Several years back, I had read an essay by Sumana Roy in the Los Angeles Review of Books that stayed with me. Titled, ‘On Being Raised by New Critics in a Small Indian Town’, it was both a personal essay and a piece of literary criticism: recounting how the lack of secondary literature in her college in Siliguri, a sub-Himalayan town in West Bengal, forced students to practice the tenets of the New Critics – a close reading of texts without any biographical or contextual reference, and attentive to only its formal elements – without being conscious of it; and what was lost when New Criticism lost favor in Literary Studies.
What struck me about the essay was the candor of the essayist, and the seamlessness with which she merged the personal with the literary. That essay finds a place in her recently published non-fiction work, Provincials: postcards from the peripheries. It is not so much a book as a mission – a mission to establish the validity of provincial life and provinciality, beyond its binary relationship with an imagined cosmopolitan centre, whether in life or letters. Only a proud provincial could undertake such an onerous task, given that it involves an overturning of stereotypes; almost a new lens to look at the world.
Over the five parts of the book – ‘Postcards’, ‘Place’, ‘Pedigree’, ‘Poetic’ and ‘Pran’ – Roy builds her case, foraging examples from across centuries and spanning continents. The consequent widely (and wildly) diverse examples in each part however cohere better in some more than others. In ‘Place’, for instance, the connecting links between the different sections fall in place seamlessly. The contest between ‘verni’ and ‘nepo’ in Bollywood gives way to ruminations on the etymology of ‘palli’, to be followed soon by John Clare as a ‘palli’ writer (or peasant-poet, if you will), the connection between Jibanananda Das’s Natore and Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, and a sequence of poems by the author about Hill Cart Road. What is further explored is the “instinct of place as an aesthetic” as found in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels and the Siliguri encountered in Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Phoolchor (flower thief); we are then immersed in the Bronte sisters and their paracosm; and Raymond Williams’ self reflections in The Country and the City lead to Jacinta Kerketta’s poems on the Chhota Nagpur Plateau via Mihir Jha; and finally, there is Fernando Pessoa and his various poetic personas. Of course, any of these sections could be read in any sequence and would still make sense – in fact, Provincials can be easily read and enjoyed as a collection of short essays that one can simply dip in and out of – but the subterranean connections in ‘Place’ make for a better sustained reading of that part as a whole.
Not surprisingly, literary figures predominate in the peripheries Roy chooses to write about – many, of canonical status who were profoundly shaped by their provincial selves. But they are also peopled with artists, singers and filmmakers. And equally with ordinary mortals the author has known in her life. Like the private tutors she knew in Siliguri.
I’m thinking of the tuition teachers of my childhood in my hometown. I grew up in the eighties, insulated from the influences of the world. Everyone’s ambition was pretty straightforward – it was to get out of this island living, to meet the world, to collide with it like a Brownian particle if need be, to feed off the energy of what lay outside our small-town Bengali life. The ticket to that was, of course, good marks; and good marks would come only if one went to the best tuition teachers. This was the sad irony – that while these private tutors hadn’t really been able to generate the escape velocity to re-form their lives, they had, over time, created a near-clinical parallel system, a “formula,” that sent their best students out into the world the way scientists sent missiles and satellites into outer space.
This section on the private tutors – how their chief qualification was being a “failure” in the job market, their salary considered as “a sophisticated version of philanthropy” by their employers, and the way their students outgrew them – is one of the most poignant in the book. Most of the other memorable sections are also those where the author writes of her own life and family – making me wish sometimes that she had written a straight-out memoir of being a provincial, instead of the expansive scope of the book. An unforgettable instance is where she describes how ‘Archies’ cards re-defined relationships in the 80s.
Since we were at an age when most of these people [siblings and parents, i.e.] seem only annoying, the words [in the cards meant for them] made us look at them as if they were someone else. It was possible to return home “forever” to a mother one had wanted to leave in the morning – the words in the card had changed the relationship. I was scared of my father, and in spite of his efforts at educating me in sports and music and cinema, our relationship wasn’t what can be called informal. [—] In these cards, however, was another kind of relationship: ‘When you need real understanding, / When you need someone to care,/ When you need someone to guide you, /A father’s always there.’
I read those words hoping to find my father in them. I learnt them by heart because I did not have the money to buy the card [—]. When I came back home, I did the opposite – I looked at my father and tried to fit those words to him. This match-the-column exercise gradually became a way of reading, not necessarily looking for words to catch the magnetism of our lives, but how were we to know? [—–] The poems… were unlike anything we read in school. What I took from them was the charm and thrill of addressing someone directly, or being addressed directly. Nothing we read or wrote… allowed us to address anyone with any degree of familiarity.
What really unites the memoir-parts of Provincials with the rest is the power of Roy’s empathy. Like the smile of Browning’s Last Duchess, she bestows it equally on one and all in this most eclectic of books – the tutor in Siliguri, the boy who wrote her a love note tentatively in English in order to impress her, John Clare’s musings in his lunatic asylum, Ramkinkar Baij’s identification with and celebration of Santhal life in his art, Annie Ernaux’s assessment of her father and grandfather in retrospect. The list is a very long one. And it also includes fictional characters – from Shakuntala and Casaubon to Apu and Mr. Biswas.
While writing on D. H. Lawrence, Roy remarks that she felt “protective” of him when she read this sentence in Frances Wilson’s biography of the novelist: “He was the type who provokes the most violent class-hatred in this country: the impotent hatred of the upper classes for the lower”. She hoped Lawrence had not known this – as he was touchy, “touchy as the humiliated are”.
This protectiveness pervades the book like a warm embrace, nudging readers to think differently about provincials.
