Sumana Roy’s book is a love letter to places not quite on the map
Reminiscing about her schooldays in provincial India, writer and poet Sumana Roy recalls that her teachers would recommend to their charges the wisdom of writers such as Tennyson, Wordsworth, Nissim Ezekiel and Ruskin Bond as guides to life. That didn’t really work. ‘In the end it was literature by old men,’ she writes. What would they know about the things that mattered to a youth dreaming of being a citizen of the world? So, instead, she and her friends turned to the ‘literature’ of greetings cards, pop songs and Hindi films. ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ read the entire contents of the first love letter she received. Here, these inauspicious beginnings lead to a compelling, albeit elegantly meandering meditation on the ways in which place shapes perspectives, vocabulary and world views, in ways more creative than that example of adolescent romantic literature might lead you to believe. ‘When “nothing happens,”’ the author notes of provincial life, ‘invention happens.’
Roy grew up in Siliguri, in Bengal, which, besides memorable views of the Himalayas, gave her questions about whether English (the language of cosmopolitan literature and greetings cards) or Bangla (the language of the locality) was the true language of love, and anxieties over her mispronunciations of English, learned, as it was, by reading rather than hearing. ‘The language came to me like it did to many others in the post-colony: slightly bitten, the severed parts held together by an indigenous glue,’ she recalls, with a typically apt turn of phrase. The glue here spans the literature of Rabindranath Tagore, Bhuwaneshwar, John Clare and Annie Ernaux, among others, along with the anonymous private tutors trapped in localities their education was supposed to enable them to escape, the life lessons of Tinkle comics, and the deconstructivist philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Part autobiographic memoir, part literary criticism, part history of overlooked or neglected talent (Bhuwaneshwar, for example, was born into poverty, declared the future of Indian literature and died anonymously while living as a beggar), Provincials is an extraordinary love letter in its own right; to the power of places that aren’t quite on the map.
Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy. Yale University Press, £16.99 (hardcover)
