How a Delhi footpath turned generations of readers into book lovers

For years, every Sunday morning, a kind of magic unfolded on the footpath near Delhi Gate in Old Delhi’s Daryaganj. As if conjured from thin air, hundreds of books would appear, transforming the pavement into one of the city’s most beloved open-air book markets. Kanupriya Dhingra first encountered it as a child, accompanying her parents in search of “useful” books. Years later, she rediscovered the market as a student at Delhi University, when her limited pocket money could no longer keep pace with an appetite for reading that stretched far beyond her college syllabus.

On one of her weekend visits to the market, she came across a collection of love-letter writing manuals — an encounter that eventually led to an extensive ethnographic study of the Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar. In her debut book, Dhingra offers an intimate account of her engagement with the Sunday book market while reflecting on how it shaped her identity as a reader. As she writes, “My Daryaganj finds are not simply second-hand books; they are souvenirs of moments in which I was, often without knowing it, beginning to identify myself as a reader.”

The book is a rich, immersive portrait of a stretch of pavement in Daryaganj. It traces the Sunday book market through its many incarnations — from its beginnings near the Red Fort to Lohe Wala Pul, then to the stretch between Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Marg and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road, where it flourished for more than four decades, before its relocation in 2019 to the enclosed compound of Mahila Haat.

Dhingra narrates the story of the market by plunging into the lives that unfolded around it. The bazaar is an “ecosystem of knowledge, skill, improvisation.” Its vendors come from different generations and communities. There is Om Prakash Mago, founder of Om Books International, who began as a bookseller in the Sunday market before building a publishing business. Then, there is Surendra Dhawan, who was a full-time photographer before turning to the book trade in search of stability. There is also Asha, one of the market’s senior booksellers, who would often tell Dhingra that “kitab bechna aadmi logon ka kaam hai, hum kaise uthayenge bhari bhari kitabein?” (Selling books is men’s work. How could women lift such heavy books?) Yet, every Sunday she would arrive with her stack of books and run her stall with complete confidence.

Unlike bookshops, the vendors at the Sunday market sell what Dhingra calls “nai jaisi” (as good as new) books. Their stock includes rare books, second-hand books, school textbooks, photocopied study material, pirated editions and a wide variety of other printed material. They follow a business model shaped as much by intuition as by educational policy, examination patterns and changing reading trends. One of the vendors she interviews, Abdul Wali, tells her: “Ek student ko achha maal do, woh agle saal phir aata hai, apne doston ke saath.” (Give one student good material, and they come back the next year with their friends). It is a business strategy refined over decades.