How Delhi’s Daryaganj Sunday Book Market provided welfare infrastructure for the city’s students

Daryaganj Sunday Book Market draws Delhi’s vast and constantly circulating student population as reliably as any institution in the city. It serves not only students from major public universities such as Delhi University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Ambedkar University, but also millions of school-going children and young people enrolled in coaching centres across the capital region. According to UDISE+ 2024–25 data, Delhi has 5,556 schools serving over 44.9 lakh students across government, aided, and private institutions. Delhi University alone admitted approximately 72,000 undergraduate students for the academic year 2025–26, across 69 colleges and 79 programmes – and when postgraduate students and those enrolled across other universities and standalone colleges in the city are included, the figure rises considerably.

These numbers gesture towards something larger than mere scale. They point to a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.

Beyond formal institutions, thousands of coaching centres clustered in hubs such as Mukherjee Nagar, Rajinder Nagar, Laxmi Nagar, Karol Bagh, and Noida draw in large numbers of migrant students preparing for civil services, law and medical entrances, engineering, NET, JRF, and a range of competitive examinations. Taken together, this creates a landscape of roughly four to five million school-age students and several hundred thousand college and coaching students in Delhi alone, with even larger numbers in the broader National Capital Region. These students are not merely learners in a neutral sense. They are also internal migrants, first-generation aspirants, precarious tenants in PGs and shared rooms, part-time workers, and dependents of families investing everything in a fragile promise of mobility. Their presence at the bazaar marks both the persistence of aspiration and the failure of formal systems to equitably sustain it.

Sunday becomes the most strategic day to visit the market. Most schools, colleges, and universities are closed, and the shops in Nai Sadak’s wholesale book market remain shut as well. In this intentional pause in formal academic commerce, the Patri Kitab Bazaar comes alive. The informal market steps in where the regulated, licensed, and taxed market withdraws. This weekly choreography exposes a peculiar paradox: what the state considers an excess becomes the most accessible and democratic space of knowledge circulation. Academic survival – through textbooks, guidebooks, exam manuals, and even aspirational reading – is made possible through stacks of second-hand, pirated, imported, discontinued, surplus, or out-of-print books that official channels either overprice or render invisible.

The bazaar’s reputation extends far beyond Delhi. Students from universities outside the National Capital Region, including institutions such as Aligarh Muslim University, located nearly 130 kilometres away, make deliberate trips to Daryaganj. They often travel in organised groups, arriving with large bags and carefully prepared lists, not only for themselves but also for friends and classmates who could not make the journey. Senior students, already familiar with the market’s layout and bargaining codes, guide newcomers to particular stalls, creating informal networks of trust and continuity between buyers and sellers. Over the years, I have encountered students who had travelled from distances stretching to 1000 kilometres and beyond, to spend a few concentrated hours at the Patri Kitab Bazaar. The mathematics, they insisted, was inescapable: books that might cost several thousand rupees in campus bookstores or online could be purchased here at a fraction of the price.

At Mahila Haat, two young women stand at the edge of a stall. One is holding a guide open, cross-checking something on her phone. The other has found an old edition of Flamingo – the NCERT English textbook – and is holding it up: tujhe yaad hai yeh? Do you remember this? They are both laughing now. The first woman is wearing a Van Gogh Starry Night backpack and Uggs – plush, impractical, entirely wrong for a bazaar where you crouch on uneven ground and step around piles of books, and entirely right for everything else she is. The Uggs were not chosen for Daryaganj. They were brought here anyway, and in being brought here, they announced something: that the person wearing them has a self that exceeds what she came to buy, that she is simultaneously a student navigating a tight budget and someone with aesthetic commitments she has no intention of leaving at the door.

The bazaar has its own dress code, though no one has written it down. It is functional above all. However, umbrellas appear in the hotter months – not the dark, anonymous ones of office commuters but red ones, yellow ones, the occasional multicoloured canopy that makes its bearer briefly visible above the crowd. Sneakers in vivid colours. Hats of every kind. The bazaar produces its own street aesthetic: functional but not joyless, practical but not austere. What makes this dress code interesting is where it breaks. The Van Gogh backpack, the Uggs, these small departures from pure function are the traces of an identity that persists even within the constraints of a tight budget and a demanding urban space. The student who arrives with a trolley suitcase and a Starry Night backpack is making two statements simultaneously: I am here to work, and I am also someone. The bazaar accommodates both.

