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David Boyk, "Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Soumya Dadu
My name is Soumya Dadu and today I'm in conversation with Professor David Boyk about his recent book, Provincial Metropolis, Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India. Professor Boyk is an Associate professor of instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses in Hindi, Urdu language and literature, and on South Asian literature, film and history more broadly. Thank you so much for joining in.
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Professor David Boyk
I love listening to the podcast and it's really an honor to be on it and to be talking about my book.
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Soumya Dadu
Before we delve into the book and its arguments and structures, I wanted to ask, what were the personal affiliations, academic pursuits and intellectual interests that brought you to writing this work.
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Professor David Boyk
So, first of all, the book is about. It's about Patna, which is a small city by Indian standards, in Bihar in North India. And so I've been interested in cities for a long time and in sort of what makes a city. And that's partly, I think I grew up in LA and spent a long time in the Bay Area. Now I'm in the Chicago area. And so I've always lived in cities and I've always enjoyed cities, and I've always been interested in various aspects of the urban experience. And so when I was beginning my training as a historian of South Asia, I was spending time in various cities, mostly in North India and especially in Lucknow. And that got me interested, first of all in a lot of the sort of specifics of Indian cities. And Lucknow is an interesting place to kind of think about that because it had both sort of being there and also reading about. Reading about Lucknow and reading about the history of other. Of other cities, because there is something, you know, there is a historical kind of literature about Lucknow more than other cities of a comparable size, but still very much smaller than the. Than the scholarship on the really big cities. Bombay, Mumbai, Kakata, Kolkata and Delhi. Those are really the cities that people have written about in very fascinating ways and at, you know, kind of collectively at great length. And of course, there are some great books about Lucknow. There's, you know, Sanjay Joshi's Fractured Modernity. There's Vinodolar Oldenburg's book on colonial Lucknow. And those were, you know, very interesting to me and helped helped me kind of understand what I was seeing as I lived there. But I noticed that they were really kind of exceptional, which isn't to say that people haven't written anything about kind of smaller cities. There's Doug Haynes's work on Surat, there's Chris Bailey's work on the Lahabad and so on. So there was a literature on cities outside the big metropolises, but not a lot in comparison. In fact, this is kind of the mid-2000s. At that time, there really wasn't so much on any Indian cities. There was some literature on the big cities, but in comparison to what there is now and at the time, what there was, you know, on cities in other parts of the world, it was a smaller and kind of newer literature. And so on the one hand, kind of seeing. Enjoying life in an Indian city, trying to sort of understand what I was seeing and what the histories of. Behind. Behind it might be, that kind of got me interested and I thought, started thinking that 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. Having grown up in LA and, as I said, spent a lot of time at that point in the San Francisco Bay area. Those are both very big kind of urban agglomerations, and so. But it felt to me like there was something in a small city that was still a city. It was absolutely urban. It had, you know, unmistakably. It had the energy of cities, the kind of the cultural dynamism, the crowds, you know, all the other things that we associate with cities. But they also were somehow different in ways that I couldn't get quite put my finger on from the really big cities. I didn't originally plan to write about Batna in particular. I thought it would be maybe one of several cities, you know, because of my linguistic capacities. I was, you know, basically thinking about North Indian cities. You know, Lucknow, of course, came to mind. El Ahmad Banaras, you know, other. Other cities, you know, kind of broadly in north India. And so one thing that brought me to Patna in particular was coming across this book called Yadhya Rozgar, which is. It's a book in Urdu. It's long. I think it's about 1400 pages. And it was published in the 1930s in Patna. It belongs to a genre called the tazkara, and tuscara is sometimes translated as a biographical dictionary. I think I call it something like a biographical compendium. It's really not very much like a dictionary, but what it is normally is a set of biographies of usually poets or saints and sometimes other kinds of people. But this particular book was unusual. A little bit had been written about it, and so I sort of was partly led to it by the historical literature. And also I was at Berkeley, which has a phenomenal collection of South Asian materials. So I just had to walk over to the library and pick it up. And I immediately thought, okay, this is a really interesting and kind of strange book because the author was, you know, pretty obscure person. He came from a kind of ordinary Sharif, in other words, sort of genteel Muslim background, kind of the lower echelons of the Muslim elite. And he was a lawyer, and he spent kind of time in the. In the courts in Patna. And in this. In this book, he was talking mostly not about poets, not about saints, in fact, not really about people who were that interesting at all if you weren't familiar with them or if you weren't. If you didn't have some connection with them. And for him, that was kind of the point, because he thought, okay, something is happening in Batna. As I said, he was writing in the 1930s, so something had happened in his lifetime that made him think, everything is changing here and in ways that I don't like. And what I need to do about that is to write down the biographies of all the people that I can think of that I've ever met or ever heard about or ever read about in Patna. That included bakers, a lot of lawyers, counterfeiters, the guy who was the first bagpipe player in Patna, chutney makers, all kinds of people who. Who were not otherwise prominent or famous or, you know, kind of notable in the way that people usually are who get written about in these biographies. But what they all had in common was that they lived in Patna. First of all, I just thought, this is a great source. I want. I want to kind of spend some time with the source and find out what the deal is. The author turns out to be kind of very idiosyncratic. He has very strong opinions, but he kind of constantly contradicts him. And so I ended up kind of writing something about that book, which, in a sort of transformed shape, ends up actually in the conclusion of my book. What it got me thinking about was, okay, so for this, you know, kind of a one of a kind person who wrote this book, you know, he has his own very particular viewpoint and so on, but he loved Patna. He felt that it was being transformed in a way that made it unrecognizable, and that represented a rupture from what he understood as a kind of historical continuity. And so I wanted to understand what was it about the city that made him so attached to it? What was it about the kind of cultural and intellectual life there that he felt was so compelling? And what was it that that had changed? And all that was not because he was important. In fact, I mean, his book is actually very obscure. But it was interesting to me precisely because it was so eccentric. And so it got me thinking about Patna, and it got me wondering, you know, else am I going to find if I kind of think more about Batna? Read more about it. I'd been there briefly, and I had a very superficial sense of what it might be like. But I really didn't know too much about it before I kind of started working on the project. And so over time, I realized I don't need to kind of make it a comparative project. I don't need to kind of dilute it. There's a lot to think about in Batna in particular, and especially in this period that he was looking back at kind of retrospectively from the 1930s, namely the late 19th and early 20th century centuries, which was a time when it turned out that there were some things that were changing in interesting ways.
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Soumya Dadu
Amazing. Thank you so much. And that's. I mean, I just love that your one source, kind of obscure, very, very evocative source, really led you down this path. So let's delve more deeply into the work itself. Your central titular argument in this work is that Patna was what you call a provincial metropolis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And in your words, provincial cities like Patna were neither overgrown villages nor miniature versions of big cities, but distinctive places whose provinciality and urbanity were inseparable. So to help us begin unpacking this argument, could you situate this term provincial metropolis, firstly within the more commonly understood typologies of settlement, such as city, town, village, geographical concepts like region and hinterland. And then how does it relate to spatial categories that are specific to colonial South Asia, such as the Mufas or even Presidency Town? I'm curious about how provincial metropolis fits within all of these typologies.
