1.1.1 Organising Serendipity: The Booksellers of Daryaganj

Since Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar used to be set up on the footpath (or patri), the sale of books in this location can be officially understood as ‘street vending’. Street vending engages with intentional as well as incidental buyers. In this case, the incidental buyer is someone who may or may not have intended to come to that market or to buy the books sold at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. For both the incidental and the regular buyers, the vendors adopt strategies such that when these buyers walk past and see the goods in the bazaar, they feel a desire for a specific article. This forms an integral part of their body of knowledge and specialisation as second-hand booksellers (kitab-vikreta) at Daryaganj. This moment of visual contact is provoked by a series of random and planned events, and we may call the whole sequence of seeing, stopping, and/or buying ‘serendipitous’.

Figures 2 and 3 represent typical bookstalls at the Patri Kitab Bazaar – their characteristic aesthetic sense and minimal infrastructure. As a part of their knowledge and specialisation, booksellers are aware that stall sajana, or curating book displays at their stalls, can help capture the fleeting attention of the passer-by, and that it is through such visual engagement that the sale of books occurs in the first place. That is, a potential buyer must first see the book to establish the desire to buy it since, unless their bookstall is only selling one kind of book, the vendor can establish only a minimally coherent arrangement by genre, type, or ‘age’ of the books. Booksellers go for optimum utilisation of the pitch that they regularly occupy and try to attract buyers through their display, either by piling the books together for an attractive price (mostly by weight) or by neatly displaying each cover so that a passer-by stops or a potential buyer’s gaze browses while looking for their find of the day as they walk by (Figures 2, 3, 4, 5).

Figure 2 Bookstalls on Netaji Subhash Marg, near Delhi-Gate (September 2017).

Figure 3 Stall Sajana (Setting up a stall) – Netaji Subhash Marg (September 2017).

Figure 4 Bookstalls outside Delhi Gate Metro Station, Exit number 3 (July 2019).

Figure 5 Arrangement of the bookstalls on Asaf Ali Marg using the closed shutters of the offices that run on weekdays (July 2019).

The booksellers adopt different methods of arranging books on their stalls. Displaying the covers of the books is one way to capture the attention of buyers. These are the books whose price is negotiable. In most cases, books stacked in heaps carry the same price. Figure 7 shows how the vendors use signs and placards. Books could be for ‘Ek Dam’ (‘each book is for the same price’) or all for the same price (‘Sale, 50/-’ – Each book on sale for Rs. 50). Sellers often go creative, with exclamations such as ‘Fix Price Matlab No Tension’ (‘fixed price means no tension’). There are other requests and alerts: ‘Kripya Mol Bhav Na Karein’ (‘kindly avoid negotiation’), or ‘take care of your belongings’. The booksellers kept revising their strategies as the use and the outlook of the streets are modified by the state with new construction or new policies, time and again. For instance, the bookstalls shown in Figure 4 are located right outside the Delhi Gate Metro Station, exit number 3. The booksellers began to occupy the area around the exit gate as soon as the metro station was built. Even while construction was underway, the booksellers continued to set up their stalls around the barricades.

A regular buyer may be able to identify these patterns of the stalls and their wares and approach the bazaar bookstalls accordingly. With repeated visits, they would know what to expect from the stalls where the covers are displayed individually, as against the heaps of books, which mostly meant that they had to search through them. This is quite unlike the planned and organised arrangement and categorisation within a ‘proper’ bookshop, where books are sold as per the market price. Unlike the repeat buyers who have over a period noted the bookstalls where they are more likely to find a desirable book, it is primarily the new or incidental buyer who must be lured ‘towards’ the bookstall – and not ‘inside’, as is the case with a proper bookshop.

Unlike the presence of a threshold in a ‘proper’ bookstore, the territory of a stall is outlined by the books laid out on the streets. There are also other makeshift paraphernalia: minimal structural stability and maximum provisionality characterise the space of a bookstall, as opposed to the bookstore space. For instance, Dilshad Ali brings iron boxes full of used English novels, the national favourite Raj Comics and the international favourite Asterix, and books by popular Hindi authors such as Surendra Mohan Pathak. He uses the same boxes as book-display platforms. In Figure 6, we see a bookseller arranging his stock in cardboard boxes outside the Hindi Book Centre (Star Publishing Group), which is closed on Sundays. He uses the same cardboard boxes as a surface on which to display the books. At the end of the day, he packs the books away in the same boxes. As the serendipitous visual contact occurs, this determines whether the buyer desires to buy a book, quickly gauging its ‘sacral value’ before entering into the bargaining process. (Ali marks the prices of used books with a pencil, thus retaining the possibility of negotiation.) Hence, I argue that this bazaar’s literary experience relies significantly on the serendipity resulting from how the bookseller utilises the space of the street and how buyers navigate their passage across it.

Figure 6 Stall Sajana – Asaf Ali Marg (July 2019).

Figure 7 Pricing the books (Juy 2017).

1.1.2 Mapping the Bazaar: The Walkers of Daryaganj

Walking is key to the experience of book buying at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. On Sundays, as they browse, pause, purchase, or ignore some bookstalls, book buyers become part of an indeterminate city crowd, withdrawing from it from time to time. As the bookstalls make the bazaar ‘visible’, the book buyers spatialise it by their movement and engagement. As seen in Vignette 1, the footpath is an open space that allows for an accessible conglomeration of multiple rhythms. Several rhythms run parallel, and others (like those of the Patri Kitab Bazaar) thrive on the absence of a few. The possibility for a pedestrian to simultaneously participate in and avoid any of these rhythms creates a serendipitous space for book purchase and sale. Here, the walker gains agency in creating their own ways of negotiating with serendipity and order. While the street is brimming with pedestrians on weekdays and weekends alike, I will highlight how walking on the footpath specifically on Sundays gains a catalytic and ‘creative’ meaning.

In my interviews, several Daryaganj shauqeens and other regular buyers spoke of how the book bazaar offered them a ‘unique experience’ compared to bookshops. This uniqueness is courtesy of the accidental nature of finding the market on the streets and their ‘find of the day’, and how such serendipitous encounters often lead to their lagaav (attachment) to the space and its books over repeated visits. Except for students, Daryaganj regulars rarely came to the Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar hoping to find a specific book. Students, too, were offered an abundance of variety in terms of a book’s editions – low-end or high-end textbooks, along with several additional out-of-syllabus books – all of which are very helpful in meeting the demands of the schools and colleges of Delhi, as well as the coaching institutes for various competitive exams mushrooming throughout the capital city.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, buyers could not predict the quantity or the type of books on offer. The chaos stirred the hope that you might find something you were looking for or something you never thought you wanted in the first place. That joy!

However, upon studying the rhythms of the Patri Kitab Bazaar – by recording the market events on camera or in the traditional manner of keeping notes in my diary and analysing them retrospectively – I observed that there may be specific patterns that the walkers have developed. Despite the seemingly fixed ‘L-shape’ that the market had acquired, starting from Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Marg to Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Marg, regular buyers did not necessarily follow this trail in a linear fashion. They chose their entry and exit points depending on where the stalls they liked were positioned. Repeat buyers had created their own trails. Among those, it was likely for, say, students from various universities in Delhi to bring their friends along and make them follow the same trails. (Some buyers would also know which local, nearby dhaba they would eat at before or after spending their day at the Patri Kitab Bazaar.) Nevertheless, any amount of planning still retains the possibility of the surprises that each stall may offer.

While inside the bazaar, I noticed how new buyers usually attempted to make sense of the whole landscape, trying to understand and take in the apparent disorder. A new visitor found that starting from the first stall at either end of the book market was relatively ‘safe’. The buyer from Vignette 1, who joins the crowd from Golcha Cinema, is a typical example. It is easier to follow the trail of the bazaar, in that sense, and not get overwhelmed. Non-buyers, including anyone who is not buying books from the stalls, were often seen wanting to escape the trail of booksellers altogether, choosing not to walk on the footpaths and walking on the edge of the road instead. Therefore, there are indeed ways in which a buyer may spatialise the Patri Kitab Bazaar, and these ways are manifold when compared to the limited scope of creativity of movement in a bookshop.

With every time-lapse recording of the bazaar, my faith in the book buyers grew stronger: they indeed spatialise the bazaar by simply walking on the streets – their movements and pauses and where they choose to be on the footpaths, amidst a mixed crowd. The grids on a map of this area will show a continuous and coherent way a pedestrian can walk these streets. However, in this periodically recurring space, buyers and non-buyers create their own patterns and individual strategies. As much as the booksellers try to define the Patri Kitab Bazaar by adapting to the space of the street as they do with their strategic movements, the buyer’s role is equally significant in this process of spatialisation. There is no one way to enter or exit the bazaar, and it seems that the walker can choose to be present or absent from the market while in that area. They could move in and out of it while perpetually being in the proximity of the book market, whether they decide to participate or not. There is an absence of a threshold to the bookstalls, even though the sellers try to set a boundary for their stall. (Some buyers hop on to the booksellers’ side, crossing the implied boundary that the bookseller has established.) But it is the buyer’s engagement – their movements, pauses, interactions, and even ignorance – that, in a way, frames a Daryaganj bookstall.

A buyer’s movements and activities were a spatial enactment of the book market and the geographical area of Daryaganj/the area around Delhi Gate. In other words, much like the booksellers who created a parallel pattern to experience the space of the book markets and, by extension, the space of Daryaganj, the walkers enabled those patterns through their movement and engagement. Hence, walking was a performative gesture that enabled the parallel communication circuits at the bazaar. Unlike in a bookshop, in the absence of a threshold, it is the movement on the streets, the back-and-forth motion of the pedestrians simultaneously inside and/or outside the Patri Kitab Bazaar, that actualises the presence of the book bazaar. Hence, much like the sellers, the buyers contribute to creating a map of the Patri Kitab Bazaar.

