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

Team Kitaab reviews The Sunday Book Bazaar- Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi by Kanupriya Dhingra (Speaking Tiger, 2026).

Cities often announce their literary life through grand institutions like libraries with marble facades, universities, publishing houses, book fairs, literary festivals. In India, a few cities reading cultures gather on pavements. For generations of Delhi readers, the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar belonged to the latter world. Every Sunday, books spilled onto the streets and the city came looking for them. Students hunted for textbooks, collectors searched for first editions, children discovered comics and readers with modest means assembled private libraries one bargain at a time. The bazaar was a place where reading happened.

Kanupriya Dhingra’s The Sunday Book Bazaar-Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi takes this deceptively simple fact as the starting point for a much larger history. The book asks how a marketplace became a cultural institution, how a pavement acquired literary meaning, and how a city’s readers were made by the informal economies of second-hand books. In doing so, Dhingra recovers the history of books as objects, booksellers as cultural intermediaries, and readers as participants in the life of the city.

The genius of the bazaar lay partly in its lack of guarantees. You could arrive looking for one book and leave with five others. A discarded library might yield a volume bearing a former owner’s name or a pile of apparently worthless paper might contain a forgotten edition. There were textbooks and pulp fiction, literary classics and magazines, pirated bestsellers and books whose provenance was uncertain. The pleasure was not simply in buying cheaply. It was in looking. The bazaar transformed browsing into an activity with its own rituals, skills and forms of knowledge.

Read an exclusive interview with author Kanupriya Dhingra on Kitaab.

Dhingra is especially attentive to this culture of searching and stumbling upon books. Her subject is therefore the making of a particular kind of reader who is curious, acquisitive, patient, price-conscious and willing to be surprised. One did not necessarily have to know what one wanted before encountering it. In this sense, the market offered an alternative to more curated forms of literary consumption. Its disorder was productive.

This is also why the book’s historical scope matters. Dhingra locates the bazaar within the longer book cultures of Shahjahanabad and Daryaganj, resisting the temptation to treat the Sunday market as an isolated Delhi eccentricity. The bazaar emerges instead from the city’s older relationships with commerce, print, migration and public space. Its booksellers, many of them migrants, entered an already layered geography and contributed to its evolving culture of books.

The result is an urban history told from below. Rather than beginning with Delhi’s celebrated monuments or official institutions, Dhingra follows people whose work is often invisible in conventional accounts of the literary city, like the booksellers, hawkers, collectors, bargain hunters and ordinary readers. Their stories reveal how cultural institutions can emerge without institutional sanction. The bazaar acquired its authority through repetition. Sunday after Sunday, year after year, people returned, and that return transformed a temporary market into a durable civic ritual.

There is something especially compelling about this idea of repetition. A market becomes a place because people develop habits around it. The Daryaganj bazaar had its own temporal architecture with the anticipation of Sunday, the morning arrival, the movement between piles, the conversations with booksellers, the discoveries and negotiations. It belonged to the city’s weekly rhythm. To remove it, therefore, was to interrupt a way of inhabiting Delhi.

Dhingra’s fieldwork is valuable precisely because it allows the history of the bazaar to remain populated. The booksellers are background figures in a story about books and its principal authors. Their knowledge of editions, prices, demand and provenance constitutes a form of expertise that conventional literary histories rarely acknowledge. They understood books as commodities, certainly, but also as objects with biographies that are bought, read, inherited, abandoned, resold and rediscovered.

This emphasis on circulation gives the book some of its richest insights. A second-hand book carries traces of previous lives. Its physical condition, annotations, stamps and inscriptions can turn it into an accidental archive. The movement of such books through Delhi complicates the notion of literary ownership. A book may pass through several households before ending up on a pavement, where it encounters a new reader. The bazaar thus becomes a site of literary afterlives.

Read an exclusive excerpt from The Sunday Book Bazaar on Kitaab

The Sunday Book Bazaar is an account of legal battles, evictions and eventual relocation to Mahila Haat places the bazaar within a more difficult history of urban governance. The questions become larger: What kinds of commerce are permitted to occupy public space? Which forms of disorder are tolerated, and which are deemed incompatible with the modern city? When authorities remove informal markets in the name of regulation, cleanliness or redevelopment, what else disappears with them?