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Professor David Boyk
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So provincial metropolis, it's a contradiction, right? Kind of. Ostensibly, you can't have. Well, let me sort of first. First explain what kind of. What I mean, because a lot of these words are ambiguous, and sometimes that ambiguity is something that I kind of deliberately play with, and sometimes it's something that I'm sort of stuck with because we're talking in English. So provincial. Right. Ref. To an idea that there are kind of important places and unimportant places and there. Or centers and peripheries, provincial in the way that I usually mean. It means belonging to the hinterland. It also, of course, has to do with being a province. And so a metropolis. Right. A metropolis is usually, you know, we mean a big city, but it also could mean the capital of a particular place. And so a provincial metropolis could be the capital of a province, which is what Batna ended up becoming. But what I primarily mean is not that it's the metropolis of a province, but rather that it's a city that was important, that was vibrant in a particular way and specifically in a provincial way. So it was some kind of a metropolis in the way that Calcutta or Bombay or Delhi were, you know, at different kind of points along that timeline, but also in a different way and in a way that was specifically provincial or belong to what is often called the mufasl. And so I begin the book, you know, of course, partly talking about Patna and explaining where it is, what it is, and why we might be interested in, but also thinking about it in a much more broader framework as part of the mufasl, or sort of raising the question of does it belong to the mufasle and what is the mufossle? So this is a word that is distinctive to South Asian English. And as you might imagine from the sound, it derives kind of more directly from Persian and ultimately from Arabic to the same root as festla, decision, fussel, harvest, and so on. So it's a root in Arabic that means division or separation. And so in Persian, which was the language of government throughout the Mughal period and into the early colonial period, mufasil. So now I'm saying mufasil, not mofossil. So that's sort of a slight difference. It's not really that sort of. I mentioned that for listeners who are kind of attuned to these sorts of linguistic things, that there's a distinction that you can make between the Persian term mufasl and the English term mufasl. It's not necessarily going to come out in my pronunciation every time very clearly, so I'm not going to belabor it, but there's a history of this word. And so the history kind of briefly is that in the Mughal period and the kind of the post Mughal period of the 18th century, Mufasil existed in governmental terminology and it referred to kind of subordinate, right? So you could have a tax collector subordinate to a sort of a superior tax collector or another kind of official who would be referred to as the mufasal, whatever official. And so that word existed in administrative language, but it did not refer to a kind of place. And the reason is that there's sort of a common sense, not only in South Asia, but in many parts of the world, right? In the US we talk about the boondocks or flyover states. We have lots of words that we use to signal that some places are important and other places aren't. And of course, those are always disputed. And the people who live in the places that are kind of maligned in those terms, of course don't always agree or sort of don't always agree on the valuation that's attached to, etc. And that's true in South Asia as well. But this is a kind of a. This is a modern phenomenon, at least in South Asia, because of course, there were cities where governmental powers were concentrated. So Delhi And Agra, especially in the. And Lahore in. In. In the Mughal period. But there was never one unambiguous capital. Governmental powers were distributed. They were mobile. Sovereignty was layered under the Mughals. So, you know, there were the kings of other kings, but those kings themselves had, you know, there were various kinds of subordinates who had their own courts and kind of urban centers. So it wasn't part of common spatial sense that some places are central and other places are peripheral. I'm speaking of cities, or in particular, that some kinds of cities were sites of culture and others weren't. Or at least it wasn't so kind of so clear that there's only one or two such central cities. So, for instance, you have Kaspas, which are small towns that are, you know, generally inhabited historically by the Muslim or Islamic service groups, so administrative groups. And, you know, you'd have saints and you'd have poets and you'd have lots of administrative life and also other kinds of intellectual and cultural and religious functions in those places. But they're quite small towns. And so there's sort of a, you know, very layered urban geography throughout the early modern period. And when that changes is under the establishment of colonial rule in Calcutta, because Calcutta. So as the British established colonial rule in Bengal, Calcutta, of course, was the capital. But the Bengal Presidency, as it was called, quickly became a very large region that came under the rule of the colonial state in the company state in Kolkata. So that's an area that ended up encompassing what's now West Bengal in India, what's now Bangladesh, what's now Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, parts of Orisha and so on. So lots of states across India and Bangladesh now are all part of that Bengal Presidency. And that, of course, includes Bihar, where Patna is. So the Bengal Presidency was this enormous area. And because of the racial logic of colonial rule and also because of the kind of administrative requirements of the kind of early company state, power was concentrated in Calcutta. And Calcutta, by the way, was also subject to different laws and different courts than its hinterland. Those applied not only to the British, but also to Indians. And so now it started to make sense in administrative logic, which quickly also kind of carried over into cultural logic to talk about there being two kinds of places. There's Calcutta and there's everywhere else, or there's the capital and there's the Mufasle. And that logic also was applied talking mainly about Bengal, but very similar logic and very similar language also applied in Madras Presidency and Bombay Presidency. So I'm talking now mostly about the British and mostly about the English language. And so now there's this word mufasal, which is, as I said, I began kind of with the sort of Persian ancestor of this word. But now it really kind of means something fundamentally different, which is, it's not talking about a difference among administrators or a difference among sort of official capacities, but it's talking about two different kinds of places. So there's the mufasl and there's everywhere else. And then the Mufasa logic also very quickly kind of becomes recursive. So Calcutta is the capital and everywhere else is the, is the Mufasle, but you also have districts. And so Allahabad is the capital of that district. And then it has its own Mufasl, Batna. Each district has a seat of government and that is then southern, which is kind of central or primary. And everywhere else is Mufasa. And so you find this kind of recursive peripherality or provinciality replicated. So in, in the beginning of the period that I'm writing about, Bihar didn't exist in any political sense. It was just a part of the, of Bengal, of the Bengal Presidency. And not only that, but it was, it was sort of multiple parts, right? There were, there were divisions and districts that made up Bihar. And you know, people talked about Bihar, but Bihar was not one unit. And Patna was the, it was the largest city in, in that region of, of the Bengal Presidency. It was in fact, it was the second biggest city in, in the entire Bengal Presidency in the late 19th century. And so it was certainly preeminent among places in Bihar. But it wasn't a metropolis in, in kind of any sort of ordinary sense. However, there's sort of, if you look kind of in both directions, forward and backward from, from the kind of late 19th century moment that I begin with, there's different ways that you can think about Patna being, being a metropolis if you look forward to, into the 20th century. You know, we'll talk about this later, I think. But in 1912, Batna did become the capital of a new province of Bihar, which is now, that covers what's now Bihar and Jharkhand. And so then it became a different kind of metropolis. But if you look backward also to the early 19th century, Patna was a different kind of metropolis then because it was really a very big city. And in fact, at the turn of the 19th century, it was probably, you know, it's hard to sort of get reliable figures. They don't really exist. Arguably, at least it was the, the biggest city in South Asia. And not only it had A lot people, but it was a very rich city and it was a politically important city. So there's this sort of movement back and forth between different kinds of centrality, different kinds of vitality that I'm sort of trying to gesture to with that title and sort of talk about from different perspectives at different points in the book.
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Soumya Dadu
Thank you for that illuminating response. I think your work is really exciting in the way it's opening up how we understand small cities and their histories. So I really appreciate you placing in context and also giving us this very fascinating overview of how ideas of place have changed over time and over this period in South Asia particularly. So let's dig into the provincial metropolis in question here, which is Patna, currently the capital city of the state of Bihar, and one that you show has moved in and out of eminence, even within the region. A central part of your argument here is that, quote, it is not merely the case that Patna was both urban, urban and provincial, but also that its urbanity had specifically provincial character. How does this formulation challenge dominant paradigms in colonial urban history that have tended to focus on major metropolises? And I also wanted to know, in what ways do you think that the story that you tell about Patna resembles other small cities, both in the region of the Gangetic plains in North India and more globally?
