 Hello and welcome to the British Library's South Asia Seminar Series, which is part of our research and digitization project, Two Centuries of Indian Print. This is our second seminar online. And we are very happy to have amongst us today, Kanupriya Dhingra, who's going to talk about the Sunday Brook Market of Darya Ganj in Delhi. Kanupriya is a research scholar at the Centre for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS London. She's supported by a Felix Scholarship Fund. Her current research engages with the parallel book markets of Old Delhi and draws on multiple methodologies from book history, oral history, urban studies, anthropology and postcolonial studies. She has delivered talks on her doctoral research at the University of Oxford, books and prints initiative and the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Studies, Chase Encounters, University of Delhi, Ambedkar University and Jadavpur University in Kolkata. Her work has appeared in Himalas, South Asian, the Caravan, Scroll India, Indian Literature and News India amongst others. We are also delighted to have Dr. Swati Moitro as our chair. Swati is an assistant professor at the Department of English at Gurudash College, University of Kolkata. She has earlier taught at Shivaji College and Miranda House in University of Delhi. Her areas of interest are book history and histories of readership, feminist historiography and women's history, 19th century studies, cultural studies, digital cultures and new media. Briefly about the format of the seminar, Kanupriya is going to give a talk for around 30 to 45 minutes and then we'll have a short 15 minute discussion between the chair and the speaker after which we'll open this up for audience Q&A. If you would like to put in your questions during the talk, feel free to use the Q&A box or the chat box to send us your questions and we'll take them in order. So without much further ado, I invite Kanupriya Thingra to talk about the Sunday Book Market of Daryaganj in Delhi. Thank you so much Priyanka. Thank you British Library for this excellent opportunity. I hope I'm visible now. Yeah, so this talk is titled Locating Daryagan Sunday Book Bazaar and before I start reading it, I would like to take my audience through two elaborate scenes about the market from before and after the relocation. So scene one, on a Sunday morning before July 21, 2019, you find yourself facing the shutdown Golcha cinema on Netaji Subhash Mark in Daryaganj, Old Delhi. You could be a local, a recent migrant to the city or a tourist. On any other day, most of the regular shops on this road are open, selling medical equipment, musical instruments among other publisher officers, and some sex clinics and a few local and multinational food joints and also a government owned Biorin mine shop. Before these shops open early in the morning from approximately 4am to 8am, a vegetable market is set up on these footpaths. On Sundays, the vegetable market runs, but most of the regular shops and offices on this busy commercial road are shut down for their weekly day off. Instead, starting around from 9am, you spot an elongated flea market on the footpath or poetry that spills over to cover the closed shutters of the footpaths behind them. Like any other flea market or weekly bazaar in Delhi, there is a stretched line of vendors on the sidewalk. That line has a dominant and rather distinct visual presence as well. It has changed the way how Daryaganj looks on any other day of the week. It is because of this line of vendors, most of whom are selling only books, the patreons occupied by walkers and pedestrians, and in much higher number than it is on the weekdays. Among them, most are here to buy books, and the books that are laid out on the ground or have been creatively arranged by the vendors, either neatly on the ground so that the titles are visible to the walkers or heaped together with distinct colourful signs declaring the price per kilo or per book. The books are not just of one type, but of various kinds, invading degrees of newness and oldness, and the pedestrians or walkers bend over one stall after another until they reach the one that attracts their attention. You walk towards the cloud to be a part of it. Further on, as you walk along Netaji Subhash Mark, you also encounter a few makeshift and permanent bookshops along the sidewalk. These are quite unlike the regular bookshops that you might see or visit across Delhi, like the famous Jain bookstore in Konop place, the famous Bahari Sands in Khan Market, or the bookshop in Jorbag, all shiny mirrors and air-conditioned coolness. The bookshops of Netaji Subhash Mark have similar selling patterns to the stalls on the patreons. Books are piled together, mostly divided by genre, on elevated surfaces, covered with sheets of paper or cloth. The prices are fixed and books are sold by weight, unless they are rare books. To show the price of these rare books, you must ask the bookshop owner. Some of the crowd in the patreons enters these bookshops as well. One could claim that the bookstalls look like an extension of these shops, only in this case we know which came first, the chicken or the egg, which is the stalls. You might have spotted some similar stalls or bookshops on smaller lanes leading into Darya Ganj via Netaji Subhash Mark. As you follow the trail of book vendors in the footpath walking towards Delhi Gate, or Delhi Gate as locals call it, you turn right into the sidewalks of Pasathali Road. You continue walking from the Delhi Gate metro station, exit number 3, and do not stop until you have reached Delight Cinema, which like Golcha is one of the city's historic cinema halls. Here the line of booksellers eventually ends. If as you walked from Golcha Cinema to Delight, you found a book that interested you because it was old and inexpensive, or because your grandfather had a copy of it, or for any other peculiar or personal reason, and you decided to buy it, it is quite possible that you had to bargain as well unless you bought it from the fixed price lot. You could have exited the book market at any point since it has no specific beginning or an end, despite the fixed job and digital span. This L shaped market was known as Darya Ganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar until it was shut down in July 2019 and relocated in September 2019, renamed as Sunday Book Bazaar Mahila Hut. I'll take a moment to share my screen before I continue. So, I'll move on to the next scene. On a Sunday morning after September 28, 2019, you walk out of one of the exit gates of Deligate Metro Station and into Darya Ganj. You start looking for the book market on the pavements instead. You find very few booksellers with hardly any books lying in front of them who tell you that this is all that is left of Darya Ganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar. But what are they still doing here, you ask. They tell you or you overhear some of them talking to the media people present that they are raising their voice together against the North Delhi Municipal Corporation to retain the footpaths of Netaji Subhash Mark and Asaf Ali Mark as the official vending zone for secondhand books. These booksellers are dissatisfied with the relocation it appears. Beti Bachao, Beti Parhao, Bina Kitab, Kaisae Parhegi Beti Save the Girl Child, Educate the Girl Child, How Would She Study Without a Book is one among the several slogans they have put on display. The book vendors claim that Darya Ganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was an institution in its own right and part of the larger economy of the education in the city and in the country as well. You're given a pamphlet explaining their struggle. The nostalgia of the streets are still brewing inside the bookshops that used to be the extensions of the Patri bookstalls. They are unusually overcrowded with buyers lining up to the cash counter. Most of the buyers are those who used to come to this market for their weekly stock of books from the Patri Kitab Bazaar and are now flocking inside the bookshops that in the absence of Sunday Book Bazaar carry its semblance. This bustle grows less in the coming weeks. If you're more informed since you have followed the news about the relocation in reports online or in print you walk further along Asap Ali Road to right in front of Broadway Hotel another historic landmark in the old city which is unfortunately shut down now this is where you spot Mahila Hart the new officially designated location for the sale of second hand books in Delhi and an alternative to the Darya Ganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar. You enter the market from the only entry gate which leads to an elevated platform. There is a second gate at the other end of the heart but neither the vendors nor the visitors use it. Along the stairs a newly built pavement allows richards and lorries to enter the book market so that the books can be brought in although with much difficulty and labour once you have climbed the stairs you can see a book market all at once. There are numbers painted on the marble floor and the whole platform is marked and divided into uniform rectangles six feet wide and four feet long outlined with yellow paint. The