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.