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Professor David Boyk
I was just sort of speaking about, kind of retrospectively about the early 19th century. And so I think that's a good place to begin. So, first of all, why was Batna an important city in the early 19th century? It had been the capital of the Bihar province of the Mughal Empire. So it's historically. So another name for Batna is Azimabad. Azimabad. Azimushan gave it that name after himself. This is a grandson of Aurangzeb, who was the. He was made the governor of Bihar. So azimabad in the 18th and into the early 19th centuries. First of all, it was a governmental center, and it was also a very important mercantile center. So it's on the Ganges. And so it had a very important place in the river trade up and down the river. It's near the confluence of several other rivers with the Ganges. And it connects the river with the various parts of the kind of agrarian landscape surrounding it. And so it was important for opium, it was important for clothes, grain, various kinds of trade. There was manufacturing there, of course, and there was also a lot of various kinds of exchange in and around Putna. So one thing that connects it with many other cities, and I think Chris Bailey was sort of the first person to make this kind of argument, and he was writing about a place near Labad, is that the railroad really kind of transformed the landscape of places all over South Asia and in particular, smaller cities that had been been quite prosperous in Patna, in fact, was extremely prosperous and was celebrated for that fact, for its prosperity and also for its cultural vibrance by travelers as well as locals, you know, throughout the early modern period. So there were, you know, some. There were famous poets, for instance, from Patna, Bedil was from there and later moved to Delhi. Rasikabatabai, who wrote. Lots of kind of prominent intellectuals and cultural figures were from there. And the merchants were very kind of celebrated for their prosperity and craftsmen and so on. So that's kind of a very familiar story. There's lots of places that have the same story and that also share the history of what happened next, which is the train comes in and you don't need to be loading things off boats, loading them onto bigger boats, taking them off bullet carts and, you know, putting them in boxes and putting them on boats and so on. All this kind of bulking activity. Not only you don't need those cities for that purpose. They're not even on the, on the railway line. So they're, they're sort of, They're. They're suddenly very peripheral to the kind of economic geography of, of the region. And so that ends up really kind of boosting the fortunes of some cities like Calcutta and really being, you know, to some extent catastrophic for at least the economic kind of life of, of. Of a lot of other places like Batna. So there's a story that you could easily tell and, and, and, and I do tell it, which is that because of those changes I've been talking about economic. Equally important at least is the political change. As I said, Calcutta is now the capital. There's a, of course, there's a state presence all throughout the region. But the, the importance of, Of Batna or of other cities, Mur. You know, all kinds of. Of other cities throughout the region, you know, basically evaporates in terms of. Of political power. And so that combination of this kind of evanescence of political and economic power transforms the geography of the region and transforms life in. But what I was kind of thinking having read this Tazkira, was, well, it doesn't seem to be the end of the story. And it doesn't seem, you know, returning to the perspective of Sayyid Badr al Hasan, the author of that book, his sense was not, you know, oh, I'm so Delighted that we're now the capital. The city that I love has finally regained its rightful prominence, but quite the reverse. His sense was we've lost the integrity, the kind of neighborliness, the, the intellectual energy and the, in particular the link with a Persianate or Islamic culture that, that Batna had inherited from, from the Mughal era along with many other cities. Right. Allahabad, Lucknow. Right. This is not, this is not at all unique to Patna, but lots and lots of cities really were part of a Mughal or kind of post Mughal intellectual and cultural world that was also becoming marginalized in, over the course of the 19th centur and of course into the 20th century. This is something that, that I think links Batman with, with, with a lot of these other places, makes them, I think, very, very comparable. And you know, you know, and the specifics might be different, but, but I think that, that it's not only a North Indian phenomenon either. I think you can say similar things about places throughout the, throughout the subcontinent. And so there's this kind of simultaneous decline of political economy. So that's happening on the one hand, but it' accompanied at least in the perception of the people living there by intellectual or cultural stagnation. You know, this does, you know, I keep mentioning it ends up not being particularly central to my main arguments, although I come back to it at the, at the end of the book. But it sort of opened my eyes to a whole larger set of sources and questions about the Islamic nature of Patna's urbanity and the relationship that, that Islamic culture and intellectual life might have with the form of a city itself. Itself. Was there some connection between the fate of those cities and, and the kind of the history of that cultural formation? Now there are also, I think, some things that are a little bit distinctive about Batna. I've talked about this historical memory. There's another historical memory that becomes prominent in this period. So Batna is on the site of Patliputra, which is the capital of the, the Mauryan Empire. And that that fact was actually suspected. People kind of threw it around but had not been archaeologically confirmed until, until the late 19th century period that history becomes not only known but becomes something to be used by various cultural and political figures. And so that was something interesting to me that there's sort of a memory of past moments, of what's thought of as greatness, and also memory of what's kind of thought of as decline. And that that sort of occurs in kind of multiple moments. And there's also something kind of distinctive geographically about Batna. Which is that it's a very narrow city. It lined the riverbank, it's very long. It's, you know, depending when and exactly how you're measuring, but it's something nine miles along the southern bank of the Ganga, but it's very narrow. So in my period it's, I think at its widest point it's about a mile and in many places it's much narrower. So, and that's because in. In part because there's sort of marshland to the south. And so it's difficult historically to build there. It gets flooded. And so the way that it's laid out is that the historical city of Patna, you know, so. So what was called Azimabad there was. It was a walled city. The walls are now mostly gone, and they were already were by my period. But there's Azimabad and the kind of immediate surroundings and that usually called Batna City, you know, what would you usually call the old city? And then to the west there's the colonial suburb, which is called Bhankipur. And then there's a kind of in between area that sort of, you know, is in between geographically and. And kind of connected, you know, in other ways with. With both of these parts. But that meant that. That it not only kind of changed the way that it was possible for people to move around the city, but that there's this sort of. This very classic colonial form of spatial segregation that takes a particularly extre. Sort of a binary kind of polarity between the two ends of the city that ended up affecting politics in the city and also kind of the relationship between older and newer elite groups who, because of the kind of limitations of my sources, do end up taking a central role in my narrative.
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Soumya Dadu
That's really intriguing. And I think it's very interesting how the layout and geography of Patnam, as well as the kind of meanings attached to it by the different people who live there, the figures that you look at and the groups that you look at really bring out the uniqueness of the place, but also give us a sense of what such smaller cities come to mean and why they're important for understanding urban histories. So I want to pick up on a slightly different aspect of the book. Something I believe that makes your work very accessible for a reader, is that it's very tightly situated in a particular time, in a particular place, and what makes it incredibly vibrant is the variety of Hindi, Urdu and English sources that you're excavating and the different themes you use these to bring out. So you go from tracing political and administrative shifts to the intellectual and cultural worlds that made Patna what it was at the turn of the century. Why did you choose this approach and how did it shape the book from the process of sifting through material to selecting your material, to translating, analyzing, and then weaving it into a coherent narrative?