books here are arranged in similar yet somewhat diverse ways compared to the streets. Some booksellers are exploring novel ways such as putting books on a low elongated table instead of directly on the ground or they have started building forts with spines of the books facing outwards or inwards and the booksellers standing inside to guide you through them and negotiate the price. Some stalls have installed tall umbrellas you know protecting the booksellers from excessive sunlight along with other accessories as you see in the picture as well such as standing bookshelves which are not used earlier in the Patrikita Pazar. As you walk inside the heart if you find a book that interests you because it is old and inexpensive or because your grandfather had a copy of it or for any other peculiar reason or personal reason you buy it possibly you had to bargain here as well unless you bought it from the fixed price lot and you exit from the same gate from which you had entered as and when it pleases you without necessarily having it slowed the real corners of Mahilahat. So these souvenirs offered a glimpse of what the Daryagan Sunday Patrikita Pazar looked like on the streets of Daryaganj and how an attempt has been made to recreate the experience inside Mahilahat even if it is in a partial way building on these visual samples of the appearance, experience and the rhythm of the two book markets this talk focuses on their spatiality. What goes into making the character of the space of these book markets and the experience of being inside and traversing these spaces is what I call locating these book markets. By locating I mean both the experience of finding and reaching these spaces and the elements that make up their locating, their location the threshold between outside and the inside space and the aesthetics of each space the rules and the regulations that are implemented bypassed or bent by either of the three principal actors the booksellers book buyers and the civic authorities that determine the use of the public space. The book was out on the streets and later inside Mahilahat of course revolves around the experience of selling and buying an experience that is beyond its commercial connotations also a sensory one partly because of the space in which it occurs. Moreover the act and process of locating is a three-way engagement between these three major actors over time booksellers have periodically turned some streets into Daryaganj some streets off Daryaganj into a book market by negotiating with the available space the civic authorities the second set of actors have regulated and they do regulate still the use of the space sparingly or deliberately forcing pushing or prompting the sellers to create new additional patterns of occupation. The third actor the pedestrians who have motivated the creations of these official and unofficial patterns of occupation and have navigated through them are I feel the rather understated participants of the geographical and sensory dimensions that the space of the street has to offer. I will argue through this talk that these participants the sellers pedestrians and the civic authorities have enabled the spatialization of the streets of Daryaganj into a periodic proposal a stop-go history of the bizarre there are several origin stories about the Daryaganj book market located in old Delhi and the now relocated market is said to have been in operation since the time. Historian Sohail Hashmi informs me that Akbar Abadi one of Shah Jahan's wives built this market in its earliest form several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of fares bizarre in this area. The name Daryaganj itself means a market across river where Daryaganj refers to a river which is the river Yamuna and Gunt refers to a site where trade is conducted it was not always the same product which was traded here though Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used rare and pirated books in the 1960s according to the locals Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market before this set up ages into the walls between Suhaash Park and Kasur Baghandi hospital there were vinyl records and hand mounted record players radios, transistors medical goods and used clothes and somehow eventually in this process books too found their place here. And after a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj a few booksellers moved to the now absent Loheka Pool or Iron Bridge near Gulcha cinema from where the street market began to expand now before its relocation to Mahila Haat the Bughar extended Delight cinema hall so it was from one cinema hall to another in a long L shape with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash and Asaf Ali Road with more than 250 booksellers now a number of these vendors in Daryaganj Bugh Bazaar have become booksellers accidentally your regular Sunday book vendor at Daryaganj might have been a freelance photographer and Urdu lecturer a New Delhi municipal council official a rickshaw puller a newspaper hawker a vegetable hawker an embroiderer a copy editor or a stenographer and so on most of them found their way through books by chance they say and once they did most of them remained in the business for decades and created unique knowledge systems using which their fellow booksellers have survived here over the years now Daryaganj Sunday Bugh Bazaar was officially registered as a natural market by the North Delhi municipal corporation which is the administrative body that controls and which controls the regulated and irregular spaces in North Delhi and as for the street vendors act which was established in 2014 which you see on your screens now a natural market means a market where sellers and buyers have traditionally congregated for the sale and purchase of products or services and has been determined as such by the local authority it can be understood as a space which develops over the course of time where interaction between buyers and sellers happens without significant institutional intervention that is how the space becomes a natural creation in the urban landscape so it's safe to say perhaps even officially sanctioned that the Bugh Bazaar exemplified serendipity Daryaganj Sunday Bugh Bazaar was a phenomenon occurring in the city at regular intervals what a cursory glance looked like what with a cursory glance looked like a temporary fluid space came to represent endurance in many ways the market symbolized shift and changes and yet given the passage of time and the ways in which the market had been operating and had sustained itself it came across as not impermanent but as a space which had a certain rhythm to it what I'm suggesting here is that throughout the course of several relocations there were wonderful creative ways in which the Sunday Bugh Bazaar escaped institutional control and censorship in the manner in which the books were procured and published the sparingly regulated location of the bookstalls and the erratic yet inventive movement of the buyers all of which made the market what it was where randomness happened despite institutional control and regulation so what the buyer finally decided to purchase is what I like to call their find of the day the value of a find here was far beyond its marked price any book that was found for or in Darya Ganj carried a sacred value to it which was determined by how and where it was located by the bookseller first and then the book buyer the market mostly derived its identity from its location on the streets and as A. L. Varma one of the oldest booksellers at the market often exclaimed there is a machine reworking behind this market now there are at least three specialized circuits that operate the present day book bizarre I define them as the traditional circuit of second hand books sourced locally and internationally these would be some of the examples of those this is the second circuit which is the study material circuit with syllabus books and it's out of syllabus books and the most recent entry is that of digital and you know duplicate pirated books which the booksellers like to call the books are sold by weight or on a fixed rate and they are very very inexpensive and there is a scope for intensive negotiation which applies especially to the rare editions of books regular visitors to this book market held a firm belief that every book that had ever been desired enough made its way to the Darya Ganj Sunday book bizarre to find its true leader I will not completely dismiss their conviction but I've since found that there is a process to acquiring the books which has been duly followed for several years the booksellers of Darya Ganj create value out of discarded material and there are precise methods of evaluation of a book's value when it leaves the proper communication circuit a book's departure from this circuit is not fixed either the books found in this book bizarre have been procured by the booksellers after the tedious process of travelling across the city and often times also across the country and the booksellers acquired these books which they thought had resale value from varied sources which you see on some of which you see on your screens now such as paper markets or Kabbali Walas Railway auctions, containers from