“To learn to read is to light a fire,” wrote Victor Hugo. “Every syllable is a spark.”
Reading is fundamental. In every generation, children first learn to read and then read to learn. The history of the word has been one of widening access. Some 3,500 years before the Common Era, Mesopotamia developed the cuneiform script to maintain administrative records. Phoenician traders introduced an early alphabet based on sounds. The ancient Greeks wrote their texts as scriptio continua, a continuous stream without punctuation. Nevertheless, throughout this period and for centuries thereafter, reading remained the preserve of an elite few.
It was only in the 15th century, after Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, that reading started to become affordable and accessible to everyone. Ordinary citizens could now engage with words and text directly. In the 18th century, the spread of coffee houses, followed by the advent of industrial printing, public education, and free public libraries further created a more informed and opinionated reading public.
An element of this narrative that is often ignored is the street bookseller. From the pavements of 17th century Paris and Victorian London to those of College Street in Kolkata and Flora Fountain in Mumbai, street booksellers have formed an integral part of this transformation: from elite luxury to mass reading habit.
An informal market
Kanupriya Dhingra’s book is about one such street market, the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar. Beginning with a personal childhood experience, her fascination with the market grew as a college student, when she lived in Satya Niketan in Delhi and became a regular purveyor of the books and atmosphere at the bazaar. As a researcher, her obsession became an academic interest. While conducting research on old writing manuals in Old Delhi, she discovered the spirited world of informal book markets. During her Ph.D at SOAS University of London, she began to research the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar.
Over months, every Sunday morning, as cardboard and iron boxes full of books were brought in and arranged, she watched the transformation of empty footpaths into a pop-up book bazaar. Using ethnographic observation, oral histories, archival research, and close attention to the market’s nuances and rhythms as it was brought to life and taken down every Sunday, she set out to understand how the book bazaar functioned within an informal economy as a site of human connection and community.
In Dhingra’s account, the market is no ordinary phenomenon. She places it within the older historical book cultures of the city. Regular visitors include not only aficionados but the city’s populations of students and migrants. Interacting with booksellers, buyers, and regular visitors, she follows its evolution from the 1960s as a motley collection of vinyl records, artefacts, and used books, through eviction and legal struggle into a unique cultural institution in this century. When the market was to be relocated to Mahila Haat, it was not only the booksellers who felt a sense of disorientation; habitual visitors, too, felt the change. “The sudden quietness of Sunday mornings felt almost uncanny. The streets that had once buzzed with argument, negotiation, and discovery now stood eerily vacant… ‘Shayad khatam hi ho gaya,’ a young man suggested quietly, disappointment evident in his voice. ‘I think it’s over.’”
Titles old and new
Nevertheless, the market proved resilient, unfolding and rearranging itself into the new space. Dhingra describes the booksellers themselves as expert readers of their customers, knowing what each reader is looking for and displaying their books accordingly. This gives the book a larger argument.
An organised bookstore shelves and categorises its books in more structured ways; without romanticising it, a street market is a series of diverse and, hopefully, compelling encounters with old and new titles. Serendipitous discoveries can lead to new directions in reading. I am reminded of the Mumbai columnist Busybee who wrote movingly about the pavement bookstalls of Flora Fountain, comparing the books to autumn leaves scattered on the ground. The form of the book suits its subject. The street book market resists tidy categories. Its description calls for an interweaving of ethnography, urban history, memoir, and poetry. “Faiz nahar jaari hai,” notes Dhingra: Faiz canal, the 14th century canal whose waters flowed through Chandni Chowk and Daryaganj, lives on — not as water, but as the flow of books and ideas circulating in this street marketplace every Sunday morning.
This is also a book about Delhi itself. The city is different things to different people. The Sunday Book Bazaar belongs to the city of the common reader. For historian Sohail Hashmi, notes Dhingra, the bazaar “is not separable from the city. It is one of the places where Delhi thinks about itself, where objects circulate, where the city’s unofficial intellectual life has long been conducted, without any fanfare”.
The reviewer is in the IAS.