I feel slightly nervous to say this, for fear of it being considered sentimental, but the idea that would grow into Provincials seems to have existed inside me for decades, for most of my adult life. Even before I had been called a “provincial”, the contours of that categorisation had come to me in various forms. It was inevitably used as a pejorative in Bangla, English, Hindi and Nepali – the languages that surround me. In it is hidden a comparative, of being inferior to someone by comparison. It is the nature of provincial life to feel deprived of experiences and opportunities and power, of a kind of belatedness, but none of this annotates our living experience. I don’t feel like a victim, and Provincials is not a book about victimhood. I set out to write it to celebrate the joys and ironies and idiosyncrasies of provincial life, of course, but also, hopefully, to inaugurate a discourse of inquiry into this large body of literature and art.

The book speaks of the works and lives of several other, from Tagore to RK Narayan. What is the kind of research that went into its making?

The idea of research has become so associated with knowing what one wants and where to find it, that it feels a bit intimidating to me. Most of these people – these writers, artists, filmmakers, my friends and neighbours – have come to my life in unexpected ways, not from my having looked for them – from books read at college, from listening to stories about them, from eavesdropping. My idea of research is a bit like eavesdropping on oneself, to allow the unexpected and the familiar a new kind of residency. I’ve not written about a single person who did not come into my life by accident. The provincial is not yet a “tag word” in academic discourse. So no search engine would have led me to the cast of Provincials.

The book seamlessly flits between personal anecdotes to snippets of other creators’ lives and works. How hard was this process of writing something that is part-memoir part-analysis?

The truth is that I’m not conscious of these distinctions that exist between genres. Michel Serres, in his book, The Five Senses, has written about the artificiality of genres because they privilege the heightening of one sense over the other four. My writing is limited by the perimeter of my experiences and my range of vision. I can only write about things that emerge from my own experience. I write as I live or speak, unaware of moving through compartments of genres. I also do not feel the necessity to change into a different self when I am writing about a so-deemed “scholarly” subject – I will write about Shakespeare in the same spirit and tone as I do about my little nephew, for instance. Academic writing is mostly deprived of humour and other emotions. My ambition for my writing is for the reader to have access to all the rasas as they move through the book, because that is how we live, through a flux of emotions.

Writing about one’s own life or family and friends can be a cathartic process. Was it so for you?

It is the reader or the audience who is to experience “catharsis”, not the writer, Aristotle tells us. What I felt was an urgent desire for the world, however small the readership of any book might be in a non-reading culture such as ours, to see the silhouettes of the lives of these people, to see them as belonging to a history that has not been explored. It was their lives that indulged the habit of my mind to look for other provincials, to study their behaviour, the forces that had created them, nourished and nurtured them as well as those that had caused them resistance. I observed, almost like a parent, the choices they had made, the control they had relinquished, their intellectual and emotional habits and habitats. I was creating a family, I was bringing them together, these people strangers to each other, separated by history and geography and much else, but who shared perhaps just this – a commonality of origin. That is how Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore, DH Lawrence, Kishore Kumar and my neighbours and friends could come together.

How have your experiences from a life on the peripheries shaped your outlook as a commercial writer in English?

The food I like to eat, the way I live, the way I express my emotions, the way I write and speak and how I love, all of these derive from having been raised in the provinces. To write like someone I am not would not only be dishonest – it would also be a failure. In this book, I gesture towards provincial styles of writing. I write in one of these styles too, I suppose.

“…The fate of a provincial writer – always in need of a tutor but never finding one,’ says a line in the book. What would be your advice for small-town writers looking to make it big in the world of literature?

I continue to feel this – the need of a tutor, like Ekalavya did, because one feels deprived of an education that would really change us and bring out the imagined best in us. It takes a lifetime to understand that such an education is utopic, but one writes with that mirage inside one’s head. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I feel for editorial attention – I know that “track changes” irritates most writers, but I feel grateful. I use it as an opportunity to educate myself. I could do with some advice myself, but if I really had to say anything, it would perhaps be to try and protect oneself from being bullied by the world and what’s trending into writing what will sell.

What do you hope readers take away from Provincials?

I want readers to recognise that the provincial is not a subaltern figure. I say this not only because of my weariness with a culture of victimhood that has taken over and overwhelmed all our protests, but because I really believe that we are not victims. Yes, there is a culture of deprivation and neglect that is inherent to provincial life, but which kind of life has everything? Isn’t that some kind of utopia, to imagine a life that has everything right and perfect in it, or at least everything we consider right and perfect? These conditions and circumstances – let us call them deprivation and neglect in shorthand – bring an edge and angularity to provincial life that doesn’t feel like a lack at all, or certainly doesn’t when one is in the middle of living through this experience. That awareness is, more often, only retrospective, that comes when one has stepped outside the province, that what made us, like we discover our shadow only in the presence of light.