Resist, remember, recite, repeat

KANUPRIYA DHINGRA

Qamar Saeed, known as the ‘King of Daryaganj’ among his fellow booksellers, showed me an ‘official’ looking document. It had the date on which he registered his place in the bazaar. ‘On this day, I was sure that this was going to be my way of life.’ He was eighteen. He has now spent forty years at the bazaar while also serving as the President of the Association of book vendors at Daryaganj.

Most of the vendors have photocopies of a tehbazaari parchi,1 which is otherwise only supposed to validate their presence for one day. They have laminated these documents realizing that they might be required to, or may wish to, reproduce the parchi in the future, even if it has only a mnemonic significance. An old bookseller told me – ‘Mere paas bayasi ki parchi hai, jab Olympic khel hua tha. Main panni mein lagakar aaunga’ – referring to the 1982 Asian Games. He still has the document
from that time and said he would get it laminated for me to see. ‘Mera poora naam likha hua hai.’ (It has my full name.)

For approximately five decades now, the historic Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar, or the Sunday Footpath Book Market, has served readers from all parts of the city and all walks of life. It is an informal, local, weekly book bazaar, and unlike most consumer goods weekly markets in Delhi, only rare, used, or pirated books get sold here. The books are sold by weight or at a fixed rate, which is relatively inexpensive compared to the ‘proper’ bookselling spaces, also known as bookshops.

Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar has officially been recognized as a ‘natural market’. A ‘natural market’ is a space ‘where buyers and sellers interact without significant institutional intervention.’2 Every Sunday, from early morning to the late evening, the footpath between Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Marg was occupied by the sellers, and the two landmark cinema halls of the old
city – Golcha and Delite – marked the endpoints of this L-shaped bazaar. However, in July 2019, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation ordered its shutdown. Two months later, in mid-September, it was relocated to a nearby gated complex called Mahila Haat. Although booksellers had been protesting for the market to return to the original footpaths, most shifted to Mahila Haat. The protests continued outside Delhi Gate Metro Station exit number 3 when Covid-19 erupted, causing further damage to the livelihoods of the booksellers.

In a world that is ambitious about the ‘beautification’ of the cities of the Global South, how do we save ephemeral spaces? What happens when the history of an impermanent, transitioning, yet culturally and economically significant site is absent? In this article, I share the worry of many Delhi enthusiasts and storytellers.

Over the past fifty years, any bookseller who decided to lay books in the vicinity of this footpath became a vendor belonging to the Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar. In fact, this is how the L-shaped market came into existence. Yet, there have been formal and informal ways of belonging to this community.

There are a variety of formal ways. These include a written intimation of business to the civic authorities and registering oneself as a street vendor so that one can comply with state and central policies such as the Street Vending Act. The vendors must keep proof of their registration with them. The documents also provide official recognition of a vendor’s lagaav or attachment to the bazaar – a document that shows their official timeline at the patri as a vendor of books. Whenever asked to verify or even describe their association with the bazaar, whether it is by the civic authorities or by keen photographers and journalists, these documents become a convenient way of declaring such attachment.

It was common for a vendor to show me one of these documents while describing their life in the Patri Kitab Bazaar. Thus, the official documents go beyond their bureaucratic function and serve as ‘paper truths’ or ‘memory props’.3 These vendors cherish the official ‘paper truths’ beyond their limited and temporary formal significance.

The vendors at Daryaganj see their community as different from other street vendors and street hawkers. This is a specialized weekly bazaar, and when compared to other Local Weekly Markets or LWMs, the vendors believe that their profession is more ‘sophisticated’. Each of them tried to communicate that selling books on the patri was not the same as selling everyday consumer goods that are found in most of the local weekly markets or LWMs.

Hence, I noted that apart from the shared location, one fascinating note of similarity amidst the vendors of Daryaganj was their shared rhetoric of belonging. They associated bookselling with pride and passion – ‘garv’ and ‘shauq’ were the terms they would frequently use. Often, they would talk about their lagaav to the patri and the business of selling books.

There are shared elements in their stories: how and when they began their business and how rewarding their individual and collective experiences have been. ‘Hobby bhi hai, roti bhi
hai,’ said Asharfi Lal Verma about his business of selling books on the patri – ‘it works as a hobby and a means to earn our livelihoods.’ Asharfi Lal Verma exclaimed: ‘Dekhiye, kuch kaam karne mein maza aata hai; agar hum chahte to dukan ya naukri bhi kar sakte the. Lekin ismein ek alag experience hota hai.’ (You see, there are some jobs that you enjoy doing; I could have done my business in a shop, or I could have done a job. But this is a distinct experience altogether.)