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Professor David Boyk
Thanks. Yeah, well, I guess so it partly, I would say, emerged from my interests and from, you know, the. The sort of. The tools that I had available to me to kind of think about these questions. And it'll also, of course, emerge from. From the sources. And so I guess going back to kind of, you know, you began by asking about sort of how I came to the project. And I said, you know, I said that I'd always been interested in kind of what makes. What makes cities urban or what sort of what. What's sort of the distinctive nature of cityhood or urbanity. And, you know, which is a word that they kind of use in two ways. Right. You know, there was urbanity, meaning the quality of being urban, but also the quality of being urbane. The project went as it had started as my dissertation, which was called Provincial Urbanity, and I ended up changing it to Provincial Metropolis. But the question in my mind of what is the relationship between the urban and the urbane? That was sort of the driving thing behind. Behind the whole project. And so I was clear that I wanted to think about intellectual and cultural history and to kind of do justice to the. The kind of self confidence, the kind of sophist, the playfulness that I was finding in the sources as I started to read, but also to think about how they were emerging from a particular place. And the reverse, right, how the place was shaped by those qualities. So I went to Patna and, you know, like. Like a lot of people do, I thought, well, I'm gonna have to go to the. The official archives. So I went to the Bihar State Archives and I spent a lot of time there. And I found some things that ended up being quite interesting and useful, but. But not always the kinds of things or the quantity of things or the. I wasn't exactly getting what I was wanting to get in order to answer these kinds of questions about cultural and intellectual history. So at the same time, I was also visiting the Khudabaksh Library. For anybody who doesn't. Hasn't been there or doesn't know, it's a magnificent library in Patna that is one. One of the greatest archives in the world of Persian and Arabic manuscripts. And so it's notable not only in Batna and not Only in Bihar, but throughout South Asia and for scholars throughout the world. People working on topics with no connection to any part of South Asia come there for its manuscript collection. So I was there looking for other kinds of things. And one thing that I found was a newspaper called Alpanch, which is an Urdu newspaper. And I think I talked to the librarian at the time, Imtiaz Ahmed, and he gave me a lot of. Of wonderful guidance. So he may have brought it up, I don't really remember, but they had some bound issues of that newspaper, which turned out later. They actually came originally from a different library that was in a Kasbah in Patna district. It's not really in the book, but I've written about elsewhere. It's a very interesting library that was set up by the young men of this chaspa at the turn of the 20th century as a kind of a really extraordinary library of contemporary Urdu material. And so 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. And at the same time, it was a local newspaper, although not only read by people in Putna, but it was really kind of focused on the city. And so I was finding a lot in there about not only kind of satirical pieces and this kind of playfulness that I ended up finding very interesting, but also just lots of substantive things about urban life, frustrations of people who lived in Patna, reflections on the geography of the city and so on. And so then I started finding more things along those lines. A lot of them were in Urdu. I also. There's another library in Patna that I got a lot of really great materials from, which is the Sachidanda Sinha Library. Sachidananda Sinha was a figure in my narrative, and he was a local lawyer and politician. And he also, he established a library in his house, and it's still open today. And it has great collections of English newspapers from Patna. So I got a lot of the Bihari and the Bihari Herald. These are really interesting newspapers that were published in English in Patna. The Bihari, or the Bihar Times, kind of had different names at different times, was a newspaper for people who identified as Biharis. And the Bihar Herald was a newspaper aimed at the Bengali community in Patna, which was quite substantial. And so those were two great sources that I ended up finding. I got a lot of them also at the National Library in Kolkata. And so reading those newspapers gave me a path into, obviously, a particular sort of set of representations of urban life from a particular set of perspectives, but nonetheless a very textured and specific set of things that people were arguing about and often getting into debates back and forth over multiple issues of a particular newspaper and themes that I would see coming up across the years. And so I ended up spending a lot of time just reading the newspaper, just in chronological order. And, and so that ended up being really, I think the basic set of archives that I really relied on most was those newspapers mostly in Urdu and English. Hindi does appear. And in particular there was one interesting Hindi newspaper at the time in Patna, which was called Bihar Bandhu. So I managed to get some issues of that as well. And those were also quite interesting. But although there was a very important Hindi publisher, the Kadguvlas press in Patna. But Hindi publishing was really in much more a nascent stage at that time. And so I found the orderly sources to be both more just. There's just a lot more of them. And I also found them kind of richer in a lot of ways and more kind of multivalent. And by the way, you know, this will be very familiar to many listeners, but something that is sort of not necessarily part of common sense now, but is an important fact to keep in mind is that Urdu was not the. Was not a Muslim language. It was not specific to Muslims. Urdu was used by people from. From all backgrounds. So I was finding the wordly press to be. To be a very useful set of sources. And then the last thing that other than kind of published materials that I had available to me, you know, my kind of local libraries, the British Library was also. And of course, you know, as time went on, the digital sources have become really phenomenal. You know, we've got the. What are called the native newspaper reports, which were colonial surveillance reports, either summarizing or sometimes translating what was, what was being talked about in Indian newspapers. Lots of materials that are. As I was doing the revisions to the book, I was finding extraordinarily helpful. And they hadn't been there when I was doing the kind of original research for the dissertation.
- [38:42]
Soumya Dadu
Thank you for that instructive and sincere response about the process and the sources that you looked into and the places that they took you. So I wanted to delve a little more deeply into the specific chapters of your work. The first part of your book focuses on particular intellectual products such as the second chapter, which is on the Qunabaksh Oriental Library, and your fascinating third chapter chapter on the 19th century newspaper alpanch that you were just speaking of. Now, as you note, these are very familiar to historians as archival sites and sources. And that also makes your chapters incredibly interesting in and of themselves. But they're also doing something quite specific for the larger argument you're weaving together about Patna. So could you tell us first about the library and the newspaper, and then how each of them serve your central argument about Patna's position as a provincial metropolitan.
- [39:35]
Professor David Boyk
Yeah, absolutely. So the Qutbakh's library was opened in 1891, right. Kind of in the earlier part of the period that I'm writing about. And it was opened by a lawyer named Khudabash Khan. So he was quite a prominent and successful lawyer in Patna. And he'd inherited a collection of books and a love of books from his father and ultimately his grandfather. And so the story that he tells, at least, is that when his father was on his deathbed, he said, you know, I'm giving you my books, but what you need to do is to turn it into a collection that is worthy of being made a public library and given to the people of Putna. And so in his telling, you know, he took that charge very seriously, and he spent enormous amount of money and effort in establishing the library. And as I said, it's really a library of manuscripts in Persian and Arabic, and notably. So it's called the Khudabaksh Oriental Public Library. And so the words Oriental and public are significant. Significant. So when he opened it to the public in 1891, he gave it to the government of Bengal in trust for the people of Patna district. Public was not only a description, but really kind of was baked into the legal charter that was attached to the library. And so a Punch is a newspaper that was published in Urdu as weekly, started in the 1880s and published into the 1910s. And so it's a Punch newspaper in particular. So, of course, the most famous Punch in the world is the London Punch, which was a satirical magazine published in London that was famous for its wit, kind of playfulness. It's sort of habit of needling prominent political figures. And also for Punch, who is, you know, kind of a sort of a Pulcinello kind of figure descendant. You know, it's sort of various ancestries from, you know, Punch and Judy and. And he's kind of the figure representing the. The paper, but he's sort of the embodiment, and he's. He kind of wanders through life, kind of poking fun at people he sees around him. So that's the famous British model, which is right there in the title, El Punch, but kind of the more approximate and the more influential model I think really is the Avid Punch, which was a newspaper published in Lucknow, which again, was an orderly newspaper. It's satirical. You know, it has many of these characteristics signaling it's belonging to the Punch genre, which is a global genre. So there's. There's an enormous number of Punch newspapers in India, many of them in Urdu. But not only there's ones in Hindi, there's ones in Meraki, there's in Bengali and also other parts of the world. There's Punch newspapers in Japan and Denmark and all kinds of places. And so in fact, the London Punch is not really the original, the original Punch newspaper, but there's a kind of an earlier model in Paris. And so it's sort of from the get go, it's a circulating kind of replicable archetype. But they're also important differences. Right? We shouldn't be fooled by simply by the Punch label. You know, the papers don't all necessarily line up in every regard. But one thing that Alpunch has in common with the Avid Punch, which is, you