US and UK, school libraries and in-house libraries of the deceased of the city and also the remaining stocks from the publishers as they tell stories about themselves and about the relationship with the market and its people they declare their association with the city so one of the booksellers Sharif Ahmad once told me you can ask me anything about the city and I have grown up on the streets of Delhi I asked one of them how did you find Darya Ganj he very proudly said I am from Delhi obviously I knew about the city but that wasn't the case with other booksellers as well there are several who are migrants found their way to their families through internal connections through outside connections and so on and so forth and this person Sharif Ahmad particularly he is proud of being one of those who participated in the making of Darya Ganj Sunday book market in the old city so consider Francesca Orsini's profound statement here silence is not absence spaces that look empty are in fact teeming with other people and they don't taste stories and trajectories we just need to look elsewhere so Darya Ganj Patri Kitab Bazaar in this sense is elsewhere as it becomes a parallel site for the circulation of books that could not make it the regular way or were given a second chance of sorts and after life of sorts unfortunately the Patri Kitab Bazaar from the streets is now gone and I will now talk about what happened to the street bazaar based on a Delhi High Court order dated July 3 2019 municipal corporation mandated that the street market here has to be removed quoting traffic concerns and Netaji Subhashmar which housed a part of Darya Ganj Sunday book market was declared a non-bending zone in a display of solidarity vendors also decided not to set up stalls on Asaf Ali mark which did not come under the purview of the High Court order but since not all of the vendors would have been able to occupy that area they decided not to set up the book stalls only on one side and until two to three months after the displacement the vendors were left waiting for a decision on either having their stalls back at the street or being offered an alternative space each week causing life loss of likelihood and making the vendors more and more desperate than ever the market has been shut down on earlier occasions mostly around national festivals or during any event in the city which required extra security so when this happened for about two to three weeks the vendors were expecting that this is happening because of August 15 Independence Day but then it took them three weeks to realize that no this is not that case and very interesting thing to note here is that they were not given a legal notice initially they just received a phone call and they had to evacuate this space for some time during all these instances the book sellers and the general public were rarely given any explanation to what is happening I am talking about previously when the market had been shut down however the market would always come back into action it would be revived through public intervention with people raising the absolute need for both books and a book market such as Darya Ganj in the city now following this closure the book sellers held protests one of which you see on your screens now in one of them the vendors formed a human chain on Asaf Ali Road each book seller had representatively put one book in front of them what they're holding is the poster that you see on the right so a very interesting thing that happened was even when they had representatively put just one book out in front of them even those books were attracting buyers it was an example of how the location of the book was are on these footpaths had become a part with the sale of books if you were here and you were in the proximity of books you would be buying books here another day of protest they collected hundreds of testimonies from the visitors who were dismayed at discovering the market absent from the streets yet again for a prolonged period of time to bypass the poverty or the censorship several book sellers were adopting inventive ways of selling books so in conspicuous spaces to avoid confiscation on a staircase or in an auto I have a couple of pictures here so this is when the protests were up in action and this is how one of the book sellers had decided to sell books this is 10 year old Tejas whose father had gone to collect customers from here and there so that they could come and buy books from here the books that you see here are from the syllabus circuit and this was also around July so there were a lot of students who were flocking this space to buy inexpensive books and the picture on the left and the right is these book sellers trying to find hidden spaces on those roads so that they can still carry on a lot of sales from the incidental buyers that were going to be there so one of the book sellers was also helped by the residents in the area very interestingly so they allowed him to display his books inside their house so that the vendor had asked one of his helpers to stand outside on the main road so that he could call customers inside now the protests that were being held in front of exit 3 of delegate metro station in the same area were striving to have the book bazaar's historical presence historical importance recognized which would legitimize its existence on the streets as against the closed control space of Mahilahat the vendors stated that the eviction of the market has effectively violated the street vendors act and the recently formulated street vendors scheme in 2019 their claim was that the eviction of vendors without the recently formed town vending committees first conducting a survey to map the vending conducted you know conducting in the area as mandated by the scheme is a violation of the principle premise of the legislation and the oldest street vendors act and much more than a year has passed since the booksellers you know had been forcefully evacuated and throughout this year except during the national lockdown vendors are still fighting to gain the street bags they have now started to put up their temporary stalls outside Mahilahat earlier while the protests were being held at Asap Ali road their books were frequently confiscated by the municipal officials mostly without even providing them with any mandatory paperwork needed before and after the confiscation so if you spent a Sunday at Darya Ganja I did for several months there throughout this drama was happening the whole situation would look like a recipient task where the protesting booksellers became used to it and not in a promising way so they would you know come there had their books confiscated and then come again and this was just happening every Sunday until September 2019 and then it continued later on as well the protesting booksellers became used to it not in a promising way as I said and some vendors at Mahilahat who say that they had to opt for this alternative option after having waited for so long still hoped that Darya Ganja market would reappear since you know the business at Mahilahat wasn't going well for them and you know one of them exclaimed we bring fewer books here it is inconvenient and the space is relatively more expensive than the streets were the ability to spread books across the footpath worked in the vendors favor allowing for the titles to be displayed and also allowing for quite a few incidental readers to enter the space and this is no longer possible inside the market which has a very limited space of you know 6x4 foot allocated space and to make the matters worse the booksellers who set up their stalls towards the rear end of the complex did not get equal attention from the customers which was absolutely not happening on the streets so one of the booksellers exclaimed that Mahilahat does have a certain glamour to it but that doesn't necessarily help the business the timings are limited as well so these booksellers are quite aware of the constraints and are really of the cost of setting their stalls at Mahilahat as well and if you have stopped coming to the market altogether and they are pursuing their business via internet or you know whatsapp and phone calls and so on several booksellers return to their hometown during the pandemic with bleaker hopes of returning to the city and even if they do they would want to be returning as a book vendor and Darya Gaj now even the bookshop owners and other vendors situated in the vicinity of the street markets previous location have mentioned that the hustle bustle on Sundays brought about by the book market was conducive to producing more sales for them and the local residents in the area they are aware now more than ever of the significance that the book market played in their everyday routine apparently its all very well done now but what would be the cost of this beautification the relocation of Patli Kitab Bazaar brings to light the skism between the idea of redevelopment that the civic authorities seem to have and the concerns of the citizens the book bazaar is not the first or the only book market to have been erased by the city authorities in the interest of development the destination of Ajmal Khan road in Karol Bagh zone is currently underway flaunted by the