In 2019, I approached the booksellers and asked them to share their personal histories. Most of them invited me to sit with them on their side of the bookstall to narrate their stories patiently. Amidst several anecdotes, there were also bits of poetry, stories of love and loss, and quite a lot of tea and food involved. This was a welcome experience for me. I had always been on the other side of the footpath so far, as a buyer.

My question to them was simple: Aap is kitab ke ek kirdar hain, mujhe apni kahani batayenge? (You are a character in my book; would you like to share your story?) Their responses were nothing short of captivating. They recounted their initial discovery of the bazaar, describing it as a space for both business and joy. Most of them found their way to books ‘by chance’ – for a long time, they did not assume that this was meant to be their final profession. Your regular Daryaganj book vendor might have been a freelance photographer, an Urdu lecturer, a New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) official, a rickshaw puller, a newspaper hawker, a vegetable hawker, an embroiderer, a copy editor, a stenographer, and so on. Many booksellers have been in the business for decades. Their stories, of their personal history and their sense of belonging to the city, recall how this bazaar was shaped over the years.

The trajectories of the sellers reflect the changes and challenges that this bazaar has faced. These challenges have surfaced from demands made by the civic authorities, from the changing demographic of the city, from processes of migration and patterns of settlement in the city, changes in the supply of books, and so on.

At some point in their lives, each vendor had arrived at Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar. Here, ‘arrival’ refers to the ‘place’ where they came from and the ‘profession’ to which they belonged before they became a part of this community. The oldest of the book-sellers are self-trained. They also brought their family members into the business. For instance, Mahesh Kumar has spent thirty-two years at the bazaar now. His elder brother brought him here, who was, in turn, helped by his uncle. According to Kumar, his uncle was trained by a certain ‘ustâd’ (a teacher, or master).

However, not all ‘traditional’ vendors found this business by way of their familial networks. For instance, all five of Divakar Pandey’s brothers signed up for the Indian Army, but he could not clear the entrance exam because of a certain medical condition. By choosing to become a bookseller, he became the exception in his family. He began by working for a railway bookstall in Rajasthan and later moved to Delhi to work with DK Publishing and Prakash Publications, located on the nearby Ansari Road. After this, he found stability on the streets and left his earlier jobs. Like Divakar, quite a few booksellers at Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar have engaged with the book business in several ways, and some of them continue to.

On the weekdays, Omkar Dogra works as an assistant at a local bookshop that deals in spiritual books. On Sundays, since 1999, he has been setting up a stall at the Patri Kitab Bazaar and has now moved to Mahila Haat, where he sells books other than those on spirituality: novels, comics, and syllabus books for schools and colleges in Delhi and elsewhere in the country.

Then there are vendors who also run publishing houses. They visit the bazaar to cater to a parallel population of readers, who in turn get their books at a relatively discounted price.
For instance, the owner of an Urdu publishing house, Masooma and Co., reproduces Urdu titles that he acquires from Pakistan and sells them at a 40 per cent discount at the bazaar, instead of the regular 20 per cent at his bookshop.

Many booksellers have spent a considerable amount of time in other non-books related professions before landing in the book trade. Surendra Dhawan was a fulltime photographer. However, his shauq or passion for photography entailed an erratic routine spread over unusual places and was hence not a sustainable option. ‘Ab grahasthi bhi sambhalni hoti hai,’ he said. His family required his presence, and he was looking for a more stable option. Bookselling became that avenue.

Dhawan’s stall in Daryaganj is as old as since the year 1999. He began by selling magazines. Somewhere around 2001-02, he was contacted by an importer if he would be interested in selling books other than magazines from the lot that arrived at the shores of India from the UK and the US. Having observed the patterns of demand at the bazaar, he asked for English novels, and ever since, that is what he has been selling. He bought the books by their weight and managed to sell them for a good profit. Over time, he has seen customers from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

At present, Dhawan is one of the more sought out booksellers in Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar. He showed me copies of translated volumes of the Booker Prize-winning novel by Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. ‘I have visited her, and these copies are signed.’ But he doesn’t sell them to his customers. In a way, these are his personal memorabilia from this business – his means to build and exhibit an attachment to the Patri. Unlike the parchis that are official ‘memory props’, these books then have an informal mnemonic significance.

Despite claiming that it has all been a matter of chance, the book vendors of Daryaganj have continued to define their work and community. Consequently, there are ways in which they have not defined themselves. In other words, there are boundaries that they have imposed internally.

Out of the 258 vendors mentioned in the official list of vendors, only eight are women. These women visited the market only in lieu of their husbands, sons, or fathers-in-law, except for Asha Devi and Vinita Wadhwa. Both talked of themselves as merely ‘assisting’ with the bookselling business. While their sons would often accompany them, they were the ones running the stall. However, they were not seen as the primary vendors among the community of vendors at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. On the few occasions when Asha would spill some informa-tion about her presence in the market, I noticed that she never spoke of herself as a book vendor per se. Each time she would talk about her engagement with the market, she repeated this sentence in one way or the other: ‘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?)