know, a number of people have written about the Avid Punch and in very interesting ways. One of the things that the two papers have in common is that they're both quite interested in urban life and in their immediate surroundings. So the. There's kind of a funny story about, about how Al Panch gets started, which is that there's a poet, the most prominent worthy poet in Patna is named Shahdazimob. When he was younger, he wrote a book called Navaya Vatan, the Voice of the Homeland. Vatan is a very kind of resonant Urdu word that refers to. It means the homeland. Sometimes that refers to a national homeland, but usually it refers more to a regional or local homeland. And so in this case he's talking about Bihar. And he's influenced by a lot of other writers around the same time, in particular the famous Urdu kind of literary history, AB which is kind of trying to establish kind of a proper lineage for or modern Urdu language and literature. And so he's kind of part of. Oh, an important thing about Shahad is that he's from Batna, but his family is not. He traces his ancestry to the Delhi elites. And so he understands himself as being in Bihar, but in some sense not of Bihar. And he echoes a lot of contemporaries in diverging from an earlier view of the Urdu language. Urdu is a language that has a long history of disputes over kind of proper linguistic usage, but something that had not always been there, but was increasingly there in the 19th century was identifying proper usage with particular geographies and in particular with Delhi and secondarily with Lucknow. So he wrote a book that in his view, was sort of friendly advice to his fellow Biharis about all the ways that they were using Urdu wrong and with extensive lists of what he regarded as kind of embarrassing errors people around him were making. And he was surprised when people. People didn't like it. And in fact, they really didn't like it. So some young men in Patna, many of whom were not even from Patna, they were from Kaspas in the surrounding area. So Shad was pompous. His name was Syed Muhammad Shahid Azim Abad. Shad is his pen name. Azim Abadi means he's from Patna. It's kind of a local label that Urdu poets often use. But he would call himself not Sayyid, but as Sayyid. So with Arabic, aliflam as Sayyid. So this is extremely pompous. And these younger upstarts thought, you know what, we're going to kind of take the wind out of his sails. And so we're not going to call it Punch. We're going to call our new paper Alpunch, kind of a pretentious Arabicized name just to make fun of him. And every issue of the paper was devoted to making fun of Shad to the extent that, you know, people would throw copies of the paper into the courtyard of his house. Shad had a friend who was a Hakeem, a doctor, and he comes over to Shad one day and he says, listen, man, I was just at a patient's bedside. Poor man is dying, his family is gathered all around, and they're not talking about him. They're talking about how everybody hate you. You got to get out of town, something bad is going to happen. So this newspaper was really was founded as a defense of Bihar, and in particular Patna, and a defense of Bihari's claim over Urdu. In other words, the point of the newspaper from its founding is we are sophisticated, we are realizaban, masters of the language, and we reject your efforts to marginalize our claim over cultural authority. By the time I really kind of come into the story a couple decades later, you know, this had all mostly blown over. In fact, Shah actually was a subscriber to the newspaper. One of the wonderful things, from my perspective, about L. Punch is that they listed the. The subscribers list because they were always having to bug people to pay up. From a historian's perspective, there's a lot that you can kind of get out of those kinds of things. So they weren't, they weren't so obsessed with, with knocking Shad down a peg anymore. But what they did continue to be very interested in was to act as a venue for this kind of quite self confident play, exchange and kind of intellectual life. I call it a satirical paper often, but not everything in the newspaper is satirical or even funny. They had kind of perfectly straight faced news pieces as well. There's quite a variety of content in the paper. But one of the things that really I thought was interesting and distinctively provincial is the emphasis on collaboration. You know, in contrast to a lot of other newspapers that are very important and that a lot of people have written about. So like, you know, Dilgudas by Abdul Halim Sharar or Harishander's magazine or read a lot of these other kind of very prominent newspapers and magazines from the period. Many of them are really kind of primarily written by, you know, one person or a handful of people. You know, of course there were people who, who were particularly involved in elephant and who were responsible for bringing it out. But they, but the paper also made a point of seeking out, in effect demand the collaboration of its readers so that readers were assumed to also be either actual or potential writers for the paper. And that the paper positioned itself in a landscape of other newspapers. And so it would reprint articles from other papers and assumed that its own articles would also be reprinted in turn. And so it's really kind of tying together a network across mainly northern India with outposts in other places. But if you look at the subscribers list, you know, the largest number of course are in Patna. Then there's a lot of other people in other places in behind. But then there's, there's people all over. There's you know, quite a few in Lucknow, there's people in Calcutta, there's people in Lahore. But the geography that the paper evokes and that it addresses is not one where Calcutta is the kind of assumed center of the universe. In fact, you know, it's sort of, it appears from time to time people write in from Calcutta. In fact, an extremely young future Maulana Azad sent a submission from Calcutta. But those places are not kind of the centers of the universe. Rather it's these kinds of older cities, Islamicate centers that really are the kind of the prominent geography. So that I thought was, was kind of interesting from the perspective of thinking about the relationship between political, economic decline and cultural life. And it also made me think about what might be then possible in a venue like that and what it had to do with Urdu. I was also at the same time reading these English newspapers and not seeing anything of the kind. They're not funny, they're not collaborative. They did reprint articles from each other, but often it was. It would be not acknowledged or, in fact, they would criticize each other for doing so. And so the kind of. The whole ethos seemed to be quite different between these papers that were published in the same place at the same time, but in kind of different idioms and for different kinds of audiences. And so it seemed to me that there's kind of ordinary intellectuals, most of the people I mentioned, Milana Azal, but of course, he's not famous at the time, right. He's a child, actually, at the time that he sent in a report on Mushaira, which is Gathering of Poets. And so precisely because the newspaper is kind of quasi anonymous, it's not clear to me that anybody knew that he was a child. And so there's. There's something about the kind of public sphere that is linking together these kinds of provincial cities that makes such activities possible. So then to return to the. The Khutabash Library, it tells us something different about this kind of provincial intellectual life. It's a place that is not, on the surface, really invested in Patna at all as a place. In fact, India is not really, in some ways, is not really, again, to the Khudabaksh Library. You know, many of the manuscripts came from India, but many didn't. Qutbaksh's goal was he understood himself as performing a service for Muslims and one that was going to invigorate or reinvigorate, as he understood it, Indian Muslim intellectual vitality. And so in that regard, right, it's for India, but it's not about India, and it's for Patna in the sense that it's, you know, as I said, he dedicated it to the people of Patna, but it's not about Patna. The collection doesn't really seem to have much to say, say, about Patna or Bihar as places. So I think it's sort of its relationship to the city is different in that regard from Al Panche's, you know, Alpancha is talking energetically and playfully about holy celebrations, is critiquing the kind of chronically horrible sanitation of the city and so on. You know, although Khudabaksh was prominent in local politics, he was sort of a valued intermediary between the people of Patnai and the colonial state. But what I think is happening there Primarily is that a kind of. A certain kind of middle class version, virtue is being embodied. He deliberately positioned himself as a model for others to follow, as somebody who was not only selfless in his dedication to larger collectives, but also one who first of all was particularly middle class in his orientation. He made a lot out of his worldview as a lawyer and also his professional connections as a lawyer, and distanced himself from the kind of aristocracy, democratic elites, some of whom did support the library materially. But he also was really representing a kind of new kind of sharif identity and kind of habitus. And so he's, I think, trying very explicitly to be a role model for a kind of intellectual curiosity and dedication and openness that he found to be present at various points in Islamic history. And he considered to have been lost in large part. And he thought that Batna could become. And he. But not only he, but also his successors, in particular, one of his sons, Salahuddin Khudabaksh, follows in his footsteps and extends his project in making Patna a center of modern Islamic knowledge and one that's oriented to Orientalists. Right. For him, it's not really about the ulema. It's not for traditional Muslim scholars. He wants all kinds of people to come to the library, both European scholars and Indian scholars. But he wants the intellectual frameworks to be those of what he understands to be modern scholarship, which is European Orientalism. But Salahdin, his son, also want Patna to be that place. Part of the stipulation that he makes is that the library has to, and its collections always have to remain in Batna, and the colonial state at various points, tries to skirt that. At least there are rumors and there's some efforts to at least move a few books, if not the entire collection to Calcutta. And that becomes a subject of conflict, controversy. And so the question becomes, you know, after Khudabash's time especially becomes, what is the relationship between this quite extraordinary library, what seems to be then and today to be kind of unprepossessing surroundings.
