so far away that all they could do was miss their province, their well.
Although Roy writes about her town Siliguri, 75 km from Darjeeling of Bengal in the east, it made me think about my town: dusty Moradabad of UP, a one-time forgotten constituency of legendary (and notorious?) cricketer Azharuddin famous for its brass artefacts globally, a trade which is now a trickle of the roar it once had been. There is something about the prose of Roy. Reading it feels like the touch of a silk dupatta, your mother caressing your hair. Oh what a joy it is to read something written by a master on top of her game.
Roy, studying in Kolkata for a better education, mentions the mushrooming of Archies gift shops that dotted the urban landscape in early 2000s. The text that the greeting cards of Archies gallery contained flummoxed her teenage self, particularly the declaration of love with a ubiquitous phrase- ‘you are my everything.’ She writes- When my friends and I discussed it, we understood it as a more sophisticated version of "I love you." But we didn't use either of these sentences. Like our virginity-about which we had no idea, except that it was precious, as precious as the money our parents saved in the bank, and that it was located somewhere inside our bodies-we kept these words for the future.’
In a hilarious passage, Roy mentions receiving a love letter, written in English. Her friend recounts an experience of receiving one too, but in Bangla. ‘It sounded so silly,’ she said. Roy writes that in the Indian provinces, the language of love had to be English. She also mentions the advice of Vatsyayana in Kamasutra where he urged women to not speak in Sanskrit during love making, probably to not scare away the suitors of inferior oratory skills.
In a passage about letters, Roy mentions how she started writing love letters for her friends and would fabricate the weather to suit the mood of the letter. Later when she read Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, she learnt one talked about weather only after every other topic had been exhausted. This, she discovered, stood in contrast to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, who having extensively read Kalidasa, effusively wrote about the rains. She also remembers how drab her father’s letters used to be, urging her to be a good girl; so generic that if they didn’t had a returning address, they could be meant for anyone. She hilariously suspected her father wanted to impress the warden Miss Grey with his letters that read like moral lessons to a dumb kid.
Roy equates her writing about provinces to Rabindranath Tagore’s, who also spent a majority of his earlier life in a small town. One of my favourite lines from the book- ‘Language was everything—it was the only way to experience intimacy.’

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part diary, part thesis and part manifesto. Provincials is a book where Roy looks at her life and own experience, the ones of other authors and celebrities and put them into context of provincial upbringing and life. The scope of the term provincials is wide (from the foothill of the Himalayas to the Brontë sisters) and it the footnotes it’s even mentioned Roy question if Boston counted as provincial. The scope being so big might seem like it would appeal to many but I think narrowing the focus would have been a better choice.

The language is beautiful but it is so dense and at times inflated, and it made it a difficult read. I was very excited after the first few pages but towards the end I was tired. The fatigue from the structural choices and the long paragraphs made it hard to retain information - especially as someone who is completely new to most people mentioned in this book.

The first part is almost 100 pages long without many natural places to pause. There are many important points that get forgotten because my eyes glazed over after a while. Roy is clearly gifted with language, and the motive for the book is admirable, but it needed to go through the edit two or three more times. Once you get past the first chapter the sections are smaller and more manageable and I definitely feel like the second half was easier to digest.

She makes interesting points, and I really enjoyed the parts looking at Shakespeare as a provincial and his response to criticism from the cosmopolitan elite - and would have liked more of this. Some of the points about language and how to pronounce words (her saying she’ll never say she loves someone with all her heart cause she doesn’t feel comfortable pronouncing heart) feels very specific to her situation growing up “in between” languages and the scars of colonization. It takes up a lot of space for something that isn’t necessarily unique to the provincial.

It feels overwhelming for someone who comes into this without a lot of the context that feels necessary to know before you start this book. A better structure, smaller parts and more concentrated writing would have made this easier to digest. Having grown up in a small place a lot of the things she mentions resonates with me, but there is a lot that goes straight over my head and seems taken as a given.

Really wanted more for this book and it seems she clearly has a talent for language, but it needed some serious editing.

[Dany · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Sumana Roy takes us through musings on provincial lives and how people are shaped by the land that raised them, as well as their perception of the world outside that land.

The book is a combination of heavily researched and knowledgeable nonfiction and personal memoir. There are points when it reads more like an extended poem than full prose, especially with Roy’s stream of consciousness pacing. She moves from one thought to the next, gently leaping between excerpts from authors, personal musings and memories and secondhand anecdotes, eventually mapping out a web of connections between dozens of lives across the globe. She uses that web to question the imaginary barriers we tend to put between rural and metropolitan, educated and ignorant, famous and negligible.

Provincials made for an interesting read that, while sometimes a little too meandering for my tastes, tended to pull me back in the end with a compelling thought or quote.

Roy has a gift for constructing images that are enrapturing in their simplicity; descriptions of home are easy to picture and easy to love. There’s a shared sense of nostalgia between each word of her moments of personal memoir.

This sense of nostalgia is especially prevalent in the latter half of the book, including an extremely poignant part in which Roy recalls how she would draw the world around her using just a single color of crayon, depicting the close rivers, the far mountains and the even farther sky. It’s such a soft, relatable moment and I found myself longing to sit in more of those moments with Roy.

