This book tells 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 new 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, Provincial Metropolis shows, 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

David Boyk offers an erudite and lively account of how early twentieth-century Bihar becomes the epitome of cultural, social, and economic ‘backwardness’ in late colonial and independent India. Provincial Metropolis is a significant rethinking of the decline of Urdu and of Islamicate culture in north India and of the relation of the provincial and the metropolitan in modernity. Boyk’s work effects a profound reorientation of the social and political theory of ‘backward places’.

Lawrence Cohen - University of California, Berkeley

David Boyk’s Provincial Metropolis is a majestic work of scholarship about a seemingly unlikely place: Patna, the Indian regional capital of Bihar. Amid the reams of scholarship on the history of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, much of it centered on developments in huge mega-cities like Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta, Boyk’s shift of gaze to the urban—and urbane—world of an interior city like Patna, which was itself a crucial nodal point in the cultural and commercial traffic connecting different parts of the northeastern subcontinent, brings us a whole new perspective on India’s fraught transition to colonial modernity. Combining the best elements of urban, political, cultural, and social history, Boyk’s incredibly well-researched and deftly written biography of modern Patna will be a lasting and memorable contribution to the field, an elegiac window into a bygone era that is bursting with vivid details and an overall delight to read.

Rajeev Kinra - Northwestern University, Evanston