Kanupriya Dhingra, "Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

10/11/24 • 55 min

Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge UP, 2024) looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and spatialization. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state-citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of being and believing.

Dr Kanupriya Dhingra is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at the Jindal School of Languages and Literature, O.P. Jindal Global University (India). She researches the History of the Book and Print Cultures, focusing on Delhi (India), from an ethnographic perspective. She earned her doctorate under the Felix Scholarship Fund from SOAS, University of London in 2021, on her dissertation titled “Daryaganj’s Parallel Book History”, which became this Element. She has also published in journals such as The Caravan, Himal SouthAsian and Seminar Magazine. She is also deeply interested in Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu poetry, especially that of Amrita Pritam, and continues to research and translate it. Her creative writing and translations have appeared in Indian Literature (A Sahitya Akademi imprint), Scroll, Indian Writers Forum, Guftgu, Aainanagar, and Antiserious. Currently, she is working on translations of Krishna Sobti and Amrita Pritam.

SM Khalid is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, working comparatively on postcolonial satire in South Asia in Hindi, Urdu and English.

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SM Khalid is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, working comparatively on postcolonial satire in South Asia in Hindi, Urdu and English.

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Previous Episode

Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)

What does it mean for a novel to think globally? And can a global novel concerned with the macro movements of capital and labor still exist in the form of a bildungsroman? This conversation between Lydia Kiesling and Megan Ward takes up questions of form and political consciousness in the novel, globality and rootedness, capitalism and the yearning for things, optimization and wellness culture, and so much more. Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree. Her second novel, Mobility, is the first book in a new imprint with Crooked Media. Lydia and Megan discuss seeing the world from a foreign service perspective, the damage wrought by cultures of individuality, and why more novels aren’t set in Azerbaijan. Lydia talks about how the close reading skills that she gained from an English major provide a way reading the world that is underappreciated by our contemporary culture of utilitarianism. From wet bun hair styles to how we want novels to speak about progressive politics, this wide-ranging conversation wraps up with Lydia’s excellent answer to Season 8’s signature question.

Mentions:

Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Oil!, Upton Sinclair
Timothy Morton
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm

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Next Episode

Eunsong Kim, "The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property" (Duke UP, 2024)

In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press, 2024), Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.

Eunsong Kim is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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