Book Excerpt: The Sunday Book Bazaar- Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi by Kanupriya Dhingra

An exclusive excerpt from The Sunday Book Bazaar- Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi by Kanupriya Dhingra (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

The Birth of the Book Bazaar

Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar did not begin as a book bazaar. What became, by the 1970s, one of the most recognised second- hand book markets in the country began as something else entirely. To understand those earliest years, I turned not to an archive but to several conversations accumulated over years of fieldwork—each witness adding something the others had not mentioned, each account beginning at a slightly different point.

Sohail Hashmi, who began visiting the area as a student in the late 1950s, recalls a market that was not yet defined by books at all. ‘Yeh bazaar pehle Lal Qila ke paas padta tha.’ What lined the pavements near Red Fort in those earliest years was a more miscellaneous inventory: stacks of extended play records, 78 RPM and 33 RPM discs, hand-mounted record players that could also be repaired nearby, transistor radios, motorcycle parts, nuts and bolts. Film song booklets—small printed pamphlets carrying lyrics, cast lists, and publicity photographs—sold for one anna to ten paise. Copies of Time magazine, Life, New Yorker arrived a few weeks after their original publication date, already second-hand, already in their afterlives. National Geographic, Hashmi notes, was visible then and remains visible now—one of the few threads of continuity across six decades of the bazaar’s life. Books were present, but they were one commodity among many. That would change—but not yet, and not quickly.

Around the Red Fort area, however, national protest rallies drew tens of thousands of people. Temporary kitchens, toilets, and camps were set up for days before and after the event, periodically crowding out the booksellers. Around Republic Day, the vendors would be removed well in advance and kept away well after. There were no records of these displacements, no official documentation of what was lost in each move. A few news reports survive. The rest exists only in vendor memory.

K.R. Nanda, one of the oldest vendors, traces the bazaar’s physical migrations through the city with the matter-of-fact authority of someone who walked every step of it. He reports: the market began near Jama Masjid, beside the now-abandoned Jagat Cinema, on the road adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. This was the neighbourhood of Urdu Bazaar—the Sunday book market was, in this sense, less an origin than a continuation.

It was informal, unannounced—a space was available, and people had things to sell. From there, a handful of vendors relocated behind the Red Fort. There were no buyers, Nanda recalls. The location was wrong. So they moved again, to Daryaganj proper, where the streets were better connected and the Sunday crowd more promising.

Even there, the early years were precarious. When the market extended as far as the local police station, the vendors began to face harassment. The breakthrough came through a single act of official tolerance. ‘Kaliya Sa’ab, us samay ke SHO the,’ Nanda says—he was the Station House Officer at the time. ‘Unhone humein permission di thi yeh bazaar lagaane ki.’ He allowed us to continue setting up the bazaar. With that permission, however informal and however contingent on the goodwill of one officer, the market acquired a foothold. Word spread. Relatives came, then friends of relatives, then vendors from Nai Sadak who had heard there was a Sunday trade worth joining. ‘Hum das se do-sau hue,’ Nanda says—we went from ten to two hundred. The rhyme in Hindi is not a coincidence. It carries the pride of someone who watched something small become something that could not be ignored.

In the 1970s, with the expansion of school and university enrolments and the consolidation of competitive exam circuits, the demand for ‘study material’ surged significantly. Bookseller Prem Kumar arrived in this moment and has never quite left it.

He does not need to consult anyone else’s account. He was there, and he remembers. He primarily sells syllabus books for colleges and universities, a specialisation that suits both his temperament and his knowledge—precise, current, organised around what students actually need rather than what a collector might desire. He began selling books in 1972, placing himself at the Lal Qila end of this history: his stall in those early years was outside the Red Fort, where today there is only a parking lot. He entered the trade with help from his extended family. His uncle ran a bookshop at Nai Sadak, and it was there that Kumar learned the business, watching his mamaji sell from the pavement alongside the shop. By 1978, Kumar had moved to the stretch near Golcha Cinema—the location that would eventually become the bazaar’s anchor. ‘Yeh bazaar shuru hi 1978 mein hua tha,’ he says. The bazaar truly began only in 1978. Kumar distinguished this specific stretch carefully from the earlier, more itinerant phase. What had been a wandering market had found, at last, a street it could call its own.

Excerpted with permission from the author and the publisher of The Sunday Book Bazaar- Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi by Kanupriya Dhingra (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

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About the Book

‘Elegantly written… Should be mandatory reading for citizens of Delhi who wish to know their city better—even, or especially, those who do not buy or read books themselves.’—Ramachandra Guha

Every Sunday, in the heart of Old Delhi, a footpath became a book bazaar.

For decades, the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar drew students, collectors, families, tourists, and the lifelong shauqeen to its pavement piles: textbooks and comics, rare editions and pirated bestsellers, forgotten magazines, remnants of libraries, and books that seemed to find their readers by accident. Built by migrant booksellers, sustained by bargain-hunters and bibliophiles, and shaped by the rhythms of the street, the bazaar became one of Delhi’s most beloved cultural institutions.

In The Sunday Book Bazaar, Kanupriya Dhingra traces the life of this remarkable market—from its roots in the centuries old book cultures of Shahjahanabad to its rise as a second-hand book world of its own, and from its displacement and legal battles to its relocation inside Mahila Haat. With the eye of an ethnographer and the affection of a lifelong reader, she follows the books, booksellers, and buyers who made the bazaar a parallel world of print: informal, unpredictable, deeply democratic, resilient, and stubbornly alive.

At once urban history, ethnography, and memoir, The Sunday Book Bazaar asks what makes a market more than a place of commerce. Who gets to read? Who gets to sell? Who gets to occupy public space? And what does a city lose when it tidies away the unruly, democratic spaces where its readers first learn to browse, bargain, linger and belong?

About the Author

Dr Kanupriya Dhingra is a scholar of book history and print cultures. Her doctoral research at SOAS, University of London, supported by the Felix Scholarship, examined Daryaganj’s parallel book culture through extensive interviews with booksellers and readers. This research was first published as Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar, a Cambridge University Press Element, in 2024. She teaches literature and cultural studies at the School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University, Gurugram, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). Her writing has appeared in The Caravan, Himāl Southasian, Usawa Literary Review, Seminar, and Scroll. She also writes and translates poetry and fiction between Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, and English.