- [53:11]
Soumya Dadu
Thank you. I appreciate the way that you brought out how Patna is at once this node in a broader Islamicate cosmopolitan network. It's also the home to a lot of collaborating writers and, and readers. It has this very vibrant intellectual life and it speaks to all of these other places where Urdu is also being read and engaged. I want to shift our conversation to another aspect that's really important to your argument, which is the separation of Bihar from Bengal Presidency through the creation of the province of Bihar in Orisha in 1912. You point out that this is a really crucial turning point that is linked to Patna's public culture and particularly particularly to the political expressions and subjectivity of a few young elite English speaking men who sought to fashion a modern Bihari identity. Who were these advocates and who was, and perhaps what was not the quote unquote modern Bihari at the center of their struggles and how were their efforts affected and circumscribed by the context of empire?
- [54:19]
Professor David Boyk
Yeah, great. So, yeah, so like, like I said, the sort of the status quo at the beginning of the story is that Batna is the largest city in Bihar and it's the, you know, it's at the center of Batna district. It was not particularly kind of politically central in any other regard. Similarly, Bihar as a whole was not really a coherent political unit, although sometimes it was kind of referred to. It was a region in a cultural sense. It's not a new invention. Biharis do have a sense of themselves as Biharis, but that sense of regional identity, which is not the only regional identity, there's also, there's other kinds of. So Bihar is broadly divided into sub regions that have their own linguistic identity. So north Bihar is Mithila or Methili is sort of the prominent language. Patna belongs to the region of Magadh where Magahi is sort of the regional language and so on. The Bhojpuri speaking region includes the region of Bihar immediately to the west of Batna, but also eastern up. The beginning of this story there's a sense that there are people that we can call Biharis. They understand themselves as such, but Bihar as a place and Patna as a city are subordinate to Kakara because they're part of the Bengal Presidency, just as are many other places. At various moments in the second half of the, especially the last quarter of the 19th century, this had started to rankle with some people, mainly white collar elites, so professionals, especially lawyers and other people who are involved in some way with the colonial state and either are working within the government or are for instance lawyers who are interacting in their professional life with colonial institutions. And so many of those people, including two of the really kind of central figures, Sachidananda Sinha I mentioned before and Mahesh Narayan. So those are two, they're Kayestas. So Kas are a Hindu caste group that is historically involved in administrative and scribal work. And so many of the professionals came from a Kasta background and many others also were from Sharif Muslim backgrounds. Those are the two professional groups that end up being the kind of main advocates for what's called the separation of Bihar from Bengal. So if you're a young man from one of these privileged backgrounds in late 19th century Bihar, you tend to go on a sort of predictable path. You move from your town or village to Patna and you go to one of the English medium schools that are being set up there. Then this is sort of an aggregate picture that I'm painting. But it covers a lot of the people who end up becoming part of this story. It covers Sajidhana Sinha, it covers Rajendra Prasad, who later becomes the first president of India. A number of the really prominent people. So you, you go to, maybe you go to the Putna Collegiate School. Then you get a little older and you go to Putna College. All of these institutions that I'm talking about are supported by the government and our instruction is in English. Then you go to Calcutta University, or you may go at a younger age to Calcutta for, for schooling there. So you go to Calcutta University and you, you might become a vic il there. Or if you're really ambitious, you might go to London and join the Inns of Court and you become a barrister. Then you come back. And now what do you do? Now you're a lawyer. So if you really want to be a successful lawyer, of course, you could follow the path of Chudabaksh, for instance, and public, you know, practice at the Patna Bar. But if you're ambitious, you want to be at the High Court. That's where the action is and that's where the money is. What is the High Court? It's the Calcutta High Court. There is no Patna High Court because there's only one High Court per province or presidency. So what you have is young men who resent what they understand to be their exile, either as boys or teenagers or as adult professionals in places like Calcutta and London, where they're in the minority and where they're, they're made to feel outsiders and the other Indians around them. For instance, in London, right, There's, there's, there's quite a number of Indians at the, at the ends of court. And they'll say things like, what do you mean? You're Bihari. Let's, let's, let's open up this atlas. And you, you show me where Bihar is in the atlas. And you can't, because there's no province called Bihar. This is the story that is told especially by Sajidan and Sinha, where it really rankled. At the same time, you're not alone, right? You can go to the, there's, there's a Bihari mess where you can go and eat with other Biharis and observe notably Geista cast rules. There's a Bihar sporting club where you can go and play football and other kind of colonial sports with other Biharis. And there's, there's also now a Bihari students conference where you meet with other students who are, you know, they're a lot like you, right? They're, they're boys, they're from a privileged background, they speak English, they have ambitions in life and those ambitions involve professional success. And they see, looking ahead, they see those ambitions being foiled, both in kind of psychological terms by the, by the subordination of Bihar to Bengal and in very material terms by the fact that there is no, there's no university in Bihar, there's no high Court in Bihar, there's no, you know, there's only kind of a handful of government offices, offices in Bihar and so on. And so they start to think, well, what can we do about this? And the obvious answer is, well, if Bihar were a province, then a lot of things would change. And so they start to, they start to advocate in the, in the late 19th century originally kind of in fits and starts for the establishment of Bihar as a province. You'll notice I'm not mentioning Orisha. Orisha gets tacked on at the last minute as a kind of marriage of convenience. So a similar thing is going on in other parts of the Bengal Presidency. It's happening in Urdasha, it's happening in, in Assam. The regions are politically subordinated to Bengal, but also local elites understand themselves as subordinated to the Bengali elite. The Bhadralok, who are not only in Calcutta but also in places like Patna or Kartak, are filling a number of the kind of local administrative roles and other kinds of white collar employment. This is all happening, of course, within a deeply colonial framework. Nobody is advocating, these are, are all fairly conservative figures, at least at this time. Later some of them will become more radical. So on the one hand they're interested in trying to make a claim that will be compelling to the colonial state and on the other hand they're extremely resentful, often on a very personal level of Bengalis. There is some overlap in terms of the makeup of this group with older Persian elites, but to a great extent we're really not talking about the aristocrats who still had a substantial role in, for instance, the kind of local power structure of life in Patna city, but we're really talking about People who are oriented toward colonial institutions, who come from kind of a different set of backgrounds. And so when they really kind of seize their moment is in 1905 when the Bengal Presidency is partitioned. And of course that's a very well known story because of its watershed significance in the history of communalism and of nationalism and it's kind of its twin. That's not to say that communalism and nationalism are identical in any way, but there's an interlinked history there that really kind of comes to the fore during and after the Bengal partition. But from the perspective of these Bihari professionals, what it is is an opportunity to position themselves as loyal, unlike the Bhadralok, and therefore deserving of their own political unit, which will simultaneously strengthen own position and weaken the position of the Bengali Bhadraluk. And when the partition is reversed in 1911, this campaign has become quite convincing to colonial administrators because it offers a different way to kind of clip the wings of the Bengali elites. So the phrase that's always used is sturdy loyalty. And the idea there is not only that Biharis are loyal, but that they're sturdy. And what is sturdy it has to do with kind of a history of ideas around masculinity. And of course there's a well known history of the figuring of the Bhudraluk as effeminate in colonial thought and conversely of Biharis as belonging to martial races and other kinds of sort of colonial ethnographic thinking that positions them as maybe not so clever but as reliable and stalwart. And the Bihari professional elites are quite canny about mobilizing that kind of thinking, also of positioning their ambitions as compatible with, at this point a fairly conservative form of nationalism and of articulating what they call subordinate patriotism. In other words, our loyalty to Bihar and our championing of a Bihari identity and Bihari political fortunes doesn't mean that we're not good Indian nationalists. Those are compatible. And so the region is a sort of a necessary component of a strong Indian nation. But if we're going to be making common cause with Bengalis, it's going to be as equals, not as their subordinates. Now, when Bihar and Ordisha is actually established as a Province in 1912 and Patna has made the capital, things don't actually end up the way that they had hoped or anticipated because the Dhaka Secretariat is simultaneously is abolished and so a lot of the administrators end up moving to Patna. And so, and so the number of Bengalis and especially Bengali white collar professionals in Batna actually shoots up. So things don't go exactly the way that they hope, but at the same time, they do get their wish. Batna is a capital and Bihar is a new province.