official website of Naught Delhi municipal corporation the roadside market in Kamlaanagar in Naught Delhi which falls under Keshav Purim zone is another market space which will be affected by this recent drive for beautification Bazaar in old cities yet another example and it has been fighting this battle for a very awful long time vendors in the bazaar were also evicted by the authorities here raising similar concerns related to traffic and illegal encroachment now while complete removal of the market space is a threat affecting the street vendors livelihoods informal markets have been dealing with rather subtle fears as a part of their everyday business routine as well for instance it is usual for the vendors at Sarojini Nagar marketer second hand cloth market in Delhi to clean up the sections of their stalls which encroach on the public space knowing that the police would arrive at very specific hours of the day as long as the encroachment is not seen by the authorities the shopkeepers are excused to the fine that they would otherwise have to pay for setting up their stalls outside the officially designated area when there is a variable market always on the safer side as far as their everyday evacuation was concerned. Their stalls were set up under Tehbazadi which is a system where sellers paid a small amount for their occupation of the area so their occupation was actually legal and even if they had to extend their stall a bit into the footpath or even if they had to enter the bookshop inside they would always find formal informal ways to communicate with either the booksellers or the civic authorities pay them a certain amount of bribe and their everyday weekly arrangement was going on well and it was only after July 2019 that the fear of a permanent removal took shape and they were eventually relocated from the streets and in the 50 years of this market's survival here in the streets the first time this happened and there is more beyond these official hurdles. The sense of discovery achieved by walking on the streets of Daryaganj is missing from Mahila Haat which is a much more controlled space at the heart the crowd is definite all those who are present are the chosen ones those who have made a decision to step inside the book market and buy books for their home libraries, their children to prepare for their examinations or even to resell books for a profit at their bookstores. Now inside the closed space of Mahila Haat no one can accidentally become a book buyer as was typically the case with the Daryaganj market on the streets. So broadly speaking the gated architectural feature of the heart has a different cultural appeal. It has several places to sit at to mull over your purchase or to meet your friends. The same Chai Wala would visit periodically to serve tea to all the vendors and a few buyers as well as we had dreams of having a tea stall inside the premises of the new book market one day. You could see children playing on the grass around inside the green spaces at Mahila Haat and you would also see groups of students interacting with each other, mulling over their purchases, what did one get, what did the other get and how they could have gotten a book for a better price and at the bazaar instead people used to huddle at each bookstore as other readers would join and there would be other pedestrians walking around as well cutting across the queue of booksellers until they were tired and they left where they came from. By the street would be an active dynamic space. For example if you see in these pictures the structure of heart would make it appear rather lazy, passive and relaxed and these are not selectively chosen pictures, these are random pictures which would just I hope they would be able to communicate this passivity that I'm talking about. So now Mahila Haat would have the look of a book fair in Delhi for example instead of what the street market kind of entailed. Now this brings me towards almost the end of my talk. What does this relocation represent? From the point of view of the officials at the North Delhi Municipal Corporation that the city of Delhi allows for change for growth for redevelopment and that the residents of Delhi current and prospective may look forward to a more regulated and beautified city in the near future. A smart city as they say but the question remains that if there were possible ways to institutionalize the space such that there were no laws of incidental readership which is immensely useful to vendors. So what we were looking for was a sort of a balance between this permutation and combination of order and chaos which had to be reinstated. Now here institutionalization would refer to finding an alternative approach that would lead to a better judicious reuse of the original site of the street itself. Delhi's hybrid architectural landscape hides several monuments among the landmarks of its historicity. You may discover them as you try to simply be in this city much like finding books in Sunday book market. Darya Ganj Patri Kitab Bazaar happened to be a rather sedentipitous institution historical as it was as well that the city would hide and unhide on Sundays. Those who knew of it would compulsively never skip a visit. Those who didn't know of it would have had they happened upon the streets of Darya Ganj. However with sterile repurposing of the streets allocated to the book market, that is not the case anymore, you may not accidentally become a book buyer as you once might have. It is all a part of a larger plan now and the only fear being faced by a book Bazaar Romantic like me is that we might have lost the Patri Kitab Bazaar to this plan. That actually brings me to the end of my talk and thank you so much. I think I ended earlier than I was supposed to but thank you so much Kanupriya. I am sure a lot of us today who are here with you listening to your talk and who have the experience of going to the book market in Darya Ganj we are feeling very nostalgic after listening to your presentation. I would now like to invite Dr Swati Moitra to chair this event and also to engage in a discussion with Kanupriya. Swati over to you. Yes, Priyanka. I think you will have to start my video because I can start it now. Thank you. Hi. Just a minute please. Hi. First and foremost I would like to thank Priyanka for inviting me over to talk and to the British Library for hosting this in the first place. Thank you so much Kanupriya. This was absolutely wonderful. I was partially VP about it because I have wandered around those streets so many times on so many Sundays and found so many books as you so eloquently put that the loss of that space and that chaos and you know your feet beginning to ache as you run out of money because those days money was at a premium and you look for that one book you don't know what you're looking for exactly but you know you keep hoping that you'll come across you stumble into something extraordinary and for those of us who had the experience of Kolkata's College Street before this we often made comparisons not necessarily fairly about the nature of such street markets and knowledgeable booksellers and such but overall it was always an experience of chaos, of dynamism and of of interacting with the city and these books in a particular way that made Daryagan so special as you got tired you stopped over and ate something, chaat or samosas or maybe drank something because often in summer it got very hot so this entire experience of shopping for books which is also an experience in chaos and endurance is something that the book market really stood for and of course speaking as someone who has never been to the new version of it your images did seem to convey a certain lack of that dynamism and instead though this might be my buyer speaking because I do miss that old space and instead it seemed to be one of the typical instances of the Delhi authorities stepping in and you cited so many examples because of stepping in and seeking to beautify the city as though such spaces are simply to chaotic to be considered particularly beautiful and this has been a consistent problem in Delhi as you've cited in fact I was horrified to learn about Kamla Nagar but we've seen similar developments happening in the neighboring Chandni Chowk which is again experiencing a similar process of so-called proposed beautification Dariya Ganj is of course part and parcel of that city of the city's culture of such market places and as you were speaking I was reminded both of Delhi's hearts and by hearts I do not simply mean the Mahila heart or the sanitized beloved but sanitized Delhi heart but also the hearts that spring up in the city in various locations on designated days where the vegetable vendors and other sellers show up on one particular day in a reminder of the village hearts and these are not and this is in from Posh Vasanth Kunj to say Masoodpur to various locations Delhi's have these hearts that are similar to the Dariya Ganj book market which used to appear on one particular day it also reminded me and especially reminded me when you were talking about the complex circuits of acquisition these books that didn't quite make it to the mainstream circuit of the fancy book shops or maybe they did and maybe