Sumana Roy’s eclectic musings in Postcards from the Peripheries draw on a motley cast of ‘provincials’—writers, languages, theorists, artists, sports figures, filmmakers, tourist guides, family, friends, acquaintances—as a starting point for her ruminations on being a provincial, on the quotidian nature of provinciality and on the provincialization of the provincial. The sections of the book move peripatetically to juxtapose extant knowledge, the cultivation of which according to Roy has been institutionalized as useful or useless.
In a section on Pedigree, for instance, Roy contemplates on the use of English as the language of self-conscious affect—be it a passionate yet unimaginative ‘I love you’ or cliched lines of Hallmark greeting cards. It is a language in which one makes declarations such as the one she had inscribed—‘From a daughter to her father, 10th August 1992’—in a book she gifted her father as an echo of its title, Letters from a Father to his Daughter. Roy’s tone of gentle amusement, as she shares that her father carried it to work and proudly showed the inscription to his colleagues but never read the book itself, will not fail in coaxing an answering smile from a reader.