The bazaar’s accessibility was inseparable from its informality. Its low prices opened the world of books to readers who might not have entered an expensive bookstore or possessed the resources to build a library through new books. Its pavement location mattered. Its bargains mattered. Even its mess mattered. The bazaar lowered the economic and social thresholds around reading, making books part of the texture of ordinary urban life.

This makes the book’s central phrase making of a reading public more than an academic formulation. A reading public is a social formation produced through access, circulation, conversation and desire. The Daryaganj bazaar helped create such a public by making books visible and attainable, allowing readers to encounter literature outside the prescribed routes of education and retail.

There is, inevitably, a tension between this account and the realities of the bazaar. Informal markets are rarely uncomplicated spaces. They involve precarious livelihoods, uneven bargaining power, contested ownership and the ambiguities of informal economies. Dhingra’s achievement is to keep these complexities in view while retaining affection for the world she documents.

The book is neither an official history nor an uncomplicated elegy. It is an attempt to understand why a place can matter so deeply even when its existence is materially precarious.

The memoiristic quality of the writing strengthens this inquiry. Dhingra writes from within the affective world of second-hand books. That affection is important because the bazaar itself depended on a form of attachment that cannot be reduced to economics. A person who spends hours sorting through dusty piles for an elusive title is participating in a cultural practice as much as making a purchase. The pleasure lies partly in the possibility that the book you did not know you were looking for might be waiting for you.

The deepest insight of The Sunday Book Bazaar is that reading publics are made through encounters. They emerge from spaces where books can be touched, inspected, discussed, haggled over and taken home. The bazaar’s significance lay in making literary culture ordinary.

There is a melancholy dimension to this history because the relocation of the market inevitably raises the question of what can and cannot be transferred. Vendors can move. Stalls can be rebuilt. Books can be transported. But can the cultural ecology of a place be reproduced elsewhere? A market is made by its routes, memories, regulars, accidents and accumulated associations. The old bazaar had become part of the mental map of Delhi. Its loss was therefore also a loss of a particular way of moving through the city.

Dhingra’s book refuses to make disappearance the only ending available. By documenting the bazaar, she performs another kind of preservation. The books that once passed from pavement to reader survive in memory, the stories of booksellers become part of the city’s archive, and the Sunday ritual enters literary history.

Ultimately, The Sunday Book Bazaar asks us to reconsider what counts as a literary institution. It makes us think how literary culture is sustained by the bookseller who remembers what a student can afford, the reader who browses without a plan, the family that buys a stack of old books on a Sunday afternoon, and the pavement that briefly becomes a library without walls.

The Daryaganj bazaar mattered because it made reading feel less like a prescribed activity and more like an encounter with possibility. Dhingra’s history captures that quality with affection and precision. In telling the story of a Sunday market, she ends up telling a larger story about Delhi itself, a city where books have always travelled through unexpected hands, and where a reading public can sometimes begin with nothing more formal than a pavement, a pile of books, and the time to look.

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About the Book

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

For decades, the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar drew students, collectors, families, tourists and lifelong shauqeen to its pavement piles: textbooks, comics, rare editions, pirated bestsellers, forgotten magazines, discarded 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 book cultures of Shahjahanabad and Daryaganj to its rise as a second-hand book paradise, and from its legal battles and evictions to its relocation in Mahila Haat.

Combining urban history, fieldwork, memoir and literary affection, she follows the books, booksellers and readers who made the bazaar a parallel world of print: informal, unpredictable, deeply democratic, and impossible to replace.

At once urban history, ethnography, memoir, and a love letter to second-hand books, 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 researches book history, print cultures, oral history, and urban studies, with a special focus on Delhi’s parallel book markets. Her doctoral work at SOAS, University of London, supported by the Felix Scholarship and the SOAS Fieldwork Grant, examined Daryaganj’s book culture through extensive interviews with booksellers and readers. She has written for Comparative Critical Studies, The Caravan, Seminar, Scroll, and Himal SouthAsian, and has spoken at institutions including Oxford, the British Library, Jadavpur University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and the University of Delhi. She also writes and translates poetry and fiction from Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu.