Jor Bagh’s The Bookshop moves to Lodhi Colony, ending 52-year era

You’d have jostled with foreign nationals and PhD scholars, lawyers and journalists, college students and world-famous writers. You’d have found news clippings essaying the shop’s 52-year-old history stuck on the walls, next to crayon drawings. An electric kettle under pictures of the founding family.

The Bookshop’s original avatar is ending. Started in 1971 by Kanwarjit Singh Dhingra and his wife Nini Singh, its end was announced on Facebook by their daughter Rachna Singh: “It is with sadness that I would like to announce that on 31 October 2023, The Book Shop will down its shutters—and we will dissolve the partnership that owns it.” Some of the original staffers, including Sonal Narain (who joined the venture as a partner more than twenty years ago), Mahika Chaturvedi and Sohan Singh, are continuing at a new location: 26, Lodi Colony Market.

A recurring question outside the gate on Monday evening, however, was whether the cats who haunt the shop’s warm yellow lighting would migrate. Hopes were high. Vrinda, an editorial assistant at Awaaz South Asia, says that she met the cats for the first time on a date many years ago. “I came here first when I was in college and it became a core Delhi experience. Coming from a small town without many queer-friendly bookshops, I liked that you could always find books to relate to and engage with. I came here with my girlfriend then. Today it feels like a nice closure to our relationship.”

Aditi Saxena, a publisher, first discovered the bookshop in 2016 with her friend, Vatsal, a chef. They would come to the Jor Bagh market and she would search for books published by her company in the bookshop (“I always found them”) while he would source his meet at Pigpo meat shop and buy culinary fiction later. “I’m going to miss this location. Wherever they go next, we’ll be there first day,” he says, before being let in by the security guard.

For Jaishree Kumar, a journalist, it’s the bookshop’s unique voice and approachability that has set it apart in all the years she’s been visiting. “You can tell that they give a lot of care to the curation process, which isn’t like most bookshops,” she says, adding, “I once even asked if I could bring my young pup to the bookshop and they said over the phone, ‘Sure!’ I was really surprised. But I never did that because he was peeping and pooping everywhere, and I didn’t want to ruin their decor. I’ll really miss this place.”