A01=Sumana Roy
Author_Sumana Roy
Autobiography
Category=DNBL1
Category=DNC
Category=JBSC
City
Colonialism
Country
English
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
India
Language
Literature
Marginal
Memoir
Metropolitan
Perspective
Postcolonial Theory
Reading
Rural
Tradition
Urban
Product details
- ISBN 9780300283365
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 08 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From the acclaimed author of How I Became a Tree, an enchanting and joyous exploration of life and creativity at the geographical edges of the modern world
“A striking mix of memoir and literary analysis. . . . Wise and whimsical.”—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
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.
“A striking mix of memoir and literary analysis. . . . Wise and whimsical.”—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
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.
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V.I.P.: Very Important Plant. She teaches at Ashoka University.