- [64:20]
Soumya Dadu
Yeah, it's incredible that there are so many layers of caste and gender, imperial and regional subjecthood. There's politics of language and religion that are intertwined in the story behind this event. Moving to Patna, I noticed that you bookend your work by mapping out the spatial divisions, administrative management, and movement in migration within the city itself, with more of a focus on the 19th century in the first chapter and the 20th century in the fifth chapter, after it becomes the provincial capital. So what changed about Patna and maybe what stayed the same after the event?
- [64:58]
Professor David Boyk
Yeah, so a lot of things changed. One thing that changed was the form of the city itself. So I said before that it's a kind of east, west, very linear, very narrow city, with Patna city or the old Azimabad at the eastern end and Bakipur, the colonial suburb, at the western end. That kind of polarization is only amplified after the separation because there's a new. A new suburb built even farther to the west of Bakipur, which is called the new capital, where all the administrative buildings are. And so already there'd been quite extreme inequality, quality of kind of urban services and quality of governance that was afforded to different parts of the city, and that only becomes more exacerbated. So Patna city becomes more crowded. There's more kind of disinvestment from kind of basic urban functions like sanitation. At the same time, as the new capital is, quite a lot of money is being spent on it. It's quite spacious. And this has implications not only kind of on the. On the level of urban governance, but also in the kinds of elites and the orientations of those elites who are inhabiting Patna. So I mentioned, of course, there's, you know, a lot of Bengali administrators are showing up. Of course, there's lots of room also for the Bihari elites who'd been advocating for separation. Now they're even more concentrated in Bipur and in the new capital. And their orientation toward those places and toward the ways of life that they cultivate is further buttressed. And so that means English and to some extent Hindi are coming in and Urdu is going out. Not only the Urdu language, but the whole Persianate cultural world, but also a landscape of urban governance. In Patna City, older elites and older forms of authority are marginalized. You know, there are old families that have. Historically, they've held darbars. So Darbar is a court. And so a lot of these kind of local nobles will have darbars in there, in the courtyards or kind of parlors of their houses, where people of the neighborhood of various statuses come to socialize and to kind of seek intervention in their, in their problems. And this is not at all to romanticize that, but it's to say that the kinds of authority and the particular groups that are able to exercise it are changing in dramatic terms. And that has implications for the kind of cultural and intellectual life of the city. And so Urdu doesn't vanish, but it's no longer part of the basic cultural formation of a kind of a sophisticated and well to do person in Patna. And in fact, that's not only the case in the aggregate, but also for instance, in individual forms. So for instance, I mentioned Rajendra Prasad. He learns Hindi as an adult, like other Kastas of his time. He's very well versed in Persian, in Urdu, not in Hindi, because Hindi didn't exist in the kind of the sense that we recognize it when he was a child. And so it's at Kakira University that he's introduced to modern standard Hindi by a fellow Bihar. And then he sort of ends up over time being more oriented in his life around English and secondarily around a Hindi centric public sphere and not around Urdu and Persian the way that others of, as I said, a variety of backgrounds had done up to that point. And so the world of Alpanj, for instance, is really gone, you know, before very long. And it doesn't, it's not complete and it's not instantaneous. But that's something that does come out, for instance, in that tazkara, the yadgar e rozgar that I talked about, where there's a very clear sense among everyone who's kind of a attuned to these questions in Patna that the days of Urdu, the days of Persian and the days of that entire post Mughal cultural formation are quickly coming to an end. It doesn't mean that everything changes still today. If you want to go from Baan Kipur to Patna city, it takes about an hour, the same as it did 100 years ago. And so the geography of the city, that sort of basic shape of the city, has not changed. Also there's the city's provinciality, the form of its provinciality changes. But it was provincial before it became a capital and it remains provincial today in a different way, you know, more than a century after, after becoming a capital. But that provinciality, it's no Longer because it's not a governmental center in some way. It's. Because it is a governmental center. Right. It's, you know, obviously not everybody in Patna has any connection with, with, you know, administration at all. That's. That's not the case, you know, in a way that's familiar from other cities, like, you know, Lucknow, for instance. That it's a state capital still today, I think, does shape an enormous number of things in the city. And it means that it loses much of what had made it culturally alive in the period that I'm beginning with. It's precisely because it was provincial before 1912 that it had so much dynamism. Because of the kind of transformations that are happening, the link between kind of local forms of prestige and authority and those kinds of links with other small cities are attenuated.
- [70:08]
Soumya Dadu
That's very interesting. And I think the impact of administrative change on a cultural and intellectual life hints at the importance of your work to us right now in this moment. You know, I feel very aware of the fact that we are speaking today of a history of Patna and a history of Bihar while awaiting results of the 2025 Legislative assembly elections. This made me wonder how your contemporary experience of doing archival fieldwork, of living in Patna, engaging with the staff at the AR archives and libraries, of making friends, of talking to families, in other words, your experience of the present, how does that shape the story that you are telling about the past in your work?
- [70:49]
Professor David Boyk
Yeah, I really appreciate that. Before I started the project, I'd been to Bihar only once and only very briefly. But I was struck at that time, and then even more so when I ended up spending a lot more time there, at the enormous divergence between the ways that I'd heard Bihar spoken of and Biharis spoken of and my experience. And in particular, I found that there's quite a distinctive gentleness that you find just routinely in Patna. So, so, for instance, you know, something that. That always really struck me is I, I would often take shared autorickshaws and in other places, you know, if, if somebody wants to stop, you know, they, they might say, giro right and stop the. Stop the vehicle. And that's taken in, In. In. In good spirit and sort of, you know, the, The. The. The way things are, are kind of routinely done in. In lots of places, but that's not the way that I would usually hear that interaction go. In Patna, people would very often say something like, bhaiya sidekar KE rukti jega. So in other words, brother, I'm trying to. Gonna try to Translate it in a way that kind of gets to the essence of what I'm trying to express here, which is, you know, brother, would you please move the car to the side and stop? Right, so it's, it's a much longer expression. It's not, it's not even just DJ instead of do. Right? Not even. It's not even sort of. There's. There's many layers for. And I'll try to express this for, for listeners who, who don't know Hindi, Urdu. So you can say roko, right? I mean, stop it. You can say rokto. That's a little bit nicer. You can say rokdi ji. That's much nicer. And finally you can say. Right. In other words, I'm addressing you in a very formal register. And I'm also saying in the future, at some point, this is not really exactly what the expression. But I'm kind of exaggerating here. Could you please stop?
