Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Soumya Dadu
Guest: Professor David Boyk, author of Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India
Publisher: Cambridge UP, 2025
Date: November 18, 2025

Overview

This episode features an engaging discussion with Professor David Boyk about his new book, Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India. The conversation dives into the history of Patna, a city in Bihar, India, and challenges dominant paradigms in urban history by foregrounding the complexities, vibrancies, and multiplicities of small/provincial cities in colonial South Asia. The episode unpacks how Patna – neither a mere overgrown village nor a miniature of a metropolis – cultivated its own form of urbanity, intellectual life, and regional identity.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Personal Motivations (~02:11)

• Boyk’s Urban Fascination: Growing up in large cities like LA and the Bay Area, Boyk was always intrigued by what makes a city "urban."
• Interest in Small Cities: After experiences in North Indian cities, especially Lucknow, Boyk noticed a gap in academic literature around mid-size and smaller cities relative to the attention given to Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi.
• Discovering Patna: Boyk was drawn to Patna after encountering Yadgar-e-Rozgar, an idiosyncratic Urdu tazkira (biographical compendium), which chronicled Patna’s ordinary residents with passion and anxiety about the city’s transformation.
  • “What I need to do about that is to write down the biographies of all the people that I can think of...that included bakers, a lot of lawyers, counterfeiters...but what they all had in common was that they lived in Patna.” — David Boyk, [07:25]

2. The Concept of the “Provincial Metropolis” (~11:41)

• Matters of Urban Typology: Boyk details how “provincial metropolis” is intentionally oxymoronic. Patna was neither a capital like Calcutta nor peripheral, but rather vibrant in a specifically provincial way.
• Explaining ‘Mufassil’: The episode unpacks this South Asian term for the "hinterland," tracing its Persian roots and transformation under colonial administrative logic, where Calcutta was center and all else became the "mufassil."
  • “There’s this kind of recursive peripherality or provinciality replicated...everywhere else is the mufassil.” — David Boyk, [16:50]
• Shifts Over Time: Patna's status evolved: once a Mughal-era metropolis (Azimabad), then a flourishing mercantile center, and later a provincial capital with shifting relevance depending on the lens and the era.

3. Provincial Urbanity: Beyond the Major Metropolises (~21:36)

• Challenge to Dominant Urban Histories: Boyk argues most urban scholarship privileges large colonial cities; his work stresses the distinctiveness and dynamism of smaller cities like Patna, which cultivated unique forms of urbanity.
• Patna’s Long Arc: The city’s economic importance declined with the railroad’s ascendance, but its intellectual and cultural worlds persisted, especially within the Persianate and Islamic traditions.
• Exceptional Geography: Patna is a narrow, riverside city (9 miles long, ~1 mile wide), further segregated by old vs. colonial neighborhoods, which shaped both physical and social landscapes.

4. Working Across Languages and Archives (~31:59)

• Source Base: Boyk’s research draws from Hindi, Urdu, and English sources, including:
  • Urdu newspapers: Alpanch, a satirical weekly central to the local intelligentsia.
  • Libraries: Khudabaksh Oriental Public Library (Persian/Arabic manuscripts) and Sachidananda Sinha Library (English papers).
• Archival Challenges: Official archives were less helpful for cultural/intellectual history; newspapers provided a vibrant window into everyday and intellectual life.
  • “I found the Urdu press to be a very useful set of sources...Urdu was not a Muslim language — it was used by people from all backgrounds.” — David Boyk, [36:52]

5. Focus on Institutions: Khudabaksh Library & Alpunch Newspaper (~39:35)

• Khudabaksh Library: Founded in 1891 by lawyer Khudabaksh Khan, intended as a public, cosmopolitan repository for Islamic knowledge and scholarship.
  • Its orientation was international and pan-Islamic more than “local.”
• Alpunch Newspaper: An Urdu satirical weekly founded in the 1880s, rooted in playful rivalry within Urdu literary circles, representing both urban wit and provincial pride.
  • “The point of the newspaper from its founding is we are sophisticated, we are masters of the language, and we reject your efforts to marginalize our claim over cultural authority.” — David Boyk, [47:35]
  • Collaboration: The paper fostered reader participation and provincial networking, connecting Patna to a wider urdu-speaking world, including contributions from a very young Maulana Azad.