they traveled various ways through institutional libraries because we did find old library books who knows why somebody had sold them off so when they eventually made it and had this second chance again I love that way the way you spoke about that they again reminded me of these similarly acquired markets of Delhi from the motor market of Chandni Chowk to the bicycle markets of Chandewala to the gullies of Chandni Chowk with the camera gully with the Chandi and the silver gully all of them tend to acquire things and not necessarily always through legitimate or circuits of acquisition so the Dariya Ganj book market while at once unique also seems to have this particularly ephemeral and yet complex character that makes it very characteristic of Delhi's other markets and indeed this is particularly remarkable because when you spoke of the prehistory of the book market you pointed out that this too started out as a consumable goods market which eventually where somehow the books won out and the books were here to stay so that's something that really stuck with me I was also particularly stuck by this idea of the booksellers who have always been deeply inventive people because as you said that they are repositories of certain knowledge systems that we do not necessarily we may not necessarily consider as legitimate aspects of city living and yet these are the things and these are the people who make Delhi so when you said that you know right at the beginning you were talking about their twisting of the government slogan Beti Bachao Beti Parhao which is you know teach the girl child save the girl child and saying that how will you teach the girl child if you don't have books the manner in which they twisted this particular slogan as a mark of protest was again something that I am extremely sorry this is exactly what I had feared I'm sorry folks he really just wanted to say hi I'm sorry anyway yes I guess we have more flavor now as Priyanka said earlier so yes as I was saying this is something that particularly stuck with me and this is what the first thing I really asked and I wanted to ask you that we are stuck at that fundamental question Calcutta's Cal College Street similarly in the last days of the left front government so this is around 2006-7 the government would eventually fall in 2011 would similarly seek to re-home the College Street book market they started they broke the old College Street there was an old market next door which they started reconstructing they named it Borno Porichai which is the book of alphabets by Vidyasagar and they wanted to relocate the entire marketplace there now as it would happen it remains incomplete a few booksellers moved on most did not and it continues to be this bizarre thing there but one of the things that beat these these failed attempt at reconstructing in Calcutta or the more successful attempt of relocation in Delhi I think the question that I wanted to ask is who does the footpath belong to who does the patris of Delhi belong to right and I would really appreciate if you told us a little bit about this constant tussle between the authorities the police and the constitution of this place as a constantly contested site of the city as a natural market which is constantly regulated by the authorities if you could tell us a little bit more about this regulatory impulse on the part of the authorities that would be great thank you so much Swathi you really ask a very interesting question who does the footpath belong to which brings me to this idea of legality and illegality also with respect to Calcutta as well there are ways in which the Delhi government or the civic authorities would not want the cities to be operated and this is where incidences like these would fall into but there also have been ways in which such use of streets has been allowed so for example what part of the city is occupiable if I can use that word in a certain way is something that they want to determine and about this idea of what is official, what is unofficial what is legal, what is illegal we all know that how it works in the city space where what is on the paper is not something what you actually see in front of you as well so even with this specific bazaar it wasn't that earlier it was under a very legal zone there were ways in which for example the books were acquired were being set up and even who was going to set up the stall where so for example in the official list of these vendors there are 258 names registered but at once on every Sunday there would not be more than 100 booksellers and there are certain or even if we talk about the books we see censored books here we see books that are out of publication here what book is entering the book market is also not always legal but an important point that now that this brings me to is that how this space is negotiated which is what you ask who does this footpath belong to the footpath then belongs to someone who has been familiar with this space for a certain amount of time has been familiar with the commodity that they are selling is familiar with the lane and has also in the process gained familiarity with how to navigate these systems so Michel Desertes has a very interesting way of putting this where he calls all of this as a creative bypassing of the street contours of the city so possibly this is what the booksellers are doing here as well as in Calcutta but then what the difference between the use of this street space in Calcutta or here in Delhi is that the booksellers there have spent a considerable amount of time there there is this element of historicity to which even the city dwellers and the migrants and the visitors and the tourists also relate to so since it has been a longer period of time there they had certain amount of agency with which not all the booksellers had to relocate they could account on the historicity they could also rely on the knowledge systems that they had created there but with the booksellers in Karyagandh most of them were new so going back a little in the history as well for the first 30 years of this market there were only 10 to 15 booksellers who had been sitting at the stalls here it was only in the last 20 years or so that newer booksellers had started to come up again as I mentioned in the talk relying upon the existing knowledge system that these booksellers had created these knowledge systems then included this idea of legality and illegality how to use this space who will come here who will not come here which book will be brought here so this constant negotiation that then becomes a part of their livelihood or their sense of the place, their sense of the city and their sense of identity as a bookseller is something that I would need to deem state here so basically what I needed to stress on was this idea of time in historicity with which you gain familiarity with the space and the city and with which you also find these creative ways to navigate those spaces not necessarily in the strict ways in which the civic authorities would mandate it for you Thank you so much and in fact that leads me to another question that I had to ask because this is something that you must at the moment we started this even became official and people started sharing the links we had a lot of people simply chiming in saying I miss Daryaganj and that's something that's been a theme throughout and so I because we've been readers there we've been buyers there and we have constituted the space in our own ways in those times so what I wanted to ask you and when I was looking at the images that you shared again we had photographs of you know there was this one of the images that you stuck at for a while was this young girl who was at best 10 years old who she was sitting on a stool and reading we had a bunch of people with the pages open and that's something that we've done in our time browsing going through and I wanted to ask what you I mean these sites of reading that we witness in a place like Daryaganj which is almost an accidental book market the way you describe it so what does this accidental book market like Daryaganj if I may call it that tell us about the city's relationship with reading itself if that's something and what do the readers make of this space if because Delhi I say this because Delhi also happens to be one of India's most important whether or not we like it we have most important educational centers right and it has certain claims to elite sites of reading cut see the many lovely libraries and the archives that Delhi has so how do we read this accidental book market if we if you will as I mentioned this is something that I'm writing my doctor and the premise of my thesis is that Daryaganj has a parallel element of book history to it so if I look at it with the lens of book history it's a parallel zone that I'm entering now why I call it parallel is you know parallel is as against a proper circuit within which books are circulated a proper space in which books are found bought exchange and again a proper set of people who do it right so it's not an alternative space it's a parallel space and that becomes important when we also look you know expand our lens to the city who is it that is entering the city who is the reader what do they want to read