Provincials is a great book to take slowly. I enjoyed reading a few pages and then setting it aside until I eventually felt the urge to come back and read a few more pages. It’s by no means a book you’ll devour in one or two sittings, but it feels comforting to return to over and over again.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This reads like someone's PhD thesis. It's extremely academic and focuses on a lot of authors I have never read, which makes me entirely the wrong audience for this book. I mistakenly assumed it would be a book exploring provincial life from a more pedestrian perspective. For me it was a very tough read indeed. I did persevere with it and am not entirely sure even now that I understood the thrust of what the author was getting at. It felt like a justification of the provincial writer as equal to or better than the urban or metropolitan author and the author's attempts to place herself and her life within that oeuvre, but a lot of it felt quite woolly and ill defined to me.

[Mili Das · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provincial by Sumana Roy is a thorough journey to our provincial lands and finding its attributes, going to a long pathway that reveals how provinces have made their contribution in people's lives, literature and cultural tapestries.

She builds her thesis by introducing us to a diverse array of individuals—writers, artists, filmmakers, cricketers, tour guides, English tutors, lovers, and chroniclers—whose stories and creations provide answers to the question—who is a provincial? Intertwined with the author's personal experiences this long journey became quite fascinating.

It also talks about how metropolitan culture always suffered a self-made superior egoistic ambiance whilst narrating the exuberance and magic of provincial life with poignant stories and excerpts, these assorted essays tried to capture a poignant patchwork of provinces.

Page after page Roy introduces us with literary giants who were born in provinces, delving into the lives and works of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bhakti poets, Kishore Kumar, William Shakespeare, John Clare, T. S. Eliot, J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, the Brontës, Annie Ernaux, and others, she celebrates the wit, mirth, whimsy, and irony of small-town lives and living.

The provincial life is a vast painting that slowly emerged from Roy's witty pen. Her passionate voice strongly mirrors the poignant shade which is definitely heart touching but the essence of her narration fades away after a few chapters, it feels like the path which takes readers to the deep down in the work somehow lost the roadmap. It was like scattered clouds of thoughts, it lost the objective of its writing.

Roy added personal anecdotes which is fun to read but it doesn't blend well with the collection of literary pieces, it often makes me feel like the narrator is overwhelmed with her excessive writing materials and couldn't make a clear collage, blurred the partitions of stories and it becomes some jumbled words which lost the trail.

This book should wet my heart rather it makes me exhausted with the inordinate writing.

[Sookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took a while to finish. I have started, paused, restarted it multiple times in past couple of months but unable to go past first thirty pages. It took time and patience to go through the denseness of the first part, and settling to Roy's writing in this format that gets progressively familiar. After this, the book becomes charming and evokes nostalgia for the past and a yearning for the "first experiences" as youth.

Its far more appealing to an audience who is familiar with Indian literature and the comics, magazines that were popular in the 80s/90s where Roy derives her nostalgia from and attributes to current dissection of colonial influence, cultural context and the sheer dilution of morals and values borrowed, abridged, and curate to the children of a slowly rising middle-class populace.

Like Roy, this was a lovely nostalgic soiree.

[Kausambhi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provincials by Sumana Roy is a collection of interconnected essays, examines the lives of people who lived in places far away from cities. These people either chose to live the provincial life or were born into it.
The subject of provincial life has been unfamiliar for me until now, or so I thought. It was only after reading Roy’s exploration of those living in the provinces, I realized anyone who has lived in obscure and unknown small towns has lived the provincial life. It was quite interesting to read about this subject through literary and literary perspective, as Roy has done. I really enjoyed the autobiographical pasts about Roy’s own provincial life in Siliguri, West Bengal. I related to her visits to Archies’ store and fascination with the romance-infused language of the cards, which was unfamiliar to those used to the stoic and impersonal English drilled into us by the Indian education system.
Besides, I was intrigued with the fact that a lot of themes of this book connected with one of her early works, How I became a Tree. Her metaphors and examples based on nature and its elements, particularly trees and forests gave me a feeling that Provincials is almost an accompaniment to How I became a Tree. In fact, readers familiar with the later book can truly appreciate Roy’s style of writing and prose. Otherwise, they may feel lost, as is evident from a number of Goodreads reviews.
Yet, despite my familiarity with the author’s style and writing, I found it hard to keep up with Provincials. For me, this happened because Roy stuck to the perspective of plural pronouns instead of personal first, which made the text disengaging. But she provides her a strong reason for her choice of the pronoun. I wish she overcame her reluctance so that the book became engrossing.
This is perhaps one of the few books I have DNFed. Still, I have a feeling that I will come back to it in the future. Someday, I will yearn to read about the lives of literary figures and characters of India, who have spent their time in places that are often on the fringes of public consciousness.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for sending across a review copy of the book.

[Ranjit Monga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skilfully, Roy appropriates everything you have known since childhood, for the provincial. Makes you realise that maybe we all are from the peripheries in some way or the other.