DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

David Boyk teaches courses in Hindi-Urdu language and literature, and on South Asian literature, film, and history. He received his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include South Asian urban and regional history, Bollywood cinema, food studies, and the history of Hindi-Urdu language and literature. 

His book, Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 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 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.

His other scholarly publications include “Collaborative Wit: Provincial Publics in Colonial North India,” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and “Nationality and Fashionality: Hats, Lawyers and Other Important Things to Remember,” “Bound for Home: Books and Community in a Bihari Qasba,” and (with Andrew Amstutz and C. Ryan Perkins) “Unpacking the Library,” all in South Asia. Two annotated translations appeared in Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma, eds., Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women. He has also published essays in various publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Caravan, The Wire Urdu, and The Wire Hindi. With Daniel Majchrowicz, he coauthored an open-access, interactive textbook, Zer o Zabar: An Introduction to the Urdu Script. He is currently translating short story collections by the Urdu writers Saadat Hasan Manto and (with Daniel Majchrowicz) Qazi Abdul Ghaffar.