Unseen Genius: People and Plants on the Periphery – A Conversation with Sumana Roy

Join us for an InterIntellect Thanksgiving weekend SuperSalon special with author Sumana Roy about people on the edges, their incredible contributions to knowledge about ourselves and the question of whether one can breakthrough and influence and inspire as someone living on the geographical edge of culture and society. We will navigate the history of provincial authors ranging from “Rabindranath Tagore to William Shakespeare, John Clare to the Bhakti poets, T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul to the Brontës, and Kishore Kumar to Annie Ernaux – and also explore insights from Sumana’s book “How I Became a Tree” – accessing a depth of insight from other nonhuman players in our quest for truth and connection.

Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries (Yale University Press), Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two collections of poems: Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant (and Plant Thinkers of Twentieth Century Bengal, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Her poems, essays and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, LARB, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review, Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. 

From the acclaimed author of How I Became a Tree, an enchanting and joyous exploration of life and creativity at the geographical edges of the modern world

“A striking mix of memoir and literary analysis. . . . Wise and whimsical.”—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal

Who is a provincial? In this subversive book, Sumana Roy assembles a striking cast of writers, artists, filmmakers, cricketers, tourist guides, English teachers, lovers and letter writers, private tutors and secret-keepers whose lives and work provide varied answers to that question. Combining memoir with the literary, sensory, and emotional history of an ignored people, she challenges the metropolitan’s dominance to reclaim the joyous dignity of provincial life, its tics and taunts, enthusiasms and tragicomedies.

In a wide-ranging series of “postcards” from the peripheries of India, Europe, America, and the Middle East, Roy brings us deep into the imaginative world of those who have carried their provinciality like a birthmark. Ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to William Shakespeare, John Clare to the Bhakti poets, T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul to the Brontës, and Kishore Kumar to Annie Ernaux, she celebrates the provincials’ humor and hilarity, playfulness and irony, belatedness and instinct for carefree accidents and freedom. Her unprecedented account of provincial life offers an alternative portrait of our modern world.