Michel de Certeau has studied the act of walking in the city as a ‘creative form of resistance’.Footnote ⁷ De Certeau’s walker – or Wandersmänner, as he calls them – is an ‘ordinary practitioner of the city’ whose body follows ‘the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it’.Footnote ⁸ He argues that the progression of a walker on the streets is tactical since it is never entirely determined by the plans of organising bodies. A regular book buyer in Daryaganj, then, essentially resists the predetermined grids of a city. I noticed one especially intriguing way in which the spatiality of Patri Kitab Bazaar offered an experience beyond that of book buying. Patri Kitab Bazaar is an ‘adda’Footnote ⁹ in the city. Students mingled with friends or enjoyed solitary walks in the bazaar and the Old City. Srivastava, in Passionate Modernity, points to the likelihood of strangers meeting in an urban landscape beyond the gaze of intimates.Footnote ¹⁰ Anonymity in the crowd is a risk for parents with younger children, who they fear will get lost as they go from one stall to another. Even if their children had little role to play in the decision-making and negotiation, I often saw parents holding hands or asking their children to stay in sight. Some parents encourage their children to browse the books while discouraging them from buying the expensive ones – that is not why one comes to the Sunday Book Bazaar. Conversely, older (unsupervised) students were on their own as they roamed from one stall to another. This is probably why they are more likely to go beyond the stalls providing study material and bump into a book they didn’t intend to buy – a second-hand novel or a fashion magazine. The anonymity also helped young lovers to hold hands – not to prevent their partners from wandering off, but to keep them close in a city where public displays of affection aren’t an easy pursuit. In this way, Patri Kitab Bazaar’s openness, despite the crowds and the chaos, offered intimacy through anonymity.

While walking is indeed a key form of experiencing the Patri Kitab Bazaar, it is also a significant part of a seller’s specialised knowledge: for instance, deciding what part of the street will receive most footfall or how to create visual incentives for the pedestrians. However, the possibility of having agency is limited since civic authorities – the third actors, who officially decide the spatialisation of the streets of Daryaganj – play a decisive role. This will become clear when I discuss the events of 2019, when the Patri Kitab Bazaar was relocated. Despite their efforts to retain the bazaar on the streets, the sellers and buyers could not stop the authorities from removing it. Further, even in determining the new location of the bazaar at Mahila Haat, the sellers and buyers had minimal say in the final decision. Time and again, the civic authorities have demonstrated their control over the Kitab Bazaar, by controlling the book buyers’ presence and movement, as well as limiting their agency to spatialise or ‘locate’ the bazaar.

1.1.3 Regulating Serendipity: The Civic Authorities

Serendipity coexists with regulation and organisation at the bazaar. The vendors create order amidst the chaos of the street to create a space for the Patri Kitab Bazaar, to make it locatable. The stalls are arranged one after the other to create a trail, and each stall is set up using minimal materials – whether this is the use of cardboard boxes for marking the boundary of a stall or an inverted umbrella to provide shade to the bookseller and inadvertently highlight the presence of the stall (Figures 6 and 3, respectively). Walkers organise the bazaar via their creative tactics, formed after repeated visits. However, the official regulation of this serendipity that comes under the purview of the civic authorities has always created tensions.Footnote ¹¹ It is this dynamic between order and chaos on the streets of Daryaganj that I will discuss here.

Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar has been distinguished from the other local weekly markets that are set up periodically ‘by the poor for the poor’ across various locations in Delhi; these are also referred to in the Street Vendor’s Act 2014 as LWMs.Footnote ¹² In the Act, the book bazaar is recorded as a specialised weekly market, as distinct from any other local weekly market, since it hosts the sale of one specific good (i.e. books) across the breadth of the street market. At other local weekly markets across the city, vendors sell a diverse variety of goods, such as clothes, footwear, kitchen utensils, sports equipment, everyday cleaning essentials, and so forth. Further, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar has been officially registered as a ‘natural market’ by the North Delhi Municipal Corporation of Delhi (NrDMC). the administrative body that controls the regulated and non-regulated spaces in North Delhi. In the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, a natural market is defined as ‘a market where sellers and buyers have traditionally congregated for the sale and purchase of products or services and has been determined as such by the local authority on the recommendations of the Town Vending Committee’. In other words, it is a space established over time where buyers and sellers interact without significant institutional intervention. So, it’s safe to say – and is perhaps even officially sanctioned – that the book bazaar exemplified serendipity. In other words, the official Act recognises the bazaaris’Footnote ¹³ autonomy and the bazaar’s serendipity.

There has been a desire amongst the vendors to legitimise their trade on the streets, and for that, they undertook certain actions. Throughout the course of its several relocations, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar has managed to negotiate with institutional regulation, planning, and supervision in wonderful and creative ways: from how the books were procured to the moderately regulated positioning of the bookstalls and the erratic and inventive movement of the buyers. All this made the market into what it is and shaped its rhythms, in which randomness happens despite what the booksellers here identify as censorship. In fact, the vendors associate regulation with ‘pabandi’ (restraint) and ‘shoshan’ (exploitation, censorship), valuing the role of serendipity in the establishment and operation of their business.Footnote ¹⁴

In Delhi, 97 per cent of the state’s population comes under the jurisdiction of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). The MCD is responsible for implementing national policy and for regularising street vending in the national capital. Before 2011, the street vendors received a pink receipt, or gulabi parchi, from the MCD. This parchi noted the fee they paid to the civic authorities to occupy the streets. In 2011, the sale of books on the streets of Daryaganj was legalised through the tehbazaari system, with the help of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).Footnote ¹⁵ Tehbazaari is a licence for the grantee to squat at a notified site on a pavement to conduct business. Since then, the market has been run by an elected body called ‘Darya Ganj Patri Sunday Book Bazaar Welfare Association’.Footnote ¹⁶ This Association was formed as a representative body for the vendors. A president, vice-president, registrar, and cashier were elected by the vendors from among themselves, whereby redressals related to the vendors’ stalls, their location, the stock, or weighty issues such as relocation and shutting down could be addressed officially. With the increase in population and growing traffic concerns, most bazaars were gradually marked as ‘encroachments’ in an aspiring ‘world’ city. The events that led to the relocation of Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar to its new location inside Mahila Haat exemplify the conflict of interest between the sellers and the civic authorities. What happened on the streets of Daryaganj between July and September 2019?

Less than four weeks after starting my fieldwork in Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, it was lifted off the streets. Based on a Delhi High Court order dated 3 July 2019, the NrDMC mandated that the street market be removed, citing ‘traffic concerns’.Footnote ¹⁷ Netaji Subhash Marg, which housed a part of Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar, was declared a non-vending zone. In a display of solidarity, vendors on Asaf Ali Marg (which did not come under the purview of the High Court order) also decided not to set up their stalls since all vendors could not have been accommodated on this street alone (only a part of the previous L-shape). For two months after the displacement, the vendors were left waiting for a decision on whether their stalls would be reinstated or whether they would be offered an alternative space.Footnote ¹⁸ Each passing week caused them a further loss of livelihood and made them increasingly desperate. To bypass the pabandi, several booksellers were seen adopting inventive ways of selling books from inconspicuous spaces to avoid confiscation – even inside an autorickshaw (Figure 9). One of the booksellers was also helped by the residents in the area. They allowed him to display his books inside their house, so the vendor asked one of his helpers to stand on the main street of Netaji Subhash Marg to bring in customers. The booksellers held several public protests (Figure 11). In one of the protests the vendors formed a human chain on Asaf Ali Marg. In another, they collected hundreds of testimonies from visitors dismayed at discovering that the market was absent from the streets yet again.

Even on past occassions of threats of relocation of the book bazaar, the vendors had claimed the ‘natural’ status of the book bazaar on these streets (as per the Street Vendors Act), and did not shy away from any official examination of its natural status. This was one of their principal demands during the 2019 protests. The book vendors were striving to have the book bazaar’s historical importance recognised, which would legitimise its existence on the streets, as against the closed, controlled space of Mahila Haat. The vendors stated that the market eviction had effectively violated the Street Vendors’ Act and the recently formulated Street Vendors’ Scheme, 2019. They claimed that the eviction of vendors without the recently formed Town Vending Committees first conducting a survey to map the selling conducted in that area (as mandated by the Street Vendor’s Act) was a violation of the principal premise of the legislation and the older Street Vendor’s Act. Several elements were significant in the events relating to the relocation in September 2019. For one, this was the first instance in more than fifty years that the Patri Kitab Bazaar had been forced to relocate. The market has been shut down in the past, notably in 1991, in 2005, and again for a few weeks in 2018 around Republic Day, mostly on the basis of similar concerns: traffic and illegal encroachment of streets. However, in July 2019, there was a larger concern looming for the vendors. The civic authorities had recently begun implementing instructions and procedures for the ‘beautification’ and sanitisation of the capital city.Footnote ¹⁹ The resilience shown by the booksellers to stay on the streets of Old Delhi highlighted the significance of their presence there, since that is where the birth and the evolution of bookselling in Daryaganj had occurred in the first place. When the civic authorities failed to recall the same, the vendors categorised this official and unilateral exercising of authority as ‘shoshan’ or censorship.

As weeks passed, the vendors realised that the risk was more critical: that this time, the market might shut down for good or get relocated to a rather inconvenient and unprofitable location. As a result, they intensified their protests. They sought better attention from the press, as well as social media, where hashtags such as ‘save book bazaar Daryaganj’ and ‘reclaim Sunday book bazaar’ became popular. The booksellers were joined by community artists, academics, architects, students, and long-term regular visitors of Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, along with some locals from the area and the city – also highlighting the bazaar’s symbolic importance for the city dwellers (Figure 10). So, of the three actors – the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities – the two active participants were unwilling to let go of the streets. The protests lasted in this manner for two months, until the relocation. At this point, the vendors divided themselves into two groups.

The first group included those who migrated to Mahila Haat. These booksellers saw Mahila Haat as an upgrade of sorts. For them, it was a futuristic approach, whereby the new space promised betterment and improvement from their previous manner and methods of work. The new gated location was, apparently, to be well looked after, away from the nuisance that any street in Old Delhi may sustain. ‘There will be no pickpocketing here, and women should move freely too’, said Qamar Saeed, President of the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar Welfare Association (Figure 8).Footnote ²⁰ It would be a regulated space. Based on the national street vending policies, the booksellers were provided with a fixed area of 6×4 feet on a rental basis. The rent would be fixed at approximately Rs. 175 to Rs. 200 per week, which was increased by 10 per cent when the agreement was renewed after three years in 2023. The second group comprised vendors who decided to stay on the streets and fight for their space on the pavements. They saw the relocation as a loss of ‘a thing of the past’. These vendors attached certain credibility to the history of the space, conducive to informal trade. They were suspicious of what the new site would offer and highly critical of the procedures that were followed for the relocation.

