An conversation with Kanupriya Dhingra with a brief introduction to her book, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, published by Speaking Tiger Books.
“Most Sundays, I found myself walking alongside hundreds of others for whom Daryaganj was, and continues to be, the primary site of book buying. It was democratic, messy, inclusive, sometimes illegal, often chaotic, but always alive.”
-- Kanupriya Dhingra, Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public
Perhaps, Kanupriya Dhingra’s Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, could be seen as a democratisation of the process of reading. In an ethnographic study of a book bazaar that springs up every Sunday, Dhingra familiarises us with the historicity of the culture of a bazaar, of reading and even locates its roots in the Mughal Faiz Bazaar from the time of Shahjahan (1592-1666).
In an earlier article dated 2020, she had written about the bazaar: “Historian Sohail Hashmi says that Akbarabadi Begum, one of Shahjahan’s wives, built this market in its earliest form. Several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of ‘Faiz Bazaar’ in this area. The name, Daryaganj, itself means ‘a market across a river’, where ‘Darya’ refers to a river (here, the river Yamuna) and ‘Ganj’ refers to a site where trade is conducted. It was not always the same product that was traded here; Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used, rare, pirated books in the 1960s. According to locals, Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market, set up adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. There were vinyl records and hand-mounted record players, radios, transistors, mechanical goods, medical goods and used clothes; books too found their place. After a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj, a few booksellers moved to the now absent ‘Lohe ka Pul‘ (Iron Bridge), near Golcha Cinema, from where the street market began to expand. Before its recent relocation to a nearby site by the name of Mahila Haat, the bazaar extended till Delite Cinema Hall. The structure of the market appeared like a long ‘L’, with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Road, and more than 250 vendors.”
Dhingra continued spellbound by the ‘magic’ of this bazaar when she visited it as a child and then, as a university student. Coming from a small town, where bookshops that stocked more than textbooks were a rarity, she supported the booksellers when they protested the ‘legalisation’ and the relocation of the bazaar to a newer site in 2019 and wrote of it in Himal Southasian in an article titled, ‘The death of a book bazaar’.
The book gives fascinating glimpses of booksellers and book buyers, of connoisseurs and of students striving for upward economic mobility in the job market. It houses parents, children, old people and young, book lovers, browsers, students, teachers and more. Dhingra asserts: “A republic, in its original sense, is a res publica—a public thing, a commons, something that belongs to everyone who participates in it. Not owned, not curated, not gatekept. The Patri Kitab Bazaar[1] is exactly this: a space where a rickshaw puller and an IAS officer, a first-generation student and a shauqeen[2] collector, a vendor from Uttar Pradesh and a buyer from Assam all have equal claim to the same pile of books.”
One of the most fascinating stories that emerges is of the Om Bookstore — that can be found in major malls across Delhi and many major cities of India — and Om Books International. Dhingra met the founder Om Mago and this is what she wrote: “Om Mago told me that when he first came to Daryaganj, there was no bazaar to speak of—just a few men who had found this way of living. Books that did not belong anywhere, that had potential afterlives, had been discovered as a sellable commodity. ‘There was need in Delhi, and there were books.’ From that simple equation, he learnt the trade, built connections across Delhi and Mumbai, and gradually transformed a pavement enterprise into what Om Books International is today.”
Dhingra has gathered details from booksellers and connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like Sohail Hashmi and Abdul Sattar gave her historic antecedents while bloggers like, Mayank Austen Soofi, who runs the highly coveted The Delhi Walla blog, and claims to idolise Arundhati Roy and have met her in the bazaar, shared more recent perspectives. Soofi “has been passing in and out of the same neighbourhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes” as the New Yorker noted, giving almost a ‘Proustian quality’ to his posts on Delhi.
Dhingra has noticed that selling books is largely confined to men though women buyers are visible. She sees a difference in approach among the genders, which is an interesting observation, given the fact that Delhi is known for its discriminatory attitude towards women.
What I found most fascinating about the book was the capture of local colours, though the focus was more centred on discussions around North Indian languages. It has interesting snippets like a man who operates pirated books out of the dickey of his car, lodging his ware near an ATM. Dhingra tells us: “At the Patri Kitab Bazaar, pirated books are called D ki kitab—where D refers to duplicate and/or digital.” She mentions too, a publisher that brings out ‘Guru Chela’ ( Master- Disciple) booklets. “There were some 100 colourful booklets with miscellaneous titles of useful literature in Hindi, English, and Hinglish.” These were a mix of write- ups on ‘useful’ tips as well as popular jokes and light literature. Along with these, the vendor sold things like “pocketknives, razors, scissors, tiny notebooks, used fountain pens, old wristwatches and their band.” She also found stalls selling old film posters, lyrics and even ancient coins! A copy of the Lolita (1955, written by Vladimir Nabokov in English) translated to Hindi finds mention. “I found a copy of Lolita in the bazaar once—in Hindi. The title only mentioned Lolita in Hindi, and there was nothing else on the cover except a woman’s portrait. There were no copyright claims inside the paratextual pages—no author, no publisher. For a reader or buyer who is not familiar with Nabokov and his works, it is just another novel in Hindi.”
