Take a leisurely walk, enjoy the sights, sounds and flavours of nostalgia

Sumana Roy's book celebrates the creativity of provincials, who became inventive because of deprivation. They take the cards that life has dealt them and start playing

Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries

Author: Sumana Roy

Publisher: Aleph Book Company

Pages: 320

Price: Rs 899

Is the word “provincial” a slur, an identity, or merely the opposite of “cosmopolitan”? As a geographical category, does it seem fixed like a rock or fluid like a river? As a literary sensibility, is it self-assured or lacking in ambition? Sumana Roy’s new book Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries invites us to join her on a long and leisurely walk with these questions that she ventures to explore rather than answer.

The author’s family moved to Siliguri in the Himalayan foothills from the border town of Balurghat near Bangladesh in the late 1970s after her father —  a man with 11 siblings  —  bought an old house in a neighbourhood where features such as tin or asbestos roofs, red iron oxide floors, windows with iron rods, courtyards and wells were common to most houses.

The residents shared space with non-human occupants such as dogs, cats, sparrows, cockroaches, mice, mynahs, frogs, flies, mosquitoes, crows, and parrots, who survived on leftovers. These houses always had room for guests  — “an uncle dispatched from a village to look for an elusive job, a niece to get her heart bleached of an inappropriate lover, an ageing maternal cousin on medical treatment for an undiagnosed ailment” — even if the rooms seemed few.

“Was it because of the courtyard where quilts were sunned and clothes dried and pickles left to acquire the longevity of the sun? I don’t know,” writes Ms Roy, who seems to be on a quiet but determined mission to make up for the fact that Siliguri “never found a home” in the books that she read as a child. The absence felt more like neglect, not an innocent omission, from those who worship at the altar of metropolitan culture. In this beautiful work of non-fiction, Ms Roy brings the margins to the foreground with affection, humour, and a sense of delight.

The author evokes the sights and flavours, sounds and textures of Siliguri from a time before “the hormonal transfusion of the internet and globalisation” when people woke up to majestic views of the mountains and the cries of men carrying “gigantic aluminum dekchis on their heads…filled with tiny, sweet, warm globules of mihidana and, occasionally, sandesh.” There was something magical in the ordinary and uneventful thrum of life away from centres of power but there was also a curiosity about what things were like outside and elsewhere. This desire for connection was fulfilled through adventures in reading—books, letters, old magazines—that brought a recognition of kinship with other writers whom she views as fellow provincials. She engages with the writing of Rabindranath Tagore, T S Eliot, and Nirad C Chaudhuri, and references briefly the work of Jacinta Kerketta, Aruni Kashyap, Mihir Vatsa, Tanuj Solanki, Tabish Khair and Anjum Hasan among her contemporaries.

Ms Roy comes across an astute and loving observer of life. She accords dignity to the minutest of details, including her own anxieties and idiosyncrasies, with her gift of attention. “I’m always careful to not pronounce the name of a dish when I’m eating out with an acquaintance. I point to the item on the menu when the waiter comes to take the order,” she writes, confessing that the action is meant to avoid the possibility of embarrassment. “What if there are silent letters hidden somewhere? I feel judged, they’ll now know that I’m not well-educated,” she adds.

As someone who was sent to an English-medium school by parents who did not speak English themselves, and was frequently ridiculed for flawed pronunciation, I can relate to what Ms Roy calls “the provincial’s fear of the metropolitan gaze” because I have felt it in my bones while growing up in suburban Mumbai. Unfortunately, the shame of being rejected for one’s inadequacy in English is a colonial baggage that many Indians carry to this date.

The author likens mispronunciation to dirt, and the performance of hygiene in the matter of language to a cleaning rag. This is a striking analogy, especially coming from Ms Roy, who is an associate professor at the elite Ashoka University in Sonepat, Haryana. One hopes that a future edition of the book will also contain her reflections on what it means for a proud provincial like herself to teach there, and how it has altered her relationship with Siliguri.

“My father sold our house in 1988. He was convinced by his own reasons—the area was waterlogged during the long rainy season,” she notes. The new house that her parents have moved into “looks slightly displaced and decontextualised”. It seems to belong to a European city, therefore many locals used to call it the White House. Ms Roy’s mother was not amused.

Siliguri itself has changed drastically in terms of the landscape, its geopolitical significance and the aspirations of its residents. “Provincials do not want to remain provincials,” the author points out. After all, she and her brother once dreamt of becoming India’s first brother-and-sister cricket commentator team. Now her biographical sketch mentions that “she tries to live mostly in Siliguri”. This book can also be read as a tribute to a place that once was.

That said, it does not use nostalgia to escape the present. It merely records change. It celebrates the creativity of provincials, who became inventive because of deprivation. They took the cards that life had dealt them and started playing.

The reviewer is a writer, journalist and educator. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X