With only a few books lying on the ground and selling at the lowest price possible, these vendors were seen to be consciously diverting the readers and book buyers from the new location at Mahila Haat. The vendors claimed that officials from the MCD frequently confiscated their books, mostly without even providing them with the mandatory paperwork. The protesting booksellers became used to the Sisyphean task of laying down the books on the streets of Asaf Ali Marg and Netaji Subhash Marg, rushing away upon the arrival of MCD officials, laying down the books again, and so on.Footnote ²¹ Despite two months of protests by the vendors, emphasising the historicity of the bazaar, its natural status, and the need for their presence on the streets, the authorities did not change their minds. The protests waned gradually and were eventually called off because of the Covid-19 pandemic.Footnote ²² The civic authorities regulated what they perceived as unregulated chaos in the bazaar, significantly changing how booksellers and book buyers could exercise spatialisation.

Figure 8 Certificate of registration for ‘Daryaganj Patri Sunday Book Bazaar Welfare Association’ under the Societies Registration Act of XXI of 1860.

Figure 9 Books being sold from inconspicuous spaces to avoid confiscation. (August 2019).

1.2.1 Rhythms Inside Mahila Haat

Inside Mahila Haat, the essential routine of the Patri Kitab Bazaar gets repeated every Sunday. It is similar to the modes of trade exercised on the streets: buying books as one walks about the space and sees them laid out, the patterns of bargaining and negotiation, and so on. However, Mahila Haat is an independent space with its own rhythms. The serendipity of the streets, which played a significant role in the business, is restricted within the gated complex of Mahila Haat. In the Patri Kitab Bazaar, trade relied on incidental buying as much as it did on intentional visits and purchases. Any walker on those footpaths was a potential buyer. In the closed space of Mahila Haat, no one can accidentally become a book buyer, as was typically the case with Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar.

Inside the Haat, the crowd is definite. Those who are present have decided to step inside the book market and buy books for their home libraries and their children or to prepare for their examinations, or to resell books for a profit at their bookstores. The gated architecture of the Haat has a different aesthetic and social appeal. The ambience inside Mahila Haat is rather slow and relaxed, unlike the active and dynamic space of the overcrowded streets, much like a Book Fair or a pustak mela. (Figure 15),Footnote ²⁴ Inside the Haat, the floor is marked with where the booksellers should sit, leaving the remaining space for the book buyers to walk and explore. A buyer could maintain a slow pace, and there is no rush to hop onto the next stall, as was the case with the bazaar on the footpath where there was only so much space where one could walk, and the likelihood of being pushed around. Inside the Haat, it was easier to return to a stall since the crowd was limited and more engaged in a singular activity – buying books. At the bazaar, by contrast, people huddled at each bookstall as other readers joined, cutting across the queue of booksellers, until they were tired and left. As such, walkers could spatialise the book market through their movements and separate it from the other co-existing spaces and activities on the street, mapping the market with their footsteps amidst the various other occupations and places simultaneously present. Inside the Haat, with only the book bazaaris occupying a fixed space for set hours on a Sunday, the rhythm of the relocated book market is relatively isolated, unlike the polyrhythmic atmosphere on the streets. The space is predefined to establish a degree of order against the street’s chaos. Mahila Haat has several places to sit, mull over your purchase, or meet your friends. Children play on the mowed grass inside the green spaces at Mahila Haat. The same chaiwallah visits periodically to serve tea to all the vendors and the few buyers. He dreams of having a tea stall inside the premises of the new book market one day, he tells me. In this way, stability creates dreams of mobility for some.

The relocation of the book market from the streets to the Haat has brought some notable changes in the bookselling strategies adopted by the vendors over the years. Mahila Haat has an ‘entry gate’ – a designated threshold – which makes the spatiality closer to that of a bookshop. While the booksellers still rely on serendipity and chance, since their stock still retains incoherence as compared to that of a proper bookshop, they have adapted new ways to maximise their visibility to the buyers and attract them to their stall. Some older methods were retained. The book spines were stacked neatly, or the books were put in piles, with appealing chaos and the promise of a ‘find’ in the heap. However, some booksellers were seen to be experimenting with this new space: stall sajana (or setting up a stall) found new meanings, as sellers reinterpreted the available space and updated their knowledge of bookselling. As we see in Figure 12, one of the booksellers decided to arrange his stock by creating four walls out of books and standing inside the fort-like shape. In Figure 13, we see that Farid Anwar, who sells books for children, has brought in new features including bookstands, colourful sunshades, and low tables to house the books – also protecting them from water on the floor in the case of rain.

Figure 12 Fort-like arrangement of a bookstall inside Mahila Haat (October 2019).

Figure 13 ‘Glamorous’ arrangement of a bookstall inside Mahila Haat (October 2019).

1.2.2 Order over Chaos

Unlike how serendipity dominated the experience of bookselling and buying on the streets, order prevailed inside Mahila Haat, in various forms. Mahila Haat is cleaner and more organised than the streets – which is one of the reasons why the officials at the NrDMC provided to persuade the booksellers in favour of this location. Other suggestions included the famous Ramlila Maidan and Hindi Park. The booksellers rejected these alternatives – and there were not many – because they were too far from the previous Patri Kitab Bazaar location and possibly because other commercial or non-commercial activities would have disrupted the sale of books. At Ramlila Maidan, for instance, another internal ‘committee’ works towards organising events. The vendors were worried they would have to go through another form of external regulation, which would affect their business and contrast with the limited autonomy they enjoyed on the streets, which came with internal modes of organisation by the vendors. Further, they were concerned that the alternatives of parks and maidans were not conducive to creating an experience of book vending similar to that offered by the streets, which was crucial. They saw footpaths as relatively more dynamic than a maidan or a park. Similarly, not every footpath is likely to produce the same experience. Golcha Cinema was not the primary location for the Patri Kitab Bazaar. The bazaar saw some minor relocations – suggested by either the booksellers themselves or by the civic authorities. Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Marg are both easily accessible commercial spaces. Daryaganj’s location between New Delhi and Old Delhi made it convenient for various readers and book buyers from all over the city to visit the bazaar. The construction of a Delhi Metro station near Dilli Gate also brought in many new customers, while older customers could now visit more frequently.

Figure 14 Passive ambience inside Mahila Haat soon after the relocation. (September 2019).

Some of the vendors’ fears came true inside Mahila Haat. The rent paid for one’s stall immediately affected the sales and the selling patterns. Inside Mahila Haat, the vendors are asked to pay a fixed amount of rent – yet another form of regulation. The total weekly rent for the space is divided amongst the number of booksellers who set up their shop inside Mahila Haat each Sunday. The rent is much higher than what the sellers paid earlier for street squatting. Higher costs have affected the price at which the vendors sell their books. The vendors took time to learn the ‘types’ of books in demand at the new site. Some vendors at Mahila Haat who said they had to accept the alternative after waiting for so long still hoped that the Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar would be restored to its former glory. For weeks, business at Mahila Haat did not go well. Many booksellers also claimed it was only feasible for them to bring smaller amounts of books to the Haat; their godowns were further away now, and the space was limited and relatively more expensive than the streets. On the streets, the ability to spread books across the footpath worked in the vendor’s favour, allowing for titles to be visible to passers-by. This was no longer possible within the six-by-four-foot space allocated per stall (unless the seller paid for more than one block of space). The situation was worse for the booksellers who set up their stalls towards the rear end of the complex as they did not get equal attention from visitors, who may have felt exhausted before making it to the far side of the complex.

Figure 15 The Annual World Book Fair at Pragati Maidan, Delhi. Several Daryaganj booksellers set up their stalls here, bringing more stock than in the bazaar. (January 2020).

The ease of locating bookstalls on the streets was pitted against the orderliness and beautification of Mahila Haat. Mahila Haat was the more ‘modern’ choice. It was likely to attract people who felt unsafe on the streets. ‘Mahila Haat has a certain ‘glamour’ to it, but that doesn’t necessarily help business’, claimed several vendors. The ‘glamour’ is the book bazaar’s beautified, sanitised, organised, orderly, and less chaotic form. In one of the ‘orders’ placed in the bazaar, the civic authorities have demanded that (i) ‘Park mein cup, plate, glass, aadi daalna sakht mana hai’ (‘Littering cups, plates, glasses, etc., is prohibited’); (ii) ‘Park ke andar tent, sofa, chair daalna sakht mana hai’ (‘Installing tents, sofa, and chairs inside the park is prohibited’); and (iii) ‘Yeh plastic-mukt park hai’ (‘This park is plastic-free’). The institutional regulation, orderliness, and organisation that differentiate the market inside Mahila Haat from the street bazaar were, in fact, what caused a loss of business for quite some time. Those who foresaw the constraints and were wary of the cost of setting up the market at Mahila Haat every week stopped coming to the market altogether and began to operate their businesses via phones and the internet. Hence, contrary to what the civic authorities had proposed, relocating the bazaar did not immediately or directly lead to a positive professional experience, even for a book bazaar that had been popular and beloved for several decades.

It’s not as if the state prohibits using the streets for purposes other than walking. There are ways in which the periodic use of the streets is supported for cultural purposes – say, street art and exhibits or fairs. Further, periodic book markets are not a new phenomenon exclusive to Delhi. Temporary spaces for books on the streets do exist on the global map and in the Indian subcontinent. Kolkata’s College Street or Boi Para (literally translated as Book Town) is the world’s largest and one of the oldest book markets.Footnote ²⁵ However, in the past few years the state government of Kolkata has proposed an ambitious, centralised book mall, which will cover an area as large as all of the existing bookstores on College Street combined. However, booksellers are reluctant to move, and the city dwellers have reacted similarly to the relocation, claiming that the book market will lose its soul.Footnote ²⁶ They agree, much like the Daryaganj booksellers, that the nostalgia associated with Boi Para also translates into business, and any additional ‘glamour’ would not be quite as profitable. Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar is not nearly as old as College Street, which is said to have started in 1817. However, residents, migrants, and tourists have periodically occupied this street for five decades, and they have recounted the experience as authentic and carrying a unique flavour. Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar was one of the ways to experience the city and its ever-changing character. Famous shauqeen visitors include author Khushwant Singh, historian Ramachandra Guha, oral historian Sohail Hashmi, and blogger Mayank Austen Soofi, known as The Delhi Walla – also the title of his blog.Footnote ²⁷ There is also a vast number of online and offline reviews in the form of personal blogs and web and print articles that speak about this market, its uniqueness, and its place in the city. These buyers and Daryaganj enthusiasts have stepped up each time the bazaar has been endangered in the past, including the relocation in 2019. The resilience of shauqeen buyers such as Guha, Soofi, and Sohail Hashmi is a straightforward way of challenging authorities and their opinion that the chaos of unruly sites in the urban landscape must be organised and beautified. In this way, the buyers and the sellers wish to retain their status as active enablers of the street space.

