Kanupriya Dhingra In Conversation with Claire Chambers

Event details

Kanupriya Dhingra's book Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar 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 respatialization. Three actors play a major role in creating and organizing 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 specialized knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Cambridge Elements book 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 a book historian. She is currently curating the South Asia collection at the library of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, as a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow. She is a Board of Directors member at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) and a member of The Bookselling Research Network. In 2023, Kanupriya was a Resident in Manuscript and Print Studies at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Kanupriya’s recent monograph, Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge University Press, 2024), is based on her doctoral research at SOAS (University of London), supported by the Felix Scholarship Fund. She has given addresses at the University of Oxford, the British Library, School of Advanced Study (University of London), Jadavpur University, Ashoka University, Ambedkar University, and other institutions. She has written extensively about her research for journals, magazines, and digital news publications such as Comparative Critical Studies, the Caravan, Seminar, Scroll, and Himāl SouthAsian.

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