so if you look at the kind of books that reach Daryaganj used books and pirated books why would somebody want to read these books there is a certain economy of anticipation happening with pirated books where you know you want that book for a certain thing or you know just because you like it just because you want to read it or your teacher has asked you to read it but you can't buy it for rupees 500 you would rather buy it in a pirated form for rupees 100 and you know where do you go for that book to a parallel space such as Daryaganj Khan Makhiz Bahari Sons would have that in the pirated form it will not give you that amount of discount but because you are a person who's coming from a certain social background you want that book immediately again with used books or even pirated books there is a huge section of the city which is relying on this market which is why there is this constant need of you know reinstating this market and I am not talking about the books I am not talking about the readers who would come in defense of the market and not just regular readers we have had you know Kushvan Singh Ramchandra Guha you know validating this market's presence in 1992 and 2005 there are certain books which are also available here parallely and I am particularly talking about the migrant student population of Delhi here who would want the same book and they can compensate with addition here and there or it being in a tattered condition and so on and so forth but again the same economy of anticipation they do want that book at the same point of time but then again for a lesser price and then there is also this parallel you know set of books that is being circulated here which are in the guidebooks or the question paper booklet and so on and so forth again these are not available at these proper book shops so when we look at Delhi's when we want to have an idea about who is it that can be called as a reader in Delhi we really have to expand our lens and then this market is a space where you see those readers in huge numbers every year for the past 50 years so there are readers who need these books there are readers who are reading these books and then there is also this you know another set of parallel readers who are looking for you know story books something that they would not intentionally go and buy because they are either expensive or unapproachable or in a language that's not you know accessible to them this place again that becomes that repository of that language of that you know addition where you can just read so I very interestingly found this you know manual called Guru Chela on you know one of these stalls and for people who know it for somebody who is from the 90s or the 80s it was actually a candy that I used to have as a child but just because the cover was you know represented that for me I didn't care what's inside the book I was that incidental reader who didn't need that book we didn't know that I was the intended reader for that book but I bought it so this what I'm trying to say is that this place is that repository of that set of parallel readers and those parallel books which will then give us the idea of what constitutes deli's readership depends on who's coming to the city who's going from the city at what point of time and what they what they need in their lives in terms of what we call books I think I have two minutes left so I have one last question and this one's very self-indulgent and that's because you of course identified three different genres and of course I agree with you but can you tell us a little bit and especially because we have an audience which may or may not be familiar with Daryaganj can you tell us a little bit about the romance novels I say this because the five rupee romance novels the mills and boons editions where quite the rage in the university especially in my women's hostel to a point where I knew women who would buy them by the bulk you know 50 rupees good get you 5 rupees 10 rupees and then go back the next Sunday is later to return them only to come back so if you would tell us a little bit about that I think that would be great did you run into women buying them did you talk about them and not just that umpteen numbers of copies of you know Kamal Sutra there who would you know people who just not go and immediately buy your I think online you know you know buying would be more accessible but you see people coming here and and and there are huge stacks of these books put together and a very interesting system that the booksellers had created here as well a few of them who had a huge archive of these romance you know novels was that they would for example give the book for 50 rupees and then take it back for 30 rupees so it it had actually they had actually invented the library system here yeah we have that in Calcutta as well I used to call it the lending system yeah for these for these they kind of try to imitate but then they have to invent yeah I think it just develops because you know people want more like you you know like we mentioned that there are these women readers who have you know found this space here where they can not keep those books at home but because of this system would just you know keep it highly treated and then you need it on it back to the booksellers and then maybe buy a next copy for themselves as well so that was something you know that I noticed that and you know it was very attractive for me as well as an ethnographer of the space who is reading what and when they are returning it as well so yeah yeah I try yeah thank you so much I think we are absolutely on time here thank you Swati for that very engaging discussion we do have a few questions already coming in and a few comments so I would read out the questions first or Kanupriya would you like me to read out the comments as well how do you prefer I think we can do the questions first sure then we can read in the time space as well the first question is from Ashok Berry is it not possible that the booksellers and customers will as it were take possession off and desanitize Mahila heart despite the controlled space and the defined patches on which the booksellers spread out their books are there any indications that it is happening already very interestingly after the pandemic hit the city the booksellers could not set up their bookstores again after a long period of time for about three months after which the booksellers realized that maybe now is the time when they had to reclaim the streets but what was happening in July 2019 and from July till September was that they did try it was a prolonged fight between the booksellers and the authorities and the readers also joined in but there was only a certain amount of will that they could exert there because this was a weekly bizarre business they could only sell books once a week so it was actually causing a loss of livelihood for these people as well which is why when 80% of the booksellers had moved to Mahila heart most of them also unwillingly so 20% of them stayed back on the streets and continued their fight but then these are the booksellers who were more aware of the legalities as well which brings me to the point that most of these booksellers do not know how to navigate these spaces these legal official spaces so if they have been given an alternative and mind you after a long period of time of loss of sales, loss of readership and it's an incidental space so if a reader doesn't see the market on the streets for 3 consecutive months they will not come back to the space they'll find alternative ways it was also July and August when a lot of students were coming to the city because that's when the academic session starts in Delhi so they did try to sustain there was a resilience there which I could very much see but it was not something that they could then not do and then after Mahila Heart was available again I will bring back the point of this being a space for incidental readers after a space was available the readers had found something that they could go to so that I wouldn't say that the resilience weekends is that when the alternative had shown up it was more or less equally good for the people who were visiting it regularly who were familiar with the space who were familiar with the booksellers that they actually needed for a certain amount of money or because of the quality or because of their rarity so after the point of time they became comfortable with the space as well which is why for the initial 2 weeks there were very few readers but after that time after a certain amount of time it again back in the space but now again the booksellers are sitting outside Mahila Heart and trying to reclaim the space because they realize that after all of this it's actually not working for them Thank you Thank you Kanupriya The second question is from Shashank Angiras Do you think that the sanitation of the book market by moving it into a new more legitimate, more organized space has an effect on the kind of books and the kind of knowledge being disseminated since a lot of these books were obtained from outside the regular publishing and distribution cycle That's a very interesting question Shashank, thank you Thankfully that has not happened but what has happened