by Claire Chambers

Entering Delhi’s famous Sunday Book Market – known locally as the Patri Kitab Bazaar – in Daryaganj is to step into another world. Previously a tangle of tarpaulin stalls behind Jama Masjid, it has been moved to a gated compound called Mahila Haat. In her new Cambridge University Press Element titled Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar, Kanupriya Dhingra treats this market as an improvisatory ‘location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities’.
Dhingra, a South Asia print historian who earned her PhD at SOAS (University of London) and now works as a professor at BML Munjal University, passed much of her life as a young adult among these booksellers. In our interview she explained that her middle-class family had not given her a particularly bookish childhood. Yet, as a student searching for texts to ‘help with passing exams’ and then as a researcher, she was unexpectedly introduced to the neglected but fascinating subject of parallel book bazaars. Over years of fieldwork, she came to realize that these markets encapsulate Delhi’s historical, economic, and socio-political currents. The result is a 92-page minigraph that fuses memoir, reportage, and analysis to tell the bazaar’s story. It reads at once as a colourful ethnographic diary and an invitation to imagine an alternative literary landscape.
Dhingra’s book is built on many months of Sundays spent walking the market, talking to traders and readers, and mapping the bazaar’s assemblages and syncopations. I was lucky enough to tag along on one of these expeditions in July 2023. Arriving empty-handed, we traced a circuitous route between tables piled high with dog-eared paperbacks under billowing canopies. I departed clutching lucky finds: a 1950s Urdu story collection and a strange out-of-print children’s novel called The Vicious Case of the Viral Vaccine. This scintilla of serendipity – arising from what she calls ‘double chance encounters’ – defines the market. Read more »



In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin announced that the current world order had changed. The unipolar world order, with one centre of power, force and decision-making, was unacceptable to the leader in the Kremlin. Yet, more than that, Putin’s speech prepared the replacement of the unipolar world order, a replacement, he would later come back to, over and over again: multipolarity.






One argument for the existence of a creator /designer of the universe that is popular in public and academic circles is the fine-tuning argument. It is argued that if one or more of nature’s physical constants as mathematically accounted for in subatomic physics had varied just by an infinitesimal amount, life would not exist in the universe. Some claim, for example, with an infinitesimal difference in certain physical constants the Big Bang would have collapsed upon itself before life could form or elements like carbon essential for life would never have formed. The specific settings that make life possible seem to be set to almost incomprehensible infinitesimal precision. It would be incredibly lucky to have these settings be the result of pure chance. The best explanation for life is not physics alone but the existence of a creator/designer who intentionally fine-tuned physical laws and fundamental constants of physics to make life physically possible in the universe. In other words, the best explanation for the existence of life in general and ourselves in particular, is not chance but a theistic version of a designer of the universe.
Sughra Raza. Scattered Color. Italy, 2012.