The relocation of the book bazaar is indicative of the larger narrative of sanitisation and regulation – that is, attempts to regulate the ways to look at or experience the city. Urban anthropologist Sanjay Srivastava argues that defining or restricting the use of public space is a modern form of urban governance over everyday infrastructures. In Entangled Urbanism: Slums, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon, he gives the example of the phenomenon of installing gates that create physically demarcated residential localities. Such ‘gating’ began in Delhi as early as the 1980s. The raison d’être of installing gates is regulation of movement.Footnote ²⁹ Confined spaces can be supervised more efficiently, unlike chaotic spaces such as streets. Srivastava’s observation on gated complexes resonates with the spatial politics of relocating Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar to a more regulated space. Enacted by the civic authorities with minimum consideration of the book vendors’ opinions or comments, the relocation was a way to bring in order and eliminate the chaos that the bazaar allegedly created on the streets.

Figure 16 Author Khushwant Singh declares his love for street book markets.

Published in Hindustan Times on 31 December 2005 (photo source: Sumit Verma, a book vendor at Daryaganj).Footnote ²⁸

The officials at NrDMC believe that Delhi has the potential to be a smart city, in which case order overrules chaos in making public spaces more user-friendly and exclusive. Displacing the book bazaar from the streets is a deliberate move towards building a modern, smart city by eliminating the older ways in which the space of the street has been operating. When I interviewed historian Sohail Hashmi – an acclaimed spokesperson for Delhi’s past and present – in 2019, he passionately argued for a manner of regulation and institutionalisation that actually benefits the street vendors instead of relocating them from the streets. Street vending worked for the booksellers. However, if the traffic and encroachment-related concerns were sustained despite the level of regulation by the civic authorities, Hashmi suggests that the regulation could have been redirected towards, for instance, the navigation of traffic on Sundays alone. In other words, the idea of redevelopment, as adopted by the civic authorities, could have been balanced with a proposal related to reusing the streets to bring order into the same streets, such that the loss of serendipity is minimal. Yet, the possibility of chaos that disturbs the better functioning of other ‘regular’ rhythms of the same streets is decreased. ‘How can any city that talks of being civilised discourage the sale of second-hand books?’ argues Hashmi. ‘It should be institutionalised by finding an alternative approach that would lead to a better, judicious “re-use” of the original site on the street itself.’

Delhi’s hybrid architectural landscape hides several monuments among other markers of its historicity. You may discover them as you try to simply be in this city – much like finding books in the Sunday book market. Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar happened to be a rather serendipitous institution (historical as it was) that the city would hide and unhide on Sundays. Those who knew of it would compulsively never skip a visit. Those who did not know of it would have – had they chanced upon the streets of Daryaganj. However, with the sterile repurposing of the streets allocated to the book market, that is not the case anymore. You may not accidentally become a book buyer as you once might have. It is all part of a larger plan now, and we may have lost the original Patri Kitab Bazaar to this plan.

2.2.1 Via Family and Ustads

For the vendors of Daryaganj, family and networks of kinship are the most common routes into the book trade. The seven famous Kumar brothers are an excellent example of this. Their father introduced them to the basic principles of hawking and bookselling. After selling books at different sites in the city – mostly pavements, bus stands, and railway stations – they discovered Daryaganj as one of the areas where bookselling could be pursued rather stably. Each of them has been in this business since they started working at an early age, and the two elder-most brothers are among the few vendors who had established the patri business from its days around Subhash Park.Footnote ³⁶ Vendors continue to bring their family members into the business.

The second typical trajectory the vendors follow to enter this profession is through mentors and intermediaries. Fifty-seven-year-old Mahesh has spent thirty-five years as a bookseller at Daryaganj Sunday Book Market. His brother was in the business before him, but not at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. However, both brothers were trained by someone he refers to as their ustad (mentor/trainer). Mahesh informed me that his ustad had also trained other men. When Mahesh started, only a handful of second-hand book vendors operated at this site; the business has grown in the past two decades. While Mahesh has been able to earn a livelihood solely from selling books at the bazaar, unlike most vendors in the bazaar he is determined not to bring his children into the business. He would prefer salaried jobs for them. Like many vendors, Mahesh also senses that the book business in Daryaganj has no future because digital books and digital marketplaces will take over: ‘internet par hi bikengi kitabein’, he says – ‘Books will only sell on the internet’.

2.2.2 From One Profession to Another

Family and mentors are not the only traditional ways to enter this profession. Divakar Pandey’s brothers signed up for the Indian army, but he could not pass the medical tests to be eligible to sit for the main examination. In his case, his profession became an exception in his family. However, Pandey didn’t immediately begin selling books at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. Before he started his business at Daryaganj, he worked for A. H. Wheeler in Rajasthan.Footnote ³⁷ He later moved to Delhi to work as a sales assistant for DK Publishing and Prakash Publications, located in the nearby Ansari Road. In fact, most booksellers at Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar have engaged with the book business in more than one way, and some of them continue to do so, which either compensates or supplements bookselling at the bazaar.

Other vendors also navigated several professions before settling in Daryaganj. Ashok has been a bookseller at the bazaar for twenty-five years. Born into an underprivileged family in East Delhi, Ashok raised money for his family and his education through petty jobs such as pulling a rickshaw and hawking. After earning his bachelor’s degree in commerce from Delhi University’s Ram Lal Anand College, Ashok joined the New Delhi Municipal Corporation. However, he continued with other businesses, too, for a while, seeking ways to increase his income. Bookselling was only one of his several jobs, until it became a permanent professional pursuit. ‘Main sangharsh karta tha, kitabon ke zariye kuch bana. Chaar baje uthta tha, newspaper daalta tha, office jata tha, lunch mein magazine aur kitabein bechta tha – aadmi ko samay ke anusar parivartan karna padta hai’ (‘I used to work hard. Selling books gave me an identity. I used to wake up at 4 am, sell newspapers, go to the office later, and sell books during lunchtime. A man must change with the demands of the time.’)

Bookselling’s capacity to reap profits and provide them with professional stability in the longer run made quite a few booksellers stay. Surendra Dhawan is an example. He turned his full-time profession as a freelance photographer into a part-time one and his part-time engagement with books into a full-time business. He told me about his transition from photographer to bookseller: photography was an exciting life that demanded different skills and constant movement across states and, at times, countries. He claims to have photographed Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister of India. It’s his favourite memory from the profession. Several such remnants of his previous professional life were evident in his excitement during the discussion (he was always keen about the camera I was using and advised me on improving my photography). I was sceptical. How is pursuing photography less lucrative for a person who clicked photographs of the prime minister than selling books at Daryaganj?

Dhawan replied that his shauq (interest, pleasure) lies in photography still, but it was not a sustainable living. Working as a photographer entailed an erratic routine spread over unusual places countrywide. He said he needed to stay in one place in the longer run: ‘Ab grahasthi bhi sambhalni hoti hai’ – his family required his presence. Even though bookselling might not be as thrilling an experience as photography, he opted for bookselling because he saw this as a sustainable profession. Much like Ashok, Dhawan had already begun investing in the used book business on the side, and he could see himself making that into a permanent option that could work for him.Footnote ³⁸ A part of achieving this stability comes from a continuing familiarity with the mechanisms with which vendors operate within this bazaar.

2.2.3 ‘Main Dilli se hoon’

When I asked Sharif Ahmed, one of the senior Daryaganj vendors, how he arrived at the Patri Kitab Bazaar, his response was a shrug and these words: ‘Main Dilli se hoon. Mujhe Daryaganj ke baare mein nahin pata hoga?’ (‘I belong to Delhi. How would I have not known about Daryaganj?’), implying that for Dilliwallahs, knowledge about Daryaganj as a potential place of business has been rather obvious.

However, not all booksellers at the Patri Kitab Bazaar are Dilliwallahs (those who belong to Delhi). Migration is a common experience shared by many booksellers of Daryaganj. Hari Narayan Giri has been in the bookselling business for some twenty years. His father was a farmer, he tells me. Giri moved to the city from Ballia in Uttar Pradesh (approximately 280 kilometres from Delhi) to look for a job and found his way to the Patri Kitab Bazaar through ‘contacts’, he says. About his life as a bookseller, he feels ‘yeh bahot behtar hai’ (‘that this is far better than farming’). This is also a profitable and more stable business. Giri says that this has since become his way of life. Throughout the week, he collects books and sells them on Sundays – most of his stock comes from the paper market, where he buys discarded books for Rs. 40 per kilogramme. ‘Double se bhi zyada margin hai’ (‘The profit margin is more than double’), he tells me. Giri is one of the innumerable migrants who, leaving their familial and social networks, came to the city and settled for a sense of ‘permanent ephemerality’.Footnote ³⁹ In fact, more than half the booksellers I interviewed said that city jobs were more financially rewarding than farming.

These migrants may be highly educated or anparh (illiterate), and none of them had prior knowledge about bookselling at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. As much as their lives as migrants are affected by macroeconomic forces, I identify the booksellers of Daryaganj as enablers of the urbanisation of the streets of Old Delhi. On departing from their primary/traditional occupational roots and becoming a bookseller ‘by chance’, as they often exclaimed, they applied their own economic strategies in the given urban milieu, providing them with the stability they desired from the city. The booksellers of Daryaganj – both migrants and natives of Delhi – have collectively ‘created’ and enabled the Patri Kitab Bazaar by incorporating complex, specialised knowledge of selling books on the streets. In this way, the vendors are not an ‘excluded’, ‘marginalised’, or ‘surplus population’ but aspirational dwellers in the immanent pursuit of opportunities.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hence, the lives of the booksellers at Daryaganj are an example of how new forms of citizenship are formed in the urban space.

