Southasia Review of Books Podcast #04: Sumana Roy on literature from the Southasian provinces
Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast from Himal Southasian, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan, assistant editor at Himal Southasian, speaks to the Siliguri-based poet, writer and essayist Sumana Roy about her latest book Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries.
In Southasian literature, it seems that there might not be any other way to see the province except in contrast to the city. So much has been said about cosmopolitanism, but what of provincialism?
Growing up in Siliguri, a sub-Himalayan town in Bengal, Sumana Roy’s experiences have marked her understanding of the provincial reader’s life: including the sense of belatedness, and the desire for pleasure in language. There’s a constant search for writings that bring other worlds to the provincial readers’ lives but also for glimpses of lives similar to theirs.
In a series of “postcards” from the peripheries of Southasia and beyond, with writings ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to William Shakespeare, Bhakti poets to the Brontës, Sumana introduces us to the imaginative world of those who have celebrated provinciality. She challenges the dominance of the metropolis to reclaim the dignity of provincial life and challenges the imaginary barriers we tend to put between the rural and urban.
Sumana Roy is a poet, writer, essayist and editor based in Siliguri. She is the author of several published texts, including her latest Provincials (2024), How I Became a Tree (2017), Missing (2018), My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories (2019), and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus (2019) and VIP: Very Important Plant (2022).
Episode notes:
Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy. Yale University Press / Aleph Book Company (March 2024)
The ‘note’ economy: A brief history of English-literature exams in contemporary India. Sumana Roy / Himal Southasian (August 2020)
Small-town chest-puff: Revisiting Narayan Debnath’s Batul the Great. Sumana Roy / Himal Southasian (May 2010)
English, August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee (1988)
Malgudi Days by R K Narayan (1942)
Long Night of Storm: Stories by Indra Bahadur Rai, translated by Prawin Adhikari. (2018)
Pather Panchali: Song of the Road by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1929)
Once Upon a Time in the Doon by Ruskin Bond (2007)
Bara by U R Ananthamurthy, translated by Chandan Gowda (1976)
Our Santiniketan by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Radha Chakravarty
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