is that the price of the books has gotten affected because of the labor involved as in getting the books here and then as I mentioned as a response to the previous question they had waited for a very long time The booksellers had most of them have stocks filled up in go downs so they are still bringing the same stack of books they are still bringing the same commodity but they have increased the price they have modified the ways in which they are selling it but something interesting that has happened inside Mahilahat is that the NDFC has mandated that only books would be sold so what was happening on the streets was there was stationery, there was paper material there was magazines that would be sold now the booksellers have to be very sure who is coming to the market and what they are buying but again as it happened with the streets these knowledge systems are created over time so they are still mapping what's happening but then the pandemic hit and so on and so forth so up until now the stock has remained the same the prices have gone up the ways in which they have been showcased has changed but this is something that we are yet to see what kind of reader is entering the market is something that we are not familiar with yet because that has not yet become permanent space for them as well despite it being cleaned as a permanent space thank you the next question is from can't read the name Preetha Preetha Mani hi thank you for your talk Kadopriya I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the book market's relationship to the more permanent publishing establishments that have also been located in the area I'm thinking of places like Manohar or Hans Publications was there any kind of symbiotic relationship between these more literary establishments and the informal book selling of the market thank you so much Preetha so one of the major sources for these booksellers especially for the ones who have been who have only constrained themselves in the city's space for sourcing their books is these publishers but where I will draw a line is between the English publishers and the Hindi publishers and also another the comic book publishers so the Hindi books don't have a resale value because they are already available at a slightly lesser price compared to the English books and they have their stable readership in Delhi only if the book is out of shape or it has been out of the circuit for a very long time is when these Hindi books would enter the market the English booksellers have sort of an arrangement with these booksellers where they had decided upon a fixed amount of time for which they would keep the books here because also a very important addition is that is actually in very close proximity to Ansari Road where most of these publishers are settled down so what these booksellers call what these book publishers call I think remainder material is what these booksellers sell again going back to the communication circuit that Robert Daunton had claimed that these are the proper spaces but then what I add to it is that is when these books come out of it is when they enter the market so for example Raj comics is very common here in Darya Gandhi's bookseller called Dil Shah Dali who has this advertising stock of old and new Raj comics and he sources them directly from the publisher but the publisher has to determine when a book has to be available for them and then there are proper evaluation methods as well price evaluation methods as well so for example if they are it again depends on the number of books that they are buying and the kind of book that they are buying but the usual quotation remains 20 to 40 percent of the stock of the price of the original stock there are ways in which it happens and there are ways in which they have set up the system as well I think that's all that I can recollect from my books chapter right now The next question is from Jayati Bhasen Hello ma'am thank you for such an interesting talk I have one question do you think that pandemic was the only reason why the Darya Gandhi book market dispersed or was there some other reasons too Thank you so much Jayati thank you for attending the talk as well at that point of time the pandemic was the only reason why the book market had dispersed because the civic authorities were trying their best to make the place available and accessible for the booksellers so while from July to September and even for a couple of months later on there were ways in which the booksellers were not happy and the protest was still going on so there was this lot of pressure on the civic authorities that they have to make this place work so at that moment the pandemic was the only reason and again which gets so for example when the lockdown had been removed this book market was one of the first ones to reappear as well although with shifted timing, shifted ways and so on and so forth so at this moment the pandemic was the reason why this happened Thank you the next question is from Shomak Diswas Hi Kanupriya, couple of questions number one, how to place this latest incursion of the Delhi government in what could be seen as a longer history of trying to formalize such informal market structures especially hearts and second question is, is there a larger comment on the nature of business changing change, more commercialized real estate etc So again thank you Shomak for attending the talk as well This is not again the only market as I mentioned that has been going through this process but as Swathi also rightly mentioned the weekly bazaars of Delhi something that has been very intrinsic to the localities within the which they work they are also being subjected to all of this and it's not something that has been going on for a very long time but only with the new power coming in India is when this idea of beautification and gentrification has started to enter the city but the larger idea remains of presenting the city in a certain way also be exercising that sort of authority in governing the citizens governing the natives of the city and having that power of making those decisions as well that was something that I could not only see on paper but also in my interaction with these authorities where their idea was that if there is something that has been going on in an informal way for a very long time it just can't happen for a very long time as well we as authorities have to enter that narrative as well and I think that would also and about the larger comment on the nature of the business changing the booksellers are very much aware of the fact that this is a dying business they are still waiting it out for let's say the next 10 years and this is coming directly from the booksellers this is not an assumption that I do because for again for someone who is very romantic about the space I would want the space to carry on and carry forward and one of the very important instances in which this was visible is that the booksellers who had entered the business through their families were not letting their children into the business except if and only their children would have wanted to do that so for example this bookseller called Mahesh Kumar who had been selling books at the market for 34 years and he has this sense of the place he was one of the first people to start selling these syllabus books at the market he is one of those people who had created systems at the market but now he is very very sure that he doesn't want his children to enter the business so what I am trying to say is that it indicates of that sense of having an idea of where this book market is headed and then there is this piracy circuit that is taking over the market and then books being available in second hand formats is also becoming something inaccessible for these booksellers so the sources are depleting as well and something new something that will outdid the second hand novel is also taking over this space so these are some of the ways in which they have a sense of this market not being that space which will continue in the future as well so I hope that response to your question is well. The next question is from Emily Griffiths Thank you so much for your talk. Do you think the relocation of Daryagan's Sunday Book Market has negatively impacted community identity in Delhi? Thanks for this very interesting question Emily but this is something that I haven't looked into yet and I would really like to but for example how I would I spent about three months inside the market and I could see that the kind of for example students I would see on the streets were not available in the market anymore so a lot of people who had made their sense of association with this space were the people who were not available in the market anymore to me this had with the place becoming more sanitized there was also this sanitized population inside the market so I think in a way if this response to your question that absence kind of marked a note in my in my observations as well that there is somebody or there is some sense of community which is not visiting the market anymore so I'm kind of going to try to look into it more so I can just thank you for the question. The next question is from Tanya Sengupta I found in your talk and in Swati's comment the idea