2.3.1 Choosing and Building ‘Knowledge Corpora’

One of the simplest ways to classify the vendors at the Patri Kitab Bazaar is by looking at the type or genre of books they sell. During my fieldwork, I noticed that a few vendors chose not to demonstrate any specialisation; however, they constituted only a small fraction of the sellers. There are three principal ‘circuits’ of books within which most vendors at the bazaar operate their business: the traditional circuit, the study-material circuit, and the circuit of ‘D’ books. In the ‘traditional circuit’, vendors sell second-hand books. Within this, some specialise in a specific language (Hindi, English, Urdu) or genre (art books, non-fiction, novels). Some vendors sell only novels in English. Within the ‘study-material circuit’, vendors sell current syllabus and/or out-of-syllabus books. The former includes coursebooks for schools, such as NCERTs or guidebooks for competitive exams. Some sell kunjis – small, inexpensive, plagiarised study guides with the latest content for specific courses and examinations of the local universities and institutions. ‘Out-of-syllabus’ books are relevant as extra-study material. These are adjacent to the school or university syllabi or for general awareness. The circuit of piracy (what vendors call ‘D ki kitab’ or ‘D Books’) is independent and is available in two ways in the bazaar: local, plagiarised quasi-legal literature in the form of pocketbooks on topics such as self-help, entertainment, general knowledge, and so forth, or pirated copies of latest bestseller novels and self-help books.

Even though books from all three circuits were available in the market in the starting years of the bazaar – educational books from the import lot, and pirated pocketbooks from local publishers/printers – the first (traditional) circuit populated the market the most in its first decade, with at least 90 per cent of the vendors selling used novels, old magazines, and educational books, the majority of which were sourced from the kabadiwallas (paper/scrap dealers). Gradually, as the availability of and demand for study material increased, the number of vendors dealing exclusively in this circuit increased, and it became an independent circuit. Later, as piracy became widespread in the Indian publishing and circulation scene in the last decade, ‘D ki kitab’ became more visible in the market. Hence, almost all new book vendors sell pirated books. Most traditional vendors started by selling general/miscellaneous books and made their way to curating a bookstall with specialised books. What is relevant here is how the vendors become a part of these circuits and decided to specialise. The kind of sources and knowledge the vendors could/can access is the first consideration.

Let us look at Abdul Wali’s journey into this profession, which will give us a glimpse into how a vendor ‘arrives’ at the Patri Kitab Bazaar, gains knowledge, and makes decisions related to what circuit they want to continue in.

Around 1972, Parvez Kumar Rohilla was popular among the vendors of the Patri Kitab Bazaar for the effort he would put into collecting and curating individual ‘sheets’, extracted from fashion and beauty magazines, both imported and local. Wali remarked: ‘Professional aadmi the. Farrate se angrezi bolte the. Har Sunday red tie lagake aate the’ (‘He was a professional. Used to speak English fluently. Wore a red tie every Sunday’). He would go around the city all days of the week to middlemen (intermediaries) and houses around the city to collect the primary material from which he would make ‘files’ (folders) of such sheets. He would sell a single sheet of fashion designs at a fixed price of Rs. 4 for the Western content and Rs. 2 for Indian content. These books were originally priced at Rs. 300–400, which was quite expensive for students. Buying only relevant pages for a much lower price, instead of the whole text that may not be useful in its entirety, was a better option. He also sold old editions of magazines such as India Today and TIME magazine. Wali still has these ‘files’ and a good collection of these magazines, but he doesn’t sell them. There are no ‘current buyers’, says Wali. However, he is willing to wait for the right shauqeen buyer (Daryaganj afficionados), who would buy them from him at a higher value. Rohilla introduced Wali to the book business at Patri Kitab Bazaar. When he decided to quit, Rohilla asked Wali to acquire his stock. (Rohilla later started a matrimonial webpage, which, according to Wali, is doing quite well and gives Rohilla some much-needed rest.) However, Wali wasn’t quite willing; he found Rohilla’s mode of business exhausting and quite demanding. Hence, instead of dealing with fashion and beauty catalogues and old magazines, Wali entered the ‘study-material circuit’ to avoid ‘hard work’: ‘Mehnat se bachne ke liye maine school line pakdi.’

Forty-two-year-old Abdul Wali now runs a bookstore in West Badarpur, Delhi-53, and his principal source of income is his stall and the clientele at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. Before entering the book business, Wali tried to study for the civil service entrance exams. He also studied Arabic at the Modern Indian Languages Department at the Arts Faculty, University of Delhi – he was told there was good demand for Arabic teachers in the Gulf countries. However, he realised that there was too much competition. Further, his poor financial situation prevented him from delaying the search for a steady source of income. Wali’s cautious yet strategic entrepreneurial attitude towards earning his livelihood in the early stages of his professional career extends towards how he pursues his business in the present day. He is not one to take risks:

Hence, Wali’s escape from ‘a lot of hard work’ doesn’t mean his business is easy-going. It took skill, management, and knowledge to build the stock and the clientele that he now has. He has his own mechanisms for acquiring books. At the same time, he knows how to limit his stock: he doesn’t try to get into unnecessary competition with older vendors who also have more experience and bigger spaces where they can store books. Further, even within the study-material circuit, he has limited himself to a certain kind of study material: he started his business by selling schoolbooks but has shifted to selling low-priced guidebooks or kunjis and second-hand coursebooks for the students of Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia. He avoids buying any and every form of course material: he mentions medical books as a particular exception since this involves extensive knowledge of relevant editions and familiarity with the needs of a specific community of students.Footnote ⁴² He tells me that there is also enough competition in his line of business. As soon as the vendors of this circuit get information on any second-hand stock availability at a paper market or with any individual kabadiwallah, they rush to acquire it: ‘Wo bees minute kehta hai to hum das minute mein pahonch jaate hain’ (‘If [the paper merchant] says twenty minutes, we get there in ten minutes’). In the present day, a scrap dealer buys his stock from houses and private and public libraries at a rate of Rs. 8–10 per kilo or for free at times. Booksellers sort useful material from the scrap and buy it from the scrap dealers at around Rs. 40 per kilo: (‘Jab maine business shuru kiya tha, tab parents koi bhi books le lete the. R. D. Sharma chahiye hogi, to Manjit Singh bhi chal jaati thi. Ab school chabi bharta hai. R. D. Sharma boli hai to wahi lenge’ (‘Around the time I started my business [as a vendor of school books], parents would buy any editions. They won’t mind a Manjit Singh or an R.D. Sharma [authors of popular companion books on mathematics]. Now, the schools tell the students what to buy. If they’ve been asked to buy an R. D. Sharma, they’ll not buy anything else’).

2.3.2 ‘Patri Ne Sikhaya’: Circumstantial and Experiential Knowledge

The diversity of sources and the active methods used to acquire books are key factors that influence vendors in determining their specialisation. At the point in the chronology of the bazaar’s history at which a vendor joins the Patri Kitab Bazaar, diverse sources are being sought by the existing vendors. Even when the first few vendors decided to sell books at Daryaganj, they had fixed sources they could rely on: imported second-hand books, paper markets, private collections, libraries, and railway auctions. Magazines and novels were among the first ‘books’ to arrive at this patri. Since then, the books that the vendors of Daryaganj sell have arrived from alternative sources, and not in the ways that ‘proper’ vendors acquire books to be sold in their bookshops. Selling books at the Patri Kitab Bazaar is a crossover between street vending and proper bookselling. That is, not only does the vendor have to know how to sell books and have a sense of the ‘commodity’ they are selling, they also need to be aware of the ways in which bazaars operate. It’s not a profession per se: you don’t study to become a street vendor, therefore it’s not an obvious career choice. However, there is training required.

The seven Kumar brothers are all in the same business, but each deals with a different genre of books. Having started with general books, they each specialised their stock over time: medical books, art books, syllabus books, novels, or books for competitive exams. This also allows the brothers to keep their businesses separate from each other. Further, their decision to diversify their businesses into different circuits can be considered a strategic move. They can reinforce certain power dynamics and hierarchy in the market by absorbing and producing knowledge of most of the mechanisms that have governed the bazaar.

The Kumar brothers now also have a bookshop and a printing press in Nai Sarak, where they repair some second-hand books to sell at the bazaar. Their extended book business is rooted in the experience at the Patri Kitab Bazaar: ‘Ye bahot purani baatein hain’ (‘These are very old matters’), says Sushil Kumar, recounting the purane din, old days. Out of the seven brothers, Sushil Kumar was the first one to start selling books: ‘Sabse pehle maine hi yahaan kitab bechna shuru kiya. Ek aane ki ek kitab bechte the. Jahaan khali jagah dikhti thi, waheen baith jaate the’ (‘I was the first one to start selling books here. I used to sell one book for a penny. I would sit down wherever I found an empty space’). Initially, he would sell books for one anna (6.25 paise) each. In those days, vendors would sit anywhere they liked since there were not so many of them, and there was no need for external or internal regulation. Their father bought stocks of books, and the brothers were supposed to sell them. Over the years that followed, they began travelling across the country to gather books – something that quite a few booksellers do not do, as they depend on local sources.

Bookseller Niyazuddin tells me that he has never moved away from the traditional sources: local libraries and private collections. He travels either on public transport or on his scooter. As a result, his collection is not specialised since he has not put in the effort to curate or define a collection. He sells whatever he gets. Even though he started around the same time as Sushil Kumar, he remained modest about how he wanted to operate in the bazaar. Niyazuddin’s case is an important exception – unlike what we have seen with the Kumar brothers or Abdul Wali, specialisation is not a necessary condition that defines the present-day traditional vendor.

