‘The Provincials’: Sumana Roy breaks the artificial barriers about the provinces in her book

Rack your brains for the last time you heard the word “provincial”. Tough to recall and remember – an outcome of changing lexicon and merging “boundaries”, perhaps. This is where an author comes in as a keeper of time, traditions and tyrannies. Sumana Roy in her new book, Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, talks about disparate elements of the identitarian politics of being a “provincial”. Roy not only sensitively echoes from memory and emotions of growing up as a provincial but also places it firmly in the histories of man and mankind. In resurrecting lesser-known facts and trivia about literary luminaries across topographies and tongues, she builds a strong case against the artificial, classist borders humans build as she tries to forge a bridge of humanity. The book reads as an interplay of observation and memory, what touches the heart and what the mind retains.

Away from the centre

The preface to “Pran” marks the five alliterative sections of the book that span the course of this delight in language and philosophy – a hallmark of Roy’s social media posts as well as creative writing. Researched thoroughly yet woven ever so lightly, Roy’s book is an ode to all things, provincial. From playing with the word and how it sits on the tongue to tracing its 18 occurrences in TS Eliot’s essay “What is a Classic?”, Roy dissects the construct threadbare, turning the idea on its head with brilliance.

Pages from the life of those “pushed into the anonymity of et cetera” as Roy narrows the lens on the etiolated people as she “peruses the perimeter”. The curious case of “learning words like singers”, reading about alien settings and characters like “Cinderella” but realising that one lived “in what our books called a democracy.” The incursion of “Archies” – the keeper of all alien greetings – from grandmother’s day to friendship day, and smatterings of songs and quotes in the English language, a deep attachment with nature, with words, an organic living in harmony with nature, an uncoloured childlike curiosity – formed a part of the “geographies of our imagination” and finds a place in Roy’s postcards from the fringes. The mores of small-town living, its language and lexis, its grammar and even its pronunciation, emerge universal patterns in the matrix of provinciality.

The tone of the text bounces delightfully from the serious to the satirical. In parts, almost mocks the epic timbre of “The Rape of the Lock” when she quotes from Premchand’s “Bade Bhai Sahab”. When bhai sahab keeps failing in the exams and the two brothers end up in the same class, the language of the bada bhai as he disses the latter’s academic achievement is expertly employed by Roy to equate the disparaging tone used by some to categorise publishing platforms and the “academic prestige” that is often sought by a writer find a place for oneself at the table.

The text is a shining example of not only an empathetic pen but also academic rigour – with references running for over ten pages. From the “spiritual climate” of Rabindranth Tgaore to Shakespeare who was called “an upstart crow”, Roy alludes to Robert Greene’s of the masters. She adds the Brontës sisters to her lists of provincials when she engages with the notion of pedigree, who found their inspiration in the landscapes around them, and then there was Jane Eyre from the parocosm who had “invented” the Yorkshire village of Haworth. The book then in essence is a compendium from near and far, giving shape to the personality of the provincial – their predilections, pronunciation and patterns.

An essential case for common humanity

Roy’s self-deprecating humour and practical referenced inquiry save the book from being a self-aggrandisement and self-serving exercise which it would have morphed into one, in the hands of a less sensitive writer. She’s delightfully surefooted. The book’s many labyrinths take you down her sharp, incisive wit and an imagination that’s earthy, energetic and organic. An example of which is this line: “When a leaf begins to dry, it is the edges that start curling first. This book is a history of those curls.”

The author makes an essential case for common humanity, much before hybrid and remote collaboration or before the world was the proverbial “global village”. There is a particular joy in reading Roy’s life truths: “Depravity is essential to creativity, a mark of provincial life, marks his understanding of provincial life.” She adds that “grammar and pronunciation are the body odour and bad breath of socioeconomic class”. Clearly, this seems to be a universal phenomenon. She addresses from the ground up the narrative of the otherisation of provincials – an outcome of deterministic aspects of circumstance and birth.

Mining memory, moments and method, Roy excavates her experience of the word “provincial” hurled pejoratively on her decades ago, as she builds a cross-sectional case on how there’s strength in owning up to the past and embracing the present. Dismissing the traditional notion of cultural capital, Roy makes a slick case for how outmoded stereotypes and generalisations are in a modern-day world.

The book is a spunky attack on the incestuous nature of the “urbane” insiders – scratching the veneer from genteelness and sophistication, Roy has found “that inside small is hidden all.”

Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Sumana Roy, Aleph Book Company.