In this talk, David Boyk draws from his new book, Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2025), to tell the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many—and is still seen today—as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland. Despite Patna’s real decline, it continued to nurture a vibrant intellectual culture that linked it with cities and towns across northern India and beyond. Urdu literary gatherings and other Islamicate traditions inherited from Mughal times helped animate the networks sustaining institutions like scholarly libraries and satirical newspapers. Meanwhile, English-educated lawyers sought to bring greater prominence to their city and region by making Patna the capital of a new province. They succeeded, but as Patna’s political influence grew, its distinctive character was diminished. Ultimately, Boyk argues, Patna’s intellectual and cultural life thrived not despite its provinciality but because of it.
David 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. His interests include South Asian urban and regional history, Bollywood cinema, food studies, and the history of Hindi-Urdu language and literature. He is the author of Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2025), a history of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His writing has appeared in South Asia, Comparative Studies of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, The Caravan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is also the coauthor (with Daniel Majchrowicz) of Zer o Zabar: An Introduction to the Urdu Script, an open-access online textbook, and of a forthcoming volume of translated stories by Qazi Abdul Ghaffar.