The way a vendor acquired their training, combined with how they started their business at the bazaar and decided to lead the business in the future, is one way to classify the vendors of Daryaganj. Mahesh, whom we met earlier, started with miscellaneous stock based on whatever was available. He now sells books for competitive exams: IELTS, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, and so forth. Mahesh’s knowledge of bookselling is only partially due to the training he received from his ustad; the rest is from his experience on these streets – that is, a combination of training and circumstantial knowledge, as is true for various older vendors. Mahesh tells me ‘Main bahot saari bhasha parh leta hoon. Bol nahin sakta, par dekh kar yeh bata dunga ke yeh kaunsi bhasha hai’ (‘I can read multiple languages. I cannot speak in those many languages, but I can identify which language it is just by looking at it’). When I asked what languages he can read fluently, he told me he understands Dutch, German, Sanskrit, Spanish, and what he calls ‘American’. Mahesh justifies his claim to be a polyglot based on his profession: ‘Patri se sikha hai, madam’ (‘I learnt it on the streets, Madam’). I asked him how: ‘Anparh ko angrez ke beech mein chhor do wo bhi angrezi bolega’ (‘Leave an illiterate amidst English-speaking people, and he will speak in English’). With time, Mahesh gained familiarity with his stock, and, corresponding to the demand for books, his ‘knowledge’ about his commodity increased. Students asked him about titles in different languages. By comparing those titles with his own, he figured out how to tell which language they were in. Like several of the vendors, Mahesh doesn’t read the books he sells or has meagre information about their literary value: the value of books, for Mahesh, is limited to their titles, language, and how often his customers demand them. Those who followed Mahesh into the profession then adopted these skills. His knowledge, gained from a combination of training, experience, and chance, has become part of an informal, unofficial, and important repertoire for a new vendor who wants to sell the same stock. This is how Mahesh belongs to what I understand as the traditional community of vendors at Daryaganj Sunday Book Market. Each of these vendor’s trajectories, then, demonstrates how the parallel business of book vending at the bazaar is related to the subsistence economy. It is informal, unprotected, and involves more risks than the ‘proper’ bookselling business.

2.3.3 ‘Apna kaam toh apna kaam hi hai’: Separating the ‘Proper’ from the ‘Parallel’

Some vendors at the Patri Kitab Bazaar are also associated with the proper communication circuit: they help in bookshops or they have their own publishing and/or printing units. Specialising at the Patri Kitab Bazaar means that they distinguish between both experiences – the parallel and the proper – since they are not the same: the variety of books and the mechanisms adopted to sell them vary. I will show, with a few examples, how they differ.

Swastik Dogra’s case challenges the notion that the booksellers of Patri Kitab Bazaar can benefit from the experience of selling books elsewhere and use that experience at the patri, and vice versa. As an assistant at Vijaykumar Govindram Hasanand (a bookshop in Nai Sarak) on weekdays, he sells the available stock and assists in data entry. This is how he earns his fixed monthly salary. He says that he likes selling spiritual books, which the bookshop primarily stocks and sells. However, his agency there is limited. As a vendor at the Patri Kitab Bazaar, he sells books other than those on spirituality: novels, comics, and syllabus books for schools and colleges in Delhi, because this is what sells here and allows him a good profit margin. Dogra’s case shows that the forms of self-management that the booksellers of Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar acquire are combined with an ardent desire for autonomy. Dogra expresses it as such: ‘Apna kaam toh apna kaam hi hai’ – He prefers selling books on the footpath, he says, because he owns this business. Dogra enjoys being a seller on the footpath instead of merely being a mediator in the bookshop where, more recently, he has mostly been managing their online catalogue. At the bazaar, Dogra is the boss. It is different from doing a day job at a bookshop or even owning one – a narrative repeated by several booksellers at the bazaar.

S. Chaudhry runs a successful book business on the nearby Ansari Road, called Masooma & Co, where he publishes and sells Urdu literature and textbooks. His customer base at the Patri Kitab Bazaar is quite different. However, at the bazaar, he sells his books at a discount of 40 per cent (unlike the 25 per cent discount at his shop), allowing students and Urdu literature readers to flock over to his bookstall. For instance, Chaudhry showed me a five-volume set of a much-requested Urdu–English Dictionary, which he sells at the Patri Kitab Bazaar for Rs. 2,000; at his shop, he sells it for Rs. 5,000. Thus, Chaudhry considers his buyers and their spending capacity while ensuring he doesn’t lose money. (I later found the same five-volume set at another bookstall, on the same evening, being sold for Rs. 1,500 – and that, too, was before any negotiations.) Moreover, only a few bookstalls sell Urdu books in the Patri Kitab Bazaar, giving an edge to Chaudhary’s stall. In both these cases – of Dogra and of Chaudhry – where booksellers either sell books at proper bookshops and at the patri, or when they both publish and sell books at more than one site, the Patri Kitab Bazaar may act as an additional, symbiotic site. However, bookselling at patri has its own parallel methods and knowledge, which the vendors must acquaint themselves with to make it a permanent profession.

2.3.4 Degree and Range of Specialisation

Even though there are many ways of becoming a bookseller at the Patri Kitab Bazaar, vendors decide on their extent and range of professional engagement with the books and the bazaar. Patri bookseller Manish specialises in antique books, which he then sells at book fairs and to an exclusive customer base that he has developed over the years. He showed me which kinds of books qualify as antique: first publications, association books, signed copies, rare book covers, and so forth. These are some of the titles he boasted of offering: an 1887 copy of Gebir, Count and Julian by W. S. Landor, acquired from London (second-hand, UK containers); a book from the library of Indraprastha Hindu Girls High School and Interim College, last borrowed on ‘24.5.1925’ by Radha, acquired from an unidentified seller who bought it second-hand from another used book market; a pocketbook of Greek art, Gods and Goddesses in Art and Legend, published in 1950, acquired from a local ‘contact’; and some 1977 editions of Women’s Era magazine and 1974 editions of Reader’s Digest, both acquired from a local reader’s private collection, on their demise, when sold by their family members. How did he achieve this quite specialised knowledge? He explained that there was no one way to find a collection of such books – he must be on the constant lookout. Over the years, he had identified reliable sources in Delhi and looked for similar contacts outside the city. Some intermediaries stock such rare books but, according to Manish, that is a more expensive option. He doesn’t approach the intemediaries unless it is to acquire a ‘special’ book. One of the ways for him to acquire an affordable collection with which he can maximise his profits is to rely on other booksellers’ stocks. One of his preferred stalls is that of Bheem, who also has a collection of such books and brings some of his stock every Sunday. Bheem sells them to his customers for as little as Rs. 50 without worrying much about how rare the book may be. The stock is even cheaper for Bheem because he buys in bulk. He exclaims that, unlike Manish, he isn’t as interested in growing his business. Bheem seems content with selling books as they reach him. Patri business offers him basic stability and security – and that is all he seeks. Manish is more entrepreneurial and exploits the knowledge he has accumulated. The symbiotic professional relationship between Manish and Bheem reflects how a particular aspect of business operated in the Patri Kitab Bazaar. In the early hours of setting up the market every Sunday, quite a few booksellers would take rounds of other bookstalls, looking for titles they think would fetch a better price.

A vendor at the Patri Kitab Bazaar needs familiarity with the materiality of a book beyond its content: covers, paratextual paraphernalia, the oldness or newness of a book, the marginalia (such as the signatures and their relevance to a buyer), why only specific books are requested repeatedly and if those books can be stocked again, and so on. While this may be similar to how vendors at other second-hand book markets acquire their knowledge, the booksellers of these markets are situated or ‘located’ uniquely. As much as the city and the street where they sell books are different, so too are their individual life histories and entrepreneurial contexts. Hence, the biography of a book bazaar is formed with the help of the biography of the booksellers who, by being situated here, have helped in locating the book market.

This profession requires situated knowledge, or how the vendors acquire and appropriate what Veronica Gago calls ‘forms of doing and knowing’, about the business of selling books at this location, with the used/pirated books as their saleable commodity.Footnote ⁴³ The kind of knowledge this business requires is also different from the business of proper bookselling. Since they don’t read the books, and there are no formal mechanisms which could provide them with an estimate of the value of the books, either literary or commercial – something that proper booksellers gain from understanding the latest publishing and sales patterns – there are specialised means for them to acquire the forms of knowledge that are required to be able to find stability in this business. The sellers, especially those who have formed specialised circuits, must know the books they sell. The booksellers at the Patri Kitab Bazaar require familiarity with the buyers’ needs. Pricing books is based on a quick evaluation: a balance between their knowledge of the ‘value’ of the stock and an analysis of what the buyer wants/can afford to pay. These are ways to make these sellers a community ‘parallel’ to that of proper booksellers and regular street vendors selling other commodities. This is one of the reasons why, as discussed in the previous section, Daryaganj Sunday Book Market is officially recognised as a specialised market.

2.3.5 In the Absence of ‘Shauq’

Vendors, despite having similar training and similar stock of books, may have different degrees of interest in the business. A. R. Khan didn’t receive any training. Further, luck didn’t favour him much. The promise of stability I noted in Ashok Kumar’s and Surendra Dhawan’s cases has remained unfulfilled in A. R. Khan’s case, who started in this business in 1985. His father-in-law suggested that he sell the novels in Hindi and Urdu that he had hoarded in his house to earn some extra money, which is how his journey as a bookseller in Daryaganj began. He left vending between 2009 and 2017. Before he moved to Mahila Haat, he used to sell books near the Daryaganj branch of the Bank of Baroda, located on Asaf Ali Marg. However, it has never been his primary means of a livelihood. Khan is a retired teacher of Urdu in a government school, where he taught for twenty-seven years. He was a scriptwriter at his institution’s radio programme for a few years and is quite invested in Urdu and Hindustani as literary languages: ‘I am a postgraduate in English, Political Science, and Urdu. I also give home tuition in these subjects now.’ He was the only bookseller who communicated with me in English for the first half of the interview, which ran for almost two hours. However, as he felt more comfortable, he switched to Urdu and even recited a few ghazalsFootnote ⁴⁴ that he told me he had written.

Inside Mahila Haat, Khan’s stall was not one of the well-curated stalls in Mahila Haat. After his personal collection sold out, he started selling what he could find from various sources, such as home libraries, schools, and some remainder stock from publishers. His initial stock (mostly his own collection) included books in Urdu, whereas now he sells a random selection of books in different languages, which includes anything from novels and non-fiction to self-help, amongst other genres. As we saw in the previous section, a vendor’s engagement with the available space on the footpath is an integral part of their day-to-day business, allowing them to attract customers in a certain way. Stall sajana, or arranging the stall, is a part of the specialisation that reflects their knowledge of how they can attract customers and how the readers may want the books displayed. Khan accepts that he doesn’t put much effort into curating or selling books, which could be one of the reasons why few buyers visit his stall. Peculiarly, Khan was rather disappointed with the poor engagement with Urdu that the visitors of Daryaganj have come to exhibit over the years. ‘You see, Urdu is not spoken commonly, especially with the new generation, and it is not used as an official language as much as it was earlier. This is reflected in the [poor] sale and resale value of books in Urdu.’ The fact that he cannot sell books in the language he is fond of may be one reason for the sense of detachment he feels vis-à-vis book vending. His disappointment extends further: ‘People are overjoyed when someone uses an Urdu word or recites a couplet in Urdu. Yet, they do not want to learn the language.’