In a very conventional sense, Asha’s case is that of de-valorization of work that women do outside their homes. Even while they are actively engaged in the profession of selling books, they see themselves as belonging to the space of the house and not the outside world of street vending. This restriction is also cultural, where women are tied to the boundaries of housework and not worldly affairs such as running a business.

An old vendor, who calls himself ‘the father of the bazaar’, exclaims: ‘Humne is patri ko sincha hai, hum ise kharab nahin hone denge.’ (We have nurtured this Patri; we will not let it perish.) He addresses what he understands as the authentic community of vendors at the Patri Kitab Bazaar as ‘we’/‘hum’. Whereas he clearly others the vendors of pirated books or the pirates. For him and several other vendors, the vendors of digitally pirated books are diminishing the authenticity of the Patri Kitab Bazaar. The vendors of ‘D’ books are seen as outside the shared rhetoric of garv and lagaav and are equated with ‘other’ street vendors and hawkers.

This was a typical case of a community’s resistance to change, where there was 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. The notion of tradition is closely related to collective social memory, where 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 generations have survived.

Interestingly, unlike other vendors who would often go into detail while explaining their specialized knowledge and stories of arrival at Daryaganj, vendors of pirated books often left most of my questions related to their business unanswered. They were acutely aware of the dangers of sharing exhaustive information about their business that is largely illegal, even if it is growing fast and bringing in much profit to the sellers. More so, this reflected their self-awareness of being on the periphery, if not completely outside the traditional boundaries of the book business in the Patri Kitab Bazaar.

The vendors of pirated or duplicate books are not an anomaly to the community. Instead, they represent how the community of vendors has evolved in Daryaganj. The demography of Delhi changed over time, as did the technology of printing and publishing, which meant that the vendors of Daryaganj modified their stock of books. What was found at Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar then is not what populates the stalls now. While pirated books have their own ecosystem of production, they do not have an independent ecosystem for their circulation. For that, there are ways in which the structure of a bazaar is helpful to sustain this business.

Photograph by Kanupriya Dhingra

Chhatri: A bookseller on the streets of Daryaganj in 2017

Historically, bazaars have been a site for porous legality and vernacular modernism – they favour piracy. In addition, the sale of pirated books anywhere else in the city’s less crowded sites also entails a higher visibility which would require the vendors to engage in complex networks of seeking permissions from the civic authorities, which these vendors certainly want to escape.

But then, why archive their stories? First, to reconstruct the history of Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar and examine its ethnographic present. Oral historian Alessandro Portelli says, ‘Memory is the only weapon we have against forgetting.’ The vendors (and repetitive buyers, or shauqeen buyers) are ‘communities of memory’ who form an integral part of the totality of this history and help in creating a richer portrait of the elements at play. The individual accounts that I rely on are as much a part of the official memory, so to speak.

Second, because, simply speaking, the book bazaar is not a permanent establishment. It has run a continued risk of a complete erasure/disappearance. There is a lack of adequately reliable and comprehensive written accounts about the history of this market and its evolu-tion during the least five decades. Hence, these stories contribute towards constructing a people’s history of the Patri Kitab Bazaar. That is, the story of the vendors and buyers becomes the story of the bazaar.

In my experience, bookshops were forbidding spaces, not merely restrictive for their buyers but also for the ethnographer. By contrast, people at Daryaganj were eager to share their stories. Buyers and booksellers shared their lagaav – for them, the Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar went beyond a business. Every initial interaction I had with a bookseller led to a prolonged conversation without fail. The sellers found ‘enjoyment’ (to quote one of the booksellers) while selecting books for their stalls. The buyers experience joy in finding books, exploring the bazaar, and recounting their experiences.

In my own transition from being an ordinary buyer to a shauqeen buyer, ethnographer, and then to an active supporter and part of the community, what gave me joy was the ability to translate my theories into action beyond the academy. Due to the displacement and the protests, I unexpectedly became part of a larger movement of protecting the bazaar and retaining the space of the street. I became a part of the community of memory that I speak about. Hence, this shared rhetoric of joy progressively became part of my methodology and helped me find new ways to perform book history.

While the struggles of the vendors and the fragility of the space were in front of my eyes, the ability of the bazaar to enable joy and surge lagaav seemed to be a crucial part of its affective power. Telling the stories of and from Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, then, meant exploring the emotions and feelings, including that of anticipation, resilience, and nostalgia.

Footnotes :

1. Tehbazaari: Tehbazari is a license in favour of the grantee to squat at a notified site on a pavement and conduct business.

2. As mentioned in the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014. See a copy here: http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2014/158427.pdf

3. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2003.