6. The Creation of Modern Bihar and Elite Subjectivity (~53:11)

• Separation from Bengal: The 1912 creation of the Bihar and Orissa province marked a transformative moment for Patna, consolidating elite advocacy for regional autonomy.
• Who Were the Modern Biharis?: The movement was driven by English-speaking, largely Kayastha and Sharif Muslim professionals, who resented subordination to Bengal’s elite and sought their own provincial court, university, and political recognition.
  • “What you have is young men who resent what they understand to be their exile...in Calcutta and London, where they're in the minority and where they're made to feel outsiders.” — David Boyk, [56:54]
• Colonial Politics: Their appeals leveraged colonial ideas about loyalty, masculinity, and “subordinate patriotism” to argue for provincial status.

7. The Changing Shape and Life of Patna (~64:58)

• Spatial and Social Transformation: Becoming a provincial capital exacerbated east-west, old-new urban divides and shifted linguistic/cultural orientation (Urdu and Persian declining; English and later Hindi rising).
• Ongoing Provinciality: Despite administrative elevation, Patna’s provincial character persists — yet it’s precisely this marginality that once allowed for unique cultural vibrancy.

8. Contemporary Experience and Historical Empathy (~70:48)

• Fieldwork and Local Encounters: Boyk reflects on the dissonance between Bihar’s negative reputation elsewhere and his lived experience of Patna’s warmth and civility.
  • “I was struck...at the enormous divergence between the ways that I'd heard Bihar spoken of...and my experience. In particular, I found that there's quite a distinctive gentleness that you find just routinely in Patna.” — David Boyk, [71:00]
• Continuity and Change: He notes continued vitality of some Urdu intellectual life and libraries, even as they are marginalized.
• Personal Affection: While not a “defense” of Patna, Boyk’s affection shapes the book’s tone and openness to provincial spaces.
  • “There's something in marginalized places that might be interesting and valuable and surprising...” — David Boyk, [75:15]

9. What Boyk Hopes Readers Take Away (~76:45)

• Multiplicity and Methodology: Urges readers to appreciate the diversity and complexity of cities—big and small—across governance, cultural history, and political economy, and to see how local intellectual life is shaped by place.
• Place Matters: Both physical geographies and cultural imaginations constitute what makes a city vibrant.
  • “Intellectual life, political life, happens in particular places, and places come to be constituted...also through cultural life.” — David Boyk, [78:30]

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the term "Provincial Metropolis":

  “Provincial metropolis, it's a contradiction, right?...What I primarily mean is...a city that was important, that was vibrant in a particular way and specifically in a provincial way.” — David Boyk, [11:41]

• On discovering Patna’s uniqueness:

  “...there was something particular to the experience of small cities, which, of course, was a little bit new to me, not only in the Indian context, but anywhere.”
  — David Boyk, [05:54]

• On Urdu press and urban life:

  “I was finding these newspapers, I thought, okay, these are phenomenal sources for thinking about Patna and for thinking about cultural life that the city has.”
  — David Boyk, [33:35]

• On fieldwork and local character:

  “In Patna, people would very often say something like, bhaiya sidekar ke rukti jega…I'm addressing you in a very formal register...people would be kind of unnecessarily polite.”
  — David Boyk, [71:00]

• On the goals of the book:

  “The fundamental thing I think that I would like to offer is multiplicity...I think it helps certainly understand places like them better, but I think it also has something to say about the more familiar kind of archetypal cities.”
  — David Boyk, [76:45]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:36 — Host and Guest Introduction
• 02:11 – 10:36 — Boyk’s intellectual journey and the lure of Patna
• 11:41 – 21:36 — "Provincial Metropolis" explained, spatial typologies, historical shifts
• 22:47 – 30:51 — Critique of dominant urban paradigms; Patna’s urban character and its comparability to other cities
• 31:59 – 38:42 — Sources, archives, and methodological challenges
• 39:35 – 53:11 — Institutional focus: Khudabaksh Library and Alpunch, their cultural significance
• 53:11 – 64:19 — Separation from Bengal, elite Bihari identity, politics of provincial formation
• 64:58 – 70:48 — Impact of 1912 transformation on city space, public culture, and social hierarchies
• 70:48 – 76:03 — Fieldwork experience, contemporary resonance, and historical empathy
• 76:45 – 81:12 — Hopes for readers, methodological reflections, importance of “place” in history

Conclusion

Professor David Boyk’s Provincial Metropolis is a nuanced, affectionate, and rigorously researched account that recasts our understanding of small cities—not as mere satellites or diminished versions of metropolises, but as vibrant, distinctive centers of their own forms of urban, intellectual, and cultural life. This episode will inspire listeners—historians, planners, language lovers, and Patna’s own residents—to reconsider the complexity and significance of the “provincial” in both history and the present.