She makes one feel it’s a must to visit the bazaar, perhaps, with a copy of her book in hand! Her style is smooth, evocative and flows well. Dhingra has a passion which translated to a whole book reflecting a community that is unique in the very fact of its existence, tied loosely by the love of books – not necessarily reading. We interviewed her to discuss her journey and here’s how she responded:
“As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.” Can you please elaborate on this “transformative power” and how the bazaar forms and unforms every Sunday?
Until 2019, since the 1970s, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was set up between two landmark cinema halls in Old Delhi — Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Road and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road. On any other day, this L-shaped part of the street carried the ordinary rhythms of a working city: government offices, shops and traders, food outlets, traffic on the road. On Sundays, those rhythms would change. Iron and cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sheets, and books spread across the footpath, using the closed shutters of offices as their display backdrop. The bazaar did not occupy the street so much as it temporarily rewrote it. What ethnography taught me to pay attention to is precisely this rewriting of the space that is overdetermined during the week, claimed by traffic and routine and competing uses, is briefly re-scripted by the arrival of booksellers and readers. And then, by evening, unscripted again. Books would go back in their boxes, the tarpaulins were folded, and the footpath was simply itself — flat and indifferent. The street would forget entirely what stood on it. But the people remembered.
Can you tell our readers what is ethnography? Why did you feel the need to do an ethnographic study on the Sunday book bazaar? What would be the target readership of your very well researched book?
Ethnography, at its simplest, is the method of sustained and repeated presence in a place and trying to understand a world on its own terms. What it is not is a survey, an archive search, or a one-time interview. It is slow and embodied. It is, also, deeply dependent on the trust of the people who agree to let you into their working lives.
Because the bazaar exists outside the formal structures that usually produce archives, there are no official records of this market. The only way to know it is to go there, repeatedly, over years, and listen. The book is built from those years of fieldnotes, interviews, and observations. While the formal fieldwork for my doctoral thesis happened in 2019, I had been a regular for a while. I continued spending Sundays at the bazaar across seasons, displacements, and a pandemic. With the support of the booksellers, I documented the 2019 protests in urgent media reports as well, to produce an immediate archive of what happened to the bazaar, instead of waiting to revisit my notes only while writing my thesis.
As for who the book is for — I resisted writing a book that only scholars could read. The Sunday Book Bazaar is for the student who recognises Usha with her handwritten list of textbooks — one that has scope for a few other ‘finds’ because her pocket money allows for it, here, at the bazaar. It is for the shauqeen who recognises their own Sunday morning in these pages. It is for the Delhi reader who has been going to the bazaar for years without quite knowing why. It is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible. The research is rigorous, I hope. But the book is for everyone.
You have mentioned the absence of women among the sellers. The few that are there do not even see themselves as sellers but as temporary fixtures in lieu of their husbands. Can you tell us why in the twenty-first century women are still being segregated in the bazaar? Is it justified?
The question of women at the bazaar is more nuanced than it first appears. Women vendors are not absent. Quite a few have been running stalls at Daryaganj for years, some for decades, even if it means supporting their brother or husband or son. What is more important, and what my fieldwork revealed, is that many of them do not claim the identity of bookseller. When I asked directly, the answers were careful, deflective, or simply negative. One vendor, who had been managing her late husband’s stall with evident expertise for decades, told me that this work belongs to men because women cannot “lift heavy books”. Another, who had joined the bazaar more recently, had also lost her husband. She was selling the stock he had gathered over the years, keeping the stall going until her son was old enough to take over. But it was more than that, she said, “He passed away on a Sunday, after selling books at the bazaar. That has to mean something.”
Cities give women this kind of ironic independence. The bazaar is one of its more interesting examples. Anonymity in the crowd, the freedom to occupy public space on their own terms, the economic agency that comes from handling money and stock and customers without anyone particularly watching. And yet the identity, the word bookseller, with its history and its community and its authority, remains something many women at the bazaar do not claim for themselves. The crowd hides them, and that hiding is simultaneously a form of freedom and a form of erasure.
You have also noticed that women buyers are different from men. How and why? Please elaborate. Is this a reflection of the culture/ accepted norm of the city/ the sellers and visitors?
Women’s time in public spaces, especially in Delhi, is measured differently. They negotiate with surveillance and scrutiny. Their purposefulness is driven by necessity. They arrive with clearer lists and are less likely to linger without a specific destination in mind. A woman spending two hours browsing a pavement book market on a Sunday morning is doing something that requires more social permission than the equivalent activity does for a man.
And yet the bazaar’s openness, its visibility from the street, and the absence of walls and thresholds made it more accessible to women than many other public spaces in the city. Even Mahila Haat[3] tends to offer an interior that might feel safer, allowing a new scope for purposeless wandering. Moreover, on a public footpath or inside a gated haat, among other people, that openness is precisely what makes the bazaar feel usable for many women readers. What they do with that openness reflects the social conditions they navigate to get there, not their relationship to books, which is as varied and as shauqeen as anyone else’s.