While Khan had a thorough knowledge of how this trade functions – he explained to me how the books had been sourced into this market over the years and who the key booksellers are – he did not find joy in selling books (compared to how, say, Rajesh Ojha or A. L. Verma enjoyed bookselling) – yet, he continues to do this despite only barely managing to make enough profit to run his house. His children are ‘settled’ and don’t need his money – one of the reasons why he can continue. Khan’s family doesn’t support his business of selling books at the Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar since he is not earning anything from this trade, and it demands much physical labour, which seems difficult for someone his of age to manage. But since he still has many books in stock, he feels the need to continue until he sells them. He seemed unconvinced by the option of selling the lot to the booksellers here or to a paper merchant. He likes to come to the market, he said, since it has become a part of his routine. Hence, bookselling becomes a habit, and not shauq. He questioned his attachment to the trade since he could not engage with it as he wanted to, because he was unable to sell Urdu books, the stock with which he started. ‘Bookselling is an art’, he exclaimed, ‘and I am not good at this art’.

Another such ‘detached’ vendor worth mentioning here is Manmohan Singh. Book vending is not his only profession, as is common for a few booksellers at the bazaar.Footnote ⁴⁵ He does iron-welding in a shop near where he lives in Jamnapar, East Delhi. He started out doing odd jobs such as embroidery on clothes and maintenance. He shares his stock of books with his friends at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. His only engagement is to sell the books and not worry about acquiring more stock or curating his stall. I asked him why his friends were helping him without taking a share of the profits. He told me he doesn’t live with his family, is unmarried, and relies on his friends’ support. I asked him why he was not married – all the booksellers I had interviewed had a family to support, mostly with the help of this business. ‘Sach bataun, to koi mila hi nahin’: he couldn’t find anyone, he said. Singh’s case was unusual for me since several booksellers at Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar entered the business with the help of a family member or, further, had some members of their family involved in the trade. In fact, the idea of kinship is typically associated with both large- and small-scale businesses in India. Singh, on the other hand, has found a community amidst the booksellers.

Interestingly, Singh is the only Sikh vendor I saw at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. He spoke to me in Punjabi once he realised I could speak it too. He felt more comfortable using his mother tongue and opened up to me about his life as a bookseller and otherwise – something that he doesn’t get to do with other vendors or most of his customers. He doesn’t have any books to sell in Punjabi, either. He would have liked to pursue that, he says, since he also reads Punjabi books and has an interest in the language. However, while Khan was unable to sell Urdu books despite the presence of Urdu in the bazaar (unlike Chaudhry, who has established a network of buyers in the bazaar), books in Punjabi do not usually circulate as a part of the communication circuit that runs in Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar. He did not seem very keen on this business, nor did he invest much capital or thought into it. He comes there to sell books among the community that he has gradually developed an attachment to, and that’s about it. If not for his sense of belonging with other vendors, Singh might as well have also sold any other commodity.

2.5.1 Two Female Book Vendors: Asha and Vinita

Of the 258 vendors mentioned in the official list, only 8 are women. These women visited the market only in lieu of their husbands, sons, or fathers-in-law, except for Asha and Vinita.Footnote ⁵⁰ Both Asha and Vinita were present regularly at their respective stalls. Asha’s stall sold used books, and Vinita’s sold out-of-syllabus children’s books, such as books on the alphabet, simple mathematics, colouring books, and so on. Thus, both their stocks of books belonged to two major circuits that operated in the bazaar. How they did the business (or performed the role of a bookseller) – setting up the stalls and negotiating with the buyers each Sunday, and even taking major and minor business decisions – was no different than for any other regular, male seller at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. Asha was, in fact, an elected member of the now-dismantled Darya Ganj Patri Sunday Book Bazaar Welfare Association and held the position of treasurer. Likely, she was merely a cursory representative of her gender, as mandated by the by-laws of the association. However, despite their visibly active role, their identity as vendors was not ‘authorised’ by the male vendors.

Since the very first Sunday of my fieldwork and throughout the protests held by the vendors between July and September 2019, and even after the relocation, I met Asha Devi every Sunday, and we often chatted more about the book market’s situation than her life as a bookseller. A woman in her late fifties, she preferred staying in one place and not moving around the stall or the streets; she blamed her age for her aching back and knees. Asha expressed her refusal to identify herself as a bookseller as such; each time she would talk about her engagement with the market, she repeated this sentence: ‘Ye aadmi logon ke hi bas ka kaam hai. Itni bhaari-bhaari kitabein auratein kaise uthyengi, aap hi batao?’ (‘This business can only be run by men. How do you think women will manage handling such heavy stocks of books?’). Since her husband passed away, she has spent several years manning the bookstall, while her son Shekhar took their book business beyond the streets of Daryaganj: Shekhar dealt with the intermediaries and outsourced the stock of second-hand books to other countries. At the stall, Asha negotiated with the customers who visited the stall since Shekhar was rarely present at the site of business. Yet, instead of Asha, Shekhar was the one whom the rest of the booksellers engaged with: from informal discussions over chai about the business to buying books from him to sell on their stalls. He is one of the younger vendors but is known among the booksellers as someone who has gained extensive knowledge about the business. Since Asha (and Shekhar) sold second-hand English novels, they were both what I understand as traditional vendors of the Patri Kitab Bazaar. Yet, Shekhar was publicly acknowledged as one by the booksellers, but not Asha.

When I met Vinita Wadhwa, who was in her early forties, she was grieving for her husband, who had died in May 2019: ‘He had a heart attack on a Sunday evening, after having spent the day on the patri, selling books.’ When I met her in July 2019 at the patri and later inside Mahila Haat, her son Dev had just started to assist her and was quickly learning the tricks of the trade in order to take over whenever it was suitable. Vinita felt the need to find other means of employment because she couldn’t identify herself as a bookseller. As in the case of Asha and Shekhar, other vendors would often communicate only with Dev rather than with Vinita about issues and opportunities related to the Patri Bazaar – say, issues related to the relocation or new stock coming in. Since Dev is younger and much less experienced than Shekhar, the vendors took it upon themselves to train him as a forthcoming vendor from the new generation, but one who would sell books at the bazaar in the traditional sense – what books to gather, building contacts that may be relevant for his business, how to negotiate with the customer and the intermediaries, and so on.

However, Vinita seemed familiar with the tricks of the trade when I met her. At their stall, they sold newly acquired out-of-syllabus supplementary course material for children, such as colouring books, books on alphabets and numbers, and some comics. Her husband’s old assistant was responsible for selling the stock of old novels he had accumulated. In this sense, Vinita had created her own specialised stall. While Dev was still learning, she already knew what would sell and how to fetch profits. Vinita had taken over the business overnight since there was no other way to earn a livelihood. The family lived in a rented house, and the book business paid all their bills. Vinita was active during the protests that were held in July–September 2019, demonstrating her resilience by fighting for the streets and getting back to business, but, a few weeks after the NrDMC made the relocation official, she decided to move to Mahila Haat. She told me that she had to find some way to feed her family of two. While she waited for Dev to take over the business gradually, she looked for a more ‘stable’ job, since the book trade within Mahila Haat had been quite erratic. She was an active seller, much like Asha or any other male vendor. However, the two months when the Patri Kitab Bazaar was lifted off the streets had demotivated her due to the lack of stability in the book business at Mahila Haat. Trusting her skills as a businesswoman, she decided to sell homemade chocolates as a side business. This would also limit her interactions in a male-dominated space and wouldn’t require her to depend on men who, apparently, ran the book business. However, since her experience and acquired training and knowledge were in bookselling, and that too in a bazaar-like space, she realised she couldn’t easily apply it to another commodity. (This, in turn, testifies that this space and this commodity are specialised and require specific modes of training and the execution of that training in the business.) Learning how to sell chocolates – or, in other words, becoming a chocolate vendor – demanded a different skill and knowledge set. Eventually, Dev and Vinita decided to move their bookstall to a more permanent and ‘proper’ space for books, such as the North Campus of Delhi University, where the demand and circulation processes are more systematic and stable.

In a very conventional sense, Asha’s and Vinita’s cases are examples of the devaluation of work that women do outside the home. Asha Devi and Vinita are the only female vendors who ran independent bookstalls in the Patri Kitab Bazaar – both because their husbands had passed away and their sons could not stay at the stall regularly. Yet, both considered themselves merely ‘assisting’ with the bookselling business, and viewed the business as unsafe for women vis-à-vis procurement and sales in a visible male space. Vinita’s father-in-law and other male booksellers would visit their stall every Sunday to check if they were safe and comfortable. The crowded streets of Old Delhi were home to a heterogeneous crowd prone to theft and petty crimes. The larger part of the vendors were men. Managing stocks of books from the godowns to their stall involved other men: rickshaw pullers and other labourers. Even while they actively engaged in the profession of selling books, Asha and Vinita see themselves as belonging to the space of the house and not the outside world of street vending – it was only out of necessity, and only until Dev could take over, that Vinita was willing to work. Even Asha expressed that this was one way for her to ‘pass’ her time, and nothing beyond that. In a way, this restriction is also cultural, whereby women are constrained by the boundaries of housework and not worldly affairs such as running a business. Consider Kiran’s case. Kiran is a thirty-five-year-old woman whose husband is a heart patient. He used to sell books near the Delite Cinema, but since 2018, around the time it became difficult for them to manage their finances, Kiran replaced her husband as a vendor. Her husband is not happy that she ‘goes outside the house to work’ – ‘main bahar kaam karti hoon, unhein achha nahin lagta’, she says. He would rather she stayed inside.

Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar is visibly a male-dominated space, professionally and socially. The only two regular female vendors could never associate themselves with the space. It is, however, common to see women vending on the streets across Delhi. For instance, at a rather famous street market in Central Delhi, popularly known as Janpath Gujarati Market, it is mostly women who sell Gujarati artefacts, jewellery, upholstery, and bags. However, the adjacent imported clothes market is also populated by male vendors. Janpath Gujarati Market is set in a different lane, and is an exclusive space for women to sell their goods around familiar people. Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar is larger in size and scale and issituated in a more conservative part of the city. Hence, even if it is not obviously stated that the space is unsafe for women or is exclusively male-dominated, this is assumed, and it shows. The civic authorities speculated and argued that the bounded architecture and outlook of Mahila Haat would be a ‘safer’ space for women to pursue book vending. There were certainly more female members/vendors seen inside the Haat, but most were sitting with their husbands, brothers, or other male family members. One of the reasons for an increase in this number was also that the vendors needed extra help in setting up their stalls inside the new site. Since it was already an expensive arrangement compared to the streets, family members, especially women, became suitable unpaid labour. However, it would be premature to claim that the conventional boundary that the vendors have created will loosen with the change in space.