of circuits of acquisition very interesting are there special links between the Bazaar space and the acquisition space for example does acquisition happen from the area around or operate through much wider geographies or both it depends on who the bookseller is and what they are trying to sell in the market as well so for example there is a case of someone called Abdul Wali he was brought into the business by his uncle who had created this very interesting archive of fashion magazines but not magazines he would tear off pages from these very expensive books on fashion and then sell them per sheet and there was a lot of hard work involved in this so and for this he had to go across the city go across the country as well for wherever he could find these books in a very let's say price but his nephew Wali would think that this task requires not a lot of hard work but also the kind of hard work that he doesn't want to do which is why he thought that he could only sell syllabus books which were available in a very small portion of the city which was also serving a certain kind of audience and readership there so there is this idea of books being sourced from local spaces and also international spaces and national spaces as I mentioned books also come in from UK and US and they arrive in Bombay and Calcutta and then that's how these books reach Delhi but then this is a decision that the bookseller kind of has to create and because there is a diversity in the market it's not an issue for the reader they will find anything and everything in the market but at one specialized stall that what is going to be available at the stall is something that the bookseller is going to decide I hope that I'm going to read the question again just in case yeah, yeah Thank you Thank you Kanupriya The next question is from Anubha Hi Kanupriya, thank you for your talk your point about the proximity to Ansari Road makes me curious can you shed more light on the circulation networks at the Darya Ganj Book Market and its booksellers maintain with other locations of trade and supply in the city has that undergone any shifts due to the disruptions to the book market since 2019 fewer buyers disrupting the demand and supply or sellers not being able to maintain these networks due to capital constraints I'll answer the latter part first again as I mentioned earlier these are the questions which we will have answers to later on as the market spreads in that area as the booksellers actually decide to invest into the space as well and again they have this stock of books which they had gathered literally from the city and across which they would want to sell off first so there has to be a balance between that and that will take some time for us to be able to answer these questions but about the circulation networks that this book market and booksellers maintain with other trade a very something that I had to remind myself constantly while doing this research is that I have to stop looking at these books as books I have to start looking them as any other commodity in exchange because they have left that proper circulation circuit proper communication circuit they have also experienced the books as commodities have lost their identity as books so how the booksellers engage with the bookness of the book has changed these are not the people who are counting on the literary value so they would find these at Kabadi Walas they would find this for example if they would go to a certain person's house to collect a lot of material is where they would also find books they would have to look at the physical copy to see how much can they sell it for so starting from the booksellers to someone who was observing them from a distance we had to diverse ourselves from what a book means which is why where these books are found for example so clothes books and computer equipments arrive at the same point in Delhi from US and UK let's say and for example these books are also found at for example there is this old Persian market where these books are found among old rugs and so on and so forth so what I am trying to think that is that they don't look at these books as books they look at them as a certain commodity which has a resale value it's only later that they adjust the literary value to it because of the kind of customer that is coming at their stalls so yeah thank you Kanupriya I don't think we have any more questions and we are very close to seven now so I think it's time to wrap up unless there is some burning question that anybody wants to put in the chat box and I would also invite Swati again if she has any comment or response to this Q&A session or any observations I was particularly struck by the questions about the circuits of acquisition and that's particularly because A Kanupriya pointed to it because I have never really while Kanupriya was speaking it made me think of the rather unsavory ways in which say library books tend to end up in places like Darya Ganj or pirated books or you know the censored books for that matter so I was my only comment here would be precisely with regards to the value of I mean the value is not necessarily in monetary terms but the value of these informal letters of acquisition and how we might think of them in terms of as I had pointed out earlier how we might think of them in terms of Delhi's very characteristic circuits of acquisition I mean I love that Kanupriya said that we have to stop thinking of it simply in terms of it as a book but rather as a consumer object because you know the thing that reminds that this entire conversation reminded me was of motor market where stolen parts from various parts of Delhi and beyond show up and then they become a part of your car if necessary so that is the this is a particular circuit about not just characteristic to Delhi but also to second hand book markets at large in India cities and that's actually something very fascinating to think about and I'm very grateful for Kanupriya that this brought up because I'll be thinking about this a lot with regards to the various spaces have been too right I think there's one more question thank you Swathi there's one more question from Hana which I would like to take hi Kanupriya thanks for your interesting talk can you speak a little about how your work is collaborative with the local community and users of the market and this is going to be our last question for this evening I think one of the ways in which I experience an ethnographic anxiety while doing this project is that how do I map the readers this market is so much in speed there are so many kinds of people who visited I did try to apply something called rhythm analysis here but I would just record the space and or just make notes and then go back to them later on I tried to speak with historians who had their contacts and people who were for example visiting this market on a very let's say repetitive count but something that helped me was just being at the market and trying to see who is it that coming so for example at one stall in one day I would just sit there and see what's happening there but that could make me familiar with what I identify in my pieces as the ordinary readers or the parallel readers of the space but something that was fascinating for me was to meet the bibliophiles was to meet the people who had been relying on this market for their passion for book collecting and I experienced two fascinating meetings with one journalist based in Oscars and one NDMC official based in Old Delhi so I saw these two very different set of people who have been relying on this market for the past let's say 20 to 30 years they were telling me stories about the markets they all of their brows was full of books from this market but two very different world views which told me more about the city that going to the same place for the same purpose there are these two people who have found two very different ways to carry on with their romance for books from the same site so I think that was one of the ways in which I could talk about these communities of memory as well where these other people who are telling me the story of the market but they're also telling me a story of themselves telling me a story about the city and how you can be in the city as well so it was anxious for me to be able to have a sense of who is it that is visiting this market but it was also a wonderful experience and now I think I would like to go back to the city and explore more ways in which I can find these people who are coming to the market or coming to that market or just finding ways to be in this city thank you so much Kanupriya for that very engaging talk I'm sure a lot of us are very nostalgic and dying to go back to Delhi and revisit the spaces thank you Swathi thank you Swathi and to the audience members I know a lot of you have joined from India and South Asia and it's very late there so thank you for staying up and being with us tonight our next South Asia seminar will be on the 22nd of February same time 5.30pm and we'll have amongst us Dr Vibhuti Dughal from Ambedkar University who will be speaking on becoming a listener in mid 20th century North India so do join us and thank you again stay well stay safe and thank you for joining us tonight