One of the things that your book makes me wonder is — is book piracy justified? What do you think?
I want to be clear first: I do not support piracy, and it is illegal. That is not a complicated position for me. What is complicated is the context in which piracy at Daryaganj exists and the questions that context raises.
After the March 2026 raid by the Crime Branch in Rohini, in which over twenty thousand books were seized — titles by Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, among others — Penguin India posted about it on social media. The comments were quite instructive. Readers responded not with sympathy for the publisher but with a straightforward observation: books are not affordable. The original editions of the seized titles cost several hundred rupees each. The pirated edition costs a fraction of that.
I am not using this to justify piracy. I am using it to point to the structural failure that makes piracy legible to so many people as a reasonable response. The formal publishing market has not solved the affordability problem. The bazaar, in its informal and sometimes illegal way, tends to fill that gap, albeit partially. The more interesting question is not whether piracy is right or wrong but what its persistence tells us about the gaps the formal book economy has created and, at the moment, cannot fulfil. A reading public that cannot afford books is not served by enforcement alone.
You have written of “a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.” Please elaborate how the bazaar supports aspirants of upward mobility. Does it help close the gaping gaps we notice among different socio-economic, ethnic groups that exist within the given polity?
The phrase unofficial welfare infrastructure came out of a specific observation: that the buyers I met at Daryaganj were not, in the main, casual browsers. They were people for whom the price of a book at a formal bookshop was a genuine obstacle. Students preparing for competitive examinations. First-generation readers with no family library to draw on. Aspirants using books as tools for a different life.
The state has not solved the problem of access to books. School libraries are underfunded. Public libraries are underused and often inaccessible. The formal book market serves readers who can afford it. The bazaar, entirely without subsidy or policy support, has for six decades been doing what the state has not: putting books within reach of people who need them.
Does it close socio-economic gaps? Partially, and imperfectly. It reduces the cost of access. It creates a space where the student with fifty rupees and the collector with five hundred rupees stand at the same stall. But it does not solve the structural problems that create those gaps — underfunding, unequal infrastructure, the credentialism that makes books feel like necessities rather than pleasures. What it does is something more modest and more important: it refuses to accept that books should only be available to those who can afford them at full price.
What has been your most interesting experience in this bazaar? Please share it with us.
There is one moment I return to often. It was 28 July 2019, a Sunday, a few weeks into my formal fieldwork. I was walking from Delhi Gate Metro Station toward the bazaar, headphones on, no music, mentally preparing for the day’s interviews. My phone rang. It was Qamar Saeed, the vendor I had come to know as the ‘King of Daryaganj’, “Madamji, bazaar uth gaya hai. Aap jaldi aaiye.” Madamji, the bazaar has been lifted. Come quickly.
I walked faster. My mind had gone quiet. No fieldwork instincts, no questions forming. Just the turn onto Netaji Subhash Marg, and then the footpath. It looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed: how completely the same it looked. The shutters were where they always were. The traffic moved. A guard sat outside the closed bank, reading his phone. And then I looked at the footpath, and it was just a footpath. No iron boxes. No tarpaulin sheets. No one crouching. No one haggling. Just concrete, flat and indifferent, as though six decades of a particular kind of Sunday morning had been lifted along with the stalls and taken somewhere I could not see.
I understood something that morning that I had known intellectually but not yet felt, that how fragile and contingent this world was. How much it depended on permissions and invisibilities, on the stubbornness and resilience of people who showed up every Sunday and arranged their books and waited. That day shaped this book more than any other.
Do you think this bazaar will continue to thrive/survive given the online market of books? Please elaborate.
The bazaar has already survived things more threatening than the online market. It has survived displacement orders, pandemic lockdowns, municipal raids, and sixty years of operating without official sanction. The online market is a pressure, but it is not a new kind of pressure.
What the online market cannot replicate is serendipity. You cannot search for a book you do not know exists. You cannot stumble upon a 1978 Penguin edition with someone else’s marginalia on an algorithm. You cannot haggle, or sit on the vendor’s side of the stall and hear a story that changes how you read. The shauqeen will keep coming for precisely these reasons. The students will keep coming because the price point remains unbeatable. The families will keep coming because it is still, on a Sunday morning in Old Delhi, one of the most alive places in the city.
The question is not whether the bazaar will survive but what form it will take. It has always been good at taking new forms — from the footpaths of Jama Masjid to the stretch between Golcha and Delite to Mahila Haat. Each relocation changes something and preserves something. That capacity for reinvention, for showing up in a new place with the same iron boxes and the same stubbornness, is what I mean when I call this a story of resilience. The bazaar has never needed the formal economy’s permission to exist. It is unlikely to start now.
Thank you for your fabulous book and wonderful answers.
[1] The Pavement Book Bazaar
[2] connoisseur
[3] Ironically, translates to ‘Women’s Bazaar’ in Hindi
(This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)
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