The Walkers of Daryaganj

Excerpted with permission from The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi's Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public by Kanupriya Dhingra, published by Speaking Tiger.

The walkers of Daryaganj have developed patterns of experiencing the bazaar. From Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Marg to Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Marg, regular buyers did not necessarily follow this trail linearly. They chose their entry and exit points depending on where the stalls they liked were placed. Shauqeen buyers—the real Daryaganj aficionados—move through the space with a different quality of attention: slower, more lateral, willing to be surprised. They created their own trails. New buyers, I noticed, tend to do what I did. They would start from one end and try to take everything in. It’s too much. The experienced buyer has learned to let the bazaar come to them rather than trying to master it. Except for students, regulars rarely visited Daryaganj Patri Kitab Bazaar for a specific book. Students, too, were offered a wide variety of options in terms of editions—from low-end to high-end textbooks, along with several additional reference books.

Kanupriya Dhingra
The Sunday Book Bazar
Speaking Tiger Books, 2026

The walker here creates singular yet imitable ways of negotiating with serendipity. While walking on the streets, the spatialisation enacted by a book buyer is determined by their movement and pauses, by where they choose to be in the same area, on the same footpaths, amidst a mixed crowd. There is no one way to enter or exit the bazaar. The walker chooses to be present or absent while perpetually remaining in proximity to the market. Unlike a bookshop, where the door marks a clear decision—you are inside, or you are not—the Patri Kitab Bazaar has no such threshold. Its boundary is porous, self-determined, and completed only by the buyer’s engagement. A bookstall without a browser is just a pile of books on a footpath. It is the act of stopping, touching, considering, that makes it a bookstall at all.

This is precisely what Michel de Certeau meant when he described walking in the city as a creative form of resistance: a way of subverting the predetermined grids of urban planning through the lived, improvisational logic of actual bodies moving through space. The city’s planners conceive of Netaji Subhash Marg as a road, a thoroughfare with a function. The shauqeen buyer conceives of it as an archive of nostalgia and a map for treasure-hunting. Neither is wrong. But it is the walker who pauses, turns, and returns to the same stall for the third time who decides which version of the street exists on any given Sunday. The Patri Kitab Bazaar is, in this sense, summoned into being each week by the people who choose to inhabit it.

Bookstalls beside the Delhi Gate Metro Station, Exit No. 3, 2017. Photo: Kanupriya Dhingra

Beyond its function as a marketplace, the Patri Kitab Bazaar operates as an adda—an informal social space where anonymity, encounter, and everyday negotiations of the city quietly unfold. The spatiality of the Patri Kitab Bazaar produces more than commerce; it generates a fleeting freedom to gather, to disappear into a crowd, to become briefly untraceable within the city’s dense social fabric. As Sanjay Srivastava notes in Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India, urban spaces such as these carry the possibility of encounters among strangers, often away from the watchful eyes of known social circles. Students arrive in groups, linger with friends, or take solitary walks, absorbing the energy of the bazaar and the rhythms of the surrounding Old City. For parents navigating the crowded, book-laden lanes with young children, however, this anonymity becomes a source of anxiety: hands are held tightly, eyes remain alert, and bodies remain tethered to avoid separation in the maze-like passageways. Shauqeen book buyers, by contrast, move
through the space with a greater sense of autonomy, wandering at their own pace, straying beyond the textbook stalls, and stumbling upon unexpected treasures—second-hand novels, pulp fiction, entertainment magazines. What begins as a purposeful academic errand often turns into an unplanned indulgence, shaping reading habits in serendipitous ways.

The anonymity afforded by the bazaar also provides a space for young lovers to express affection discreetly. Holding hands becomes a subtle yet significant gesture, a way to stay close in a city where public displays of affection are often met with scrutiny. In this sense as well, the openness of the Patri Kitab Bazaar contrasts with the intimacy of a closed bookshop, offering a haven for moments of connection and expression that defy societal norms. Could this public display of affection be considered a form of resistance, a defiance against the constraints of urban life?

Walking is not just a means of experiencing the Patri Kitab Bazaar—it is a vital part of the fabric of Old Delhi itself. As Sam Miller observed in Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, cities were once designed for the convenience of walkers, and even amidst the rise of cars and trains, the humble act of putting one foot in front of the other remains a powerful symbol of freedom and agency. As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.

Yet what truly distinguishes the Patri Kitab Bazaar is not only how it is walked through, but how it is made—assembled and
disassembled each Sunday, leaving no permanent trace on the street that held it. The bazaar is not simply located in Daryaganj. It is made there, through repetitive, embodied gestures that remember their place even when nothing is fixed in stone. This is the convergence of those who arrive with books and those who arrive looking for them—until the footpath becomes, briefly, something else entirely. By evening, the street reclaims itself. By the following Sunday, the bazaar reclaims the street. This is what a natural market looks like from the inside—not planned, not permanent, but returning, reliably, because the need that produced it has never gone away.

Each Sunday, familiar bodies return to familiar edges of the footpath, balancing bricks, boxes, crates, and sacks, to conjure a temporary architecture of books. The street slowly surrenders its weekday anonymity and gathers a new grammar, written in piles, stacks, pathways, and pauses. Before the first bargain is struck and before the first page is turned, the bazaar has already announced itself through these quiet acts of laying down, opening up, and claiming space—a choreography that transforms an ordinary road into a living, ephemeral republic of books.

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