Women often navigate the market with a heightened awareness of proximity – of who is standing too close, whose gaze lingers, which lanes feel safer, and which stalls are better avoided. Their bodies are trained not only in the logic of consumption but in the politics of self-preservation. Time itself is negotiated differently: many women arrive earlier in the morning or prefer to come in groups, calculating their presence in relation to perceived safety and respectability. Students, in particular, often travel in pairs or clusters, distributing both risk and labour. One browsing, one guarding the bags; one negotiating, one keeping watch. In these small collaborations, the bazaar becomes a site not just of exchange but of solidarity, rehearsal, and learning.

Men, too, adopt their own dress codes and bodily strategies, but their relationship to the space is often marked by a different negotiation with risk and surveillance. They are able, more easily, to dissolve into the masculine anonymity of the street: resting longer, stretching out across stacks of books, arguing loudly over prices without fear of moral judgement. Where women’s preparedness often reads as a form of caution, men’s can appear as entitlement to space. These distinctions, subtle yet persistent, reveal how the same market produces multiple, gendered ways of occupying the same space.

In this sense, the bazaar does not merely facilitate the circulation of books. It disciplines and reshapes bodies. It teaches posture, pace, gesture, and alertness. It turns ordinary accessories into tools of navigation and survival. And in doing so, it makes visible the ways in which reading, collecting, and desiring books are not only intellectual acts, but also deeply physical, spatial, and gendered ones – written onto the body with every step across the pavement.

In July and August, the bazaar looks like this: bodies everywhere, backpacks grazing each other, the stacks of exam guides reduced by mid-morning to half their height. The crowd does not browse – it works. Students move with lists in hand, cross-checking titles against syllabi photographed on phones, calling out to friends two stalls away who might have found what they are looking for. The older vendor at the centre does not look up. He has seen this before, every year, at the start of every session. He simply keeps arranging.

Four young women crouched over a pile of inexpensive classics – Penguin, Wordsworth, the familiar spines of editions that cost less than a meal. This was their first visit to the bazaar. One of them had brought a camera; she was the group’s designated photographer. Another was an aspiring influencer, already composing the afternoon in her head. They were laughing, genuinely, the way you laugh when something exceeds what you expected. Wow, one of them exclaimed, and the others agreed without looking up. I found myself showing them how to tell a Penguin Classic from a Wordsworth – the weight of the paper, the texture of the spine, the difference in editorial apparatus – and why it might matter to a reader who has both in front of her for the same price. They listened in the way students do when something is being transmitted that isn’t on any syllabus.

It must have been after September – not the start of the academic session, but weeks into it, when students buy books in the second wave, filling in gaps, supplementing what they could not afford the first time. I kept noticing the bags. Not backpacks but proper luggage: wheeled trolleys, large duffel bags, the kind of thing you bring when you plan to carry more than you came with. One day, I put my notebook aside and spent the morning photographing only this – the bags students brought to Daryaganj, their size, their condition, their contents spilling out at the edges. It is one of the things fieldwork teaches you: that the most urgent research questions arrive on the ground, through a repeated image that refuses to be ignored. The bags said something about distance – literal distance, from hostels in Mukherjee Nagar or Laxmi Nagar or further, from PGs in areas of the city that have no bookshop nearby – and about intention. You bring a trolley because you already know you will leave with more than you can carry in your arms.

Newcomers to the market, often first-year students or those visiting for the first time, tend to linger longer. They lack the seasoned expertise of regulars and are more cautious, scrutinising books carefully, wary of being overcharged or sold the wrong edition, inspecting for signs of photocopying, marginalia, or wear that might affect usability. One student from Ambedkar University Delhi, Ankita, shared: “I have been told that sometimes the books are old or have missing pages, so I check thoroughly before buying anything.” Regular visitors, by contrast, navigate the market with confidence. They have learned which stalls offer the best deals and which vendors are more reliable. A group of students from Aligarh Muslim University, visiting for the third time, described their strategy: “We know the stalls that usually have what we need,” one of them said. “We also negotiate better now because we understand the pricing here.”

Technology has complicated these transactions further. Students now stand between two economies: the physical pile and the digital screen. Phones are used to cross-check prices on Amazon or Flipkart, to WhatsApp classmates, or to consult teachers. “I always check online prices first,” said Priya, a student preparing for the UGC NET exam, with a focus on History. “Sometimes the difference is huge, and I can decide if it’s worth buying here.” This moment of comparison reveals how the bazaar does not exist outside global capitalism. It sits deeply within it, subverting some logics while reinforcing others. Friends combine lists and bargain as a unit for bulk discounts. “We always come together,” Priya explains. “It’s easier to get a better rate when you are buying more.” Collective action becomes an everyday economic strategy.

Excerpted with permission from The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making Of a Reading Public in Delhi, Kanupriya Dhingra, Speaking Tiger Books.