- [72:26]
Soumya Dadu
Right.
- [72:26]
Professor David Boyk
And so the point that I'm. That I'm kind of making is I would find that in a situation where it's conventional to be not necessarily brusque, but efficient and, you know, there's nothing generally taken amiss if you're a little bit abrupt, but people would be kind of unnecessarily polite. I'm not going to make any kind of sociological argument for why that's the case, but it's something that first of all struck me just as something that was nice, but also something that really diverged from the way that I had sort of been taught to think about, about Bihari and Biharis, who are often, you know, spoken of in quite pejorative ways in other places. So the point, I don't think that I exactly tried to write the book as a defense of Bhatna, but certainly kind of that kind of affection that I feel, you know, hopefully kind of, I think imbues the, the book with a certain kind of. Of sympathy and of openness also to, to the possibility that there's. There's something in marginalized places that might be interesting and valuable and surprising, you know, and that's, that's not the only such experience. You know, I mean, there, there's a. I used to like to go to a tea stall that's kind of across the street from the Patna junction train station, and I was surprised one, to find a group of poets who apparently, you know, met there routinely. Also, you know, as someone who's interested in orderly literature and, you know, buying Ordu books and reading orderly books, it's often quite hard to find them there. You know, there are certain places that you can go in various cities, but, but it's not necessarily that easy. But in, in Patna, not too far from the Godebakt Library, there's a neighborhood called Sebzi Bach that has very nice order of the bookstores. And so I was happy and a little bit surprised to find there's sort of a nucleus of this Urdu intellectual life still, still alive and well, you know, having said that, it was marginalized, you know, more than a century ago. You know, that is the case, but it's not complete. Similarly, the Hudabaksh Library, there's actually two buildings, the main reading room, where, you know, it's air conditioned and you have scholars from all around India and all around the world reading, you know, Mughal manuscripts and so on. But before you get there, you pass a different room which is, there's a building with, it's kind of open, open to the outdoors, you know, and Putnam is a place that doesn't have a lot of public space that's available to kind of ordinary people. But one place that you can go is, it's called Curzon Reading Room because Viceroy Curzon was one of the supporters of the library. So it still has his name over it. And that's where you go to read the newspaper or to cram for your exams. So it's an important thing for people to do to be able to cram for exams and they need somewhere to do it. And that's not what Hudebaksh was hoping for. But seeing that. And you know, and also in other libraries, there's, there's another library in kind of a Hindi focused library in Patna city called the Bihar Hideshi Library. I had kind of similar experiences there and kind of thinking about the links among different kinds of intellectual life and intellectual activity and including intellectual pursuits that are kind of self described intellectuals might not recognize as such, like cramming for exams. It made me wonder about the different kinds of intellectual life that might be kind of coexisting and interacting with, acting in a place like Batna and, or people who might feel that they're left behind and might be very acutely aware of their perception by others as backwards or inadequate or provincial, and those might or might not kind of accord with their own understanding of themselves. That made me also kind of want to think about the histories, the histories of a provincial place or a place that some might call provincial, and the different ways in which, which it might have been provincial or not, and the different ways in which it might have been urban or urbane over its history.
- [76:03]
Soumya Dadu
Yeah, I really like how your own movement across the city and the feelings that different sites evoked and just interacting with people evoked had a bearing on the story you tell, at least in its tone, if not in substance necessarily. That, that's really fascinating. So I think this brings us to my final question. What is something that you hope that readers, and I'm imagining all the different kinds of readers who would be interested in your work, from historians to urban planners, language students to Patna's own residents. What do you hope that these different readers take away from your work?
- [76:46]
Professor David Boyk
Thanks. The fundamental thing I think that I would kind of like to offer is, is about multiplicity. In other words, I'm, I'm not at all trying to dismiss the literature on kind of bigger and better known cities. I think, you know, I've learned a tremendous amount from that literature and, and you know, I found it extremely valuable, you know, both intellectually and, you know, and also for sort of understanding my own, my own experiences. And it's also had a lot to say for me about Patna. At the same time, looking at places like Patna or like Lucknow or like Hyderabad or Madurai or, you know, any of these kinds of places that not as frequently written about, I think it helps, certainly helps understand places like them better. But I think it also has something to say about the more familiar kind of archetypal cities, namely, what it, what is distinctive about big cities and what is distinctive about small cities and what are the things that they, that they share or that move between them? And those could have to do with governance, they could have to do with political economy. They could have to do with, with cultural history. They could be, you know, they could have to do with, with the relationship between the city and, and, and the countryside or between kind of forms of urbanity and forms of rurality. I was just thinking about this very recently when, when I listened to, to Will Glover's new Book Network episode about, about his new book that I'm haven't read yet. And I'm very excited to because it, it, I think sort of comes to these sort of similar questions but from a very different perspective. And, but I have to also say I, I benefited enormously from his book book on Lahore, which also I sort of served as a model for me in terms of linking sort of geographies and intellectual histories. And so that's kind of one thing which is that places that might seem different because one is big and one is small might have similarities and places that seem similar because they're, after all, they're both cities might have important differences. And then also in terms of methodology, I'd also also like to offer. I sort of struggle at some points because, you know, it's useful at various times to say, you know, well, I'm an urban historian, or I'm an intellectual historian, or I'm a cultural historian and so on. And I've always struggled a little bit with how to kind of place myself, because I think that there are aspects of the book that you could call an intellectual history. So, for instance, the Khudabaksh chapter, the Alpunch chapter, but at the same time, especially in the Alpan chapter, I'm really trying to situate those intellectual histories in a particular geography and in a particular social milieu. And so, for me, my understanding of Batna as a place, as a set of political institutions and so on is, for me, it's something that I have to approach from via questions about. About literature, about the kind of the ways that, for instance, people interested in literature were interacting, whether it was in Mushayda's poetry gatherings or through kind of print media, media like El Punch in local geographies, and with people quite far away, and vice versa. You know, I don't have any illusions that I'm the first person to kind of come up with such an idea, but that is something that I would like to emphasize or remind people of, which is that intellectual life, political life, happens in particular places, and places don't really have. They have the meanings that are, you know, because this is a very old point, you know, but one that I had to sort of remind myself of at various places points that they come to be constituted, not only through kind of petitions to local officials or, you know, things like that which I discussed a number of points, or through infrastructural projects, like a kind of failed tramway project or arguments over sanitation, but also through cultural life. But also the cultural life in a newspaper like El Punch is enmeshed with the physical surroundings and. And the kind of. The playful tone of contributors to L. Punch is also serving to draw connections to kind of effectuate lives, often having to do with, like, well, we want cleaner streets because the plague keeps reappearing in Patna. And this is something that we have in common with people in Lahore. And so drawing those connections in a particular cultural idiom and through kind of the medium and the technologies, also of lithography and of the mail and of the railroad. You know, all of those are kind of inseparable from each other.
- [81:13]
Soumya Dadu
All right, we'll end here. Thank you so much for this conversation. It's been deeply illuminating, and I've really appreciate the care and nuance that you've brought to these questions. I think your reflections open up a lot of new ways of thinking about cities in general, small cities, and colonial South Asia as well. And I'd really encourage listeners to read the book, which bring this conversation also alive and rich and compelling ways. Thank you so much.
- [81:40]
Professor David Boyk
Thank you.