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