This book tells the story of the city 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 had come to be seen by many-and is still seen today-as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland. But despite the city's real decline, it continued to nurture a vibrant and cosmopolitan 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 that sustained satirical newspapers and scholarly libraries. Drawing on rich archival research in Urdu, Hindi, and English, Provincial Metropolis shows that Patna's intellectual and cultural life thrived not despite its provinciality but because of it.

‘David Boyk's insightful and readable study of the city of Patna offers ringing proof that long scholarly neglect of this ‘provincial metropolis,' as he aptly names it, is undeserved. Boyk traces the vicissitudes of political control, economic development, and infrastructure change the city experienced, telling Patna's story with an inclusive and original eye.

Barbara Metcalf - University of California, Davis

Provincial Metropolis presents a fresh and nuanced framework for interpreting the layered lives of South Asia's ‘tier-2' cities. Through a history of modern Patna, David Boyk provides a lively, masterful account of ‘the mofussil' as space and idea, revealing the many cities and histories that inhabit urban spaces beyond the subcontinent's metropolises. Drawing on a wealth of English, Hindi, and Urdu sources and changing urban geography, Boyk establishes Patna's emergence in colonial India as a provincial capital, but also as a hub of cosmopolitan intellectual and literary networks, that diminished gradually with the receding of its older Islamicate cultures. This persuasive reassessment of how provincial cities have shaped South Asia's contemporary landscapes is a must-read for everyone interested in colonial modernity, urbanism and regional history.

Prachi Deshpande - Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta