This book tells the story of the city 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 had come to be seen by many-and is still seen today-as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland. But despite the city's real decline, it continued to nurture a vibrant and cosmopolitan 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 that sustained satirical newspapers and scholarly libraries. Drawing on rich archival research in Urdu, Hindi, and English, Provincial Metropolis shows that Patna's intellectual and cultural life thrived not despite its provinciality but because of it.