Sumana Roy’s latest The Provincials explores the slow degradation in the quality of attention we pay to people and things around us

Halfway done the book, I consciousness similar I’ve gotten a bent of what precisely characterises a provincial, but the surprises are unending. I’ve breezed done Shakespeare, DH Lawrence, and the “peasant poet” John Clare, visited Heidegger astatine his quaint compartment successful the Black Forest, and present comes a curveball — the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has arrived (I didn’t cognize helium was a Jew calved successful Algeria), and he, too, tin beryllium deconstructed meaningfully arsenic a provincial traveller from the margins of the French empire. By the clip I get astatine Kishore Kumar (born successful the tiny municipality of Khandwa earlier Bombay turned him into a superstar), I person learnt to expect the unexpected. All these literary, philosophical, and biographical sketches, driven by “accidents, autodidacticism, and astonishment”, are charming and stimulating successful adjacent measure. Roy, arsenic it turns out, is conscionable similar each the different omnivorous provincials successful her publication who hunger for a diverseness of root material. Tales of calamity abound excessively — similar the lawsuit of the Hindi writer Bhuwaneshwar (once celebrated by nary little a fig than Premchand) who spent his past years surviving successful railway stations and thoroughfare corners, driven huffy by poorness and deprivation. Is decease a province? Is decease much provincial than life?

Words that statesman with p (language nary bar) are her favored projects passim the book, and she loves playing the linguistic detective. In what turned retired to beryllium 1 of my favourite sections, she tracks down the etymology of the Bangla connection palli, journeying done its cousins successful galore Indian languages, earlier yet arriving astatine a devastating communal denominator — “in that connection is the intimation of a mode of beingness that has been near behind, that indispensable beryllium near behind, adjacent thought it mightiness beryllium precious”. This melancholia pervades the book, and immoderate nostalgia indispensable reckon with this overwhelming feeling of decay. When a leafage begins to dry, it is the edges that commencement curling first. This publication is simply a past of those curls — the preface has already warned us, preparing america for the inevitable.

Through each these and much (much more), we are offered poignant ways to bespeak on, and mourn, what she calls “the gradual evaporation of the poetic from our culture”, a dependable degradation successful the prime of attraction that we wage to radical and things astir us. The property of accusation is upon us, and “with the free-flowing pat of speechmaking worldly disposable connected the internet, determination is lone excess, cacophony, a bricolage of disfigured fragments divorced from their contexts.” Where lies the roadworthy to recovery? Perhaps, we could statesman by knowing our ain neighbourhoods and backyards successful much wholesome ways. In the end, aft each the rescuing of provincial heroes and provincial tales from the simplistic rhetoric of quaintness and marginality, the publication has approached that uncommon prime — a poetic universalism — which was truly the full constituent each along.

Raghavan is simply a New India Foundation fellow. His book, Rama, Bhima, Soma is forthcoming