In a world that seeks (and responds to) proper nouns, provincial is a common noun, writes the Siliguri-based writer-poet Sumana Roy in her latest muse, Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries. The idea sprouts in her when someone uses the term for her. So begins her tryst with the word, its meaning, and its intention.
“The p tic in my head refuses to leave,” she writes. To her, a ‘provincial’ is “someone who has to ‘beautify’ himself with borrowed feathers”; someone who is ignored and neglected in the “modern world’s ‘background’”; those “who have been pushed into the anonymity of et cetera”.
Potpourri of genres
Between hundreds of notes — a patchwork of observation, reflection, retrospect and critique — Roy explores the varying connotations of the word: in language, history, literature, culture, geography and so on. Her book, a potpourri of genres, features a wide spread of writers who have felt like outsiders among peers or in their profession. Thus emerges a long line of names, either celebrated or forgotten in literary circles: from Rabindranath Tagore to Bhuwaneshwar, D.H. Lawrence to Hugh MacDiarmid, William Shakespeare to the Bhakti poets, V.S. Naipaul to Heidegger, Kishore Kumar to the fathers of Annie Ernaux or Roy herself — people who belonged not only to the provinces but beyond them, not only as provincial writers and artists but also as provincial readers of world literature; as local voices that survived globally.
In an attempt at recording the “patient histories” of these provincials, Roy imagines their “emotional and intellectual map” and the provinces that made them who they were, for better or for worse.
English — both as a language and as a culture — remains the leitmotif of Roy’s book. In the petri dish of Indian languages, as she calls it, English either serves as a “catalyst” between cultures — as a medium of expressing love, intimacy, or respect — or divides people in classes which are not economical but political. Its grammar and pronunciation, often unnatural to provincial tongues, become the “body odour and bad breath” that must be kept hidden.
Some doubts
While Roy proves, with full force, that she is a perceptive writer capable of expressing a wide breadth of thoughts and emotions, it is the same scattered nature of her writing that confuses the reader. Stimulation soon turns into exhaustion and thus, she loses this reader in the very ambiguity in which she had found an audience.
At the same time, Roy, unintentionally, separates the academic reader from the casual reader; appealing more to the former when clearly, the latter is a larger group. Doubts surface. Does Roy accidently make the same mistake — of alienating one from another — that she spends 300 or so pages correcting, especially when she understands what it means to be left out? Is the matter more structural than functional? Is it that the ‘chapters’ are not spaced out that they become inaccessible? And most importantly, are the provincials in her book known because they embraced their provinciality or because they grew out of it? It is something Roy does not clarify conspicuously. These questions hold one back from truly appreciating her work.
Nonetheless, Provincials is a work worthy of deliberate thought and attention. Those familiar with the intricacies of literature, across time and space, will find great solace in Roy’s annotations. For the rest of us, enamoured by the written word but still learning the art of literary analysis, Roy’s work makes for a fine aspiration.
Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries; Sumana Roy, Aleph, ₹899.
The interviewer is an independent feature writer. Instagram: @read.dream.repeat
Published - September 06, 2024 09:04 am IST