Meenu and her daughter Divya are also worth mentioning here. Both are members of the extended Aggarwal family, as is Vinita. Meenu and Divya began coming to the market to participate in the protest. During the protest, Divya mentioned that due to a family feud the Aggarwal brothers were fighting for their individual stalls and not as a unit, which is why both mother and daughter had come to support her father. Divya worked in the sales department of a jewellery shop and had to leave the protest site for work every Sunday. Her mother was present throughout the protests. Both Meenu and Divya are registered in the official list of vendors. However, while they were not authentic members of this community because of their irregular participation in the bazaar’s day-to-day, Divya and Meenu were still expected to participate in the protests.

It was challenging for female booksellers to establish their ownership of the bazaar space – they lacked the pride or pleasure to openly claim it. According to them, they don’t ‘fit in’. The organisation of the vendor community at the Patri Kitab Bazaar shows a persistence of older family forms and structures within which individuals, particularly women, must continue to operate. The female vendors at the bazaar accommodate their agency and autonomy within the existing constraints of duty and obligations, both social and familial.Footnote ⁵¹ Asha and Vinita are not creating any new forms of specialisation or adding to the knowledge corpus. Instead, they choose to act within the traditional norms the male vendors have created and continue to create. In this view, if I were to disregard how the male vendors view them or how they choose to express their rhetoric of belonging, instead of seeing them as ‘non-vendors’, I would rather place them with other ‘detached vendors’ such as A. R. Khan and Manmohan Singh. Female vendors at the bazaar have not (yet) been able to form their independent identity as proper vendors of Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar.

However, gender was not the only means of bias. To reaffirm what makes a vendor part of the traditional community of vendors, the type of books that they sell played a key role. This is where the vendors of ‘D’ books were dissociated from the traditional community and were placed outside the implicit boundary.

2.5.2 Vendors of ‘D ki kitab’

During the 2019 protests, K. R. Khanna boisterously described himself as the ‘father of this market’ each time I or any media personnel interviewed him – a claim other booksellers were keen to discredit. They claimed that other older members, such as Om Mago or Sushil Kumar, had started the market. Nevertheless, whether or not he was the father of the market, he did sell books at the bazaar for a long time. Khanna gave up his allotted space on Netaji Subhash Marg some time ago and now helps his son, who runs a shop in Kamla Nagar, Delhi-07. Referring to himself as a paternal figure of authority, or a buzurg (elderly member of a community), was his way of reclaiming his share in the social memory of the community’s past and present.

Why am I discussing Khanna ji here? He introduced me to the term ‘D’ books, which is what the vendors call pirated or digitally produced books. He then played a pivotal role in introducing me to another aspect of bookselling at the bazaar: the boundary the booksellers create by excluding the vendors of ‘D’ books as authentic members of the community of vendors at Daryaganj.

Khanna exclaimed on behalf of what he understands as the authentic community of vendors: ‘Humne is patri ko sincha hai, hum ise kharab nahin hone denge’ (‘We have nurtured this Patri; we will not let it deteriorate’). He addresses the authentic community of vendors at the Patri Kitab Bazaar as ‘we’/‘hum’ while he ‘others’ the D-book vendors. For Khanna and several other vendors, the vendors of digitally pirated books are diminishing the value of the Patri Kitab Bazaar. The vendors of ‘D’ books are outside the shared rhetoric of garv and lagaav and are equated with ‘other’, ordinary street vendors and hawkers who should find a place elsewhere. This was a typical case of a community’s resistance to change, with a gradual loss of traditional static bonds to social and spatial change.

The networks in which the vendors of pirated books are placed are distinct from the traditional networks with which older booksellers engage.Footnote ⁵² The notion of tradition is closely related to collective social memory, whereby beliefs and customs are handed down from generation to generation. Tradition is often linked to strong embeddedness and attachment to place and can frequently be found where a core group of stakeholder’s generations have survived. Whenever I asked the vendors of non-pirated books about the processes of procurement and circulation of the books, most of them provided similar, overlapping narratives: surplus or imported stocks, institutional or private libraries, and so on. Having a shared network which runs each of their businesses highlighted that they have traced a tradition for their community. On the other hand, pirated books have their own ‘communication circuit’, which is outside the aforementioned tradition. These booksellers do not go through the conventional means of acquiring used books, such as publishers, libraries, auction sales, paper markets, and so on. Instead, they are connected to the printers directly. In this way, they become a more immediate part of the suggested parallel communication circuit, having only a few actors within the circuit to communicate with. There is something worth noting here vis-à-vis the ‘newness’ of these books. Since D-Books are duplicates of the latest releases, they are indeed nayi-jaisi, unlike second-hand books or photocopied study-material. Hence, the knowledge corpus of D-book vendors is also unique and distinguishable from that of other vendors of the Patri Kitab Bazaar. Theirs is thus a community within a community, wherein most of these vendors are younger and new to the profession of bookselling, and only sell pirated books.

I met Rajiv almost every Sunday in 2019. He sold pirated books out of a Hyundai Santro car. It was interesting to see that instead of the temporary space of the street, he chose the temporary space of a car to sell his ‘new’ books – pirated copies of the latest releases. Rajiv greeted me every day and discussed the latest issues with the space of the market, especially how the MCD was creating problems for vendors of the patri. Contrary to what Khanna told me, he seemed to share a good bond with other regular vendors as well – that is, he was not seen as a ‘threat’, which is the idea that Khanna endorsed. However, unlike vendors of second-hand books, who would often go in detail while explaining their ‘communication circuit’, Rajiv left most of my questions related to his business unanswered (questions such as how these books reach this book market, who are the major printers, are there any middlemen involved, is there a threat around the illegal procurement, production, or sale, and so on). ‘Hum naye log hain, nayi kitabein bechte hain’, is all he would say – ‘We are new vendors, we sell new books.’ This was true for the rest of the vendors of pirated books as well. They were acutely aware of the dangers of sharing exhaustive information about their business, which is largely illegal, even if it is growing fast and brings in much profit for the sellers. Piracy has existed in the Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar for decades. Having evolved newer formats of piracy and even newer ways of conducting business, the meta-community of vendors of pirated books are the ones to take the Patri Kitab Bazaar into the future. Their reluctance to share information also reflected their self-awareness of being on the periphery of the book business in the Patri Kitab Bazaar, if not completely outside the traditional boundaries. That is, even as their business was proliferating on the patri, and the patri was, in fact, a profitable site of business, they would rather discuss the general manner of operation of the patri than distinguish their community as a principal unit. This was untrue for the vendors of the other two circuits.

The sellers of pirated books do not undervalue their stock. Either they convinced customers that their books were not pirated or they said that the pirated books are, in fact, behtar (‘better’) than the original – they are available much earlier than the used copies, and at a fixed price. So, no ‘chik-chik’ (haggling). Therefore, this became an additional burden for the vendor of the traditional circuit, especially several such who sold novels to the non-specialised reader not looking for ‘rare’ copies. In my interviews with them, traditional vendors also defined their authenticity in terms of not selling pirated books – the fact that they had to make this point out loud to an ethnographer of the marketspace made their sense of incongruity with the vendors of ‘D’ books more apparent. One of their common complaints was that ‘duplicate books are available across the city; they can sit anywhere else’. Why, indeed, do these booksellers set up their stalls here? Is it simply because this market receives a large number of book buyers?

Modern-day piracy is a result of the introduction of modern technology to printing and publishing. As low-cost technologies of mechanical and digital reproduction have become popular and accessible, it has become easier and cheaper to produce ‘D’ books and sell them at the same price as a second-hand copy, but with a higher profit margin. Even as pirated books have their own production ecosystem, they do not have an independent ecosystem for circulation. For that, there are ways in which the structure of a bazaar is helpful to sustain this business. In addition, selling pirated books anywhere else in the city’s less crowded sites also entails higher visibility. This would require the vendors to engage in complex networks of seeking permissions from the civic authorities, which these vendors certainly want to avoid.

The resilience that any community retains is reflected in its capacity to absorb disturbances and reorganise while undergoing changes, whilst retaining the same structure, function, and identity. These members also provide feedback. In the case of Patri Kitab Bazaar, D-book vendors do not align with the traditional networks, nor do they bear any generational connections. They are an ‘addition’ to this community in the ways in which they add to the bazaar’s present-day (and possibly future) structure, function, and identity. Do the vendors of pirated books share the traditional community’s resilience and attachment to the place? I witnessed an example of this resilience in the vendors of pirated books first-hand during the protests held between July and September 2019. Since the traditional community had divided itself into two groups – those who had decided to relocate and those who were against the decision – the reluctance displayed by the vendors of duplicate books to outgrow the outmoded space of the streets could be interpreted as their way of supporting the traditional community of vendors. At the outset of the protests, while the booksellers were trying to establish the validity of their claims to the limited street slots, the mainstream booksellers of Daryaganj regarded the vendors of pirated books as peripheral. This attitude underscored the low regard for their knowledge and background. Later, the same set of ‘authentic’/traditional booksellers sought to partner with these other(ed) vendors to represent a majority for the relocation prompted by the civic authorities.Footnote ⁵³ Most of the vendors of pirated books decided to stay on the streets for a good span of time – possibly because the streets were more likely than Mahila Haat to accommodate their ‘grey-area’ business and because they had fostered a sense of operating their business on the streets.

In conclusion, at the Patri Kitab Bazaar, the habitus of the vendors, their education, training, social background, circumstances, family, and so forth, all come into play as they indulge in precarious modes of self-management. By way of their situated knowledge, the vendors give the Patri Kitab Bazaar its unique identity. Over time, the vendors acquire the capacity to relate and negotiate with traditional forms that are declining or being reworked in the bazaar according to new logic. Within these emerging mechanisms, such as those the vendors of ‘D’ books bring in, the traditional vendors are no longer the privileged mediators. Instead, they must find ways to foster new, emerging networks.