Delhiwale: 30 years of ‘Jai Kishan’

Jacksons Books in Paharganj, Delhi, celebrates 30 years of selling used books to backpackers, enduring despite the decline of local bookstores.

Prince Book Stall, Raja Book Stall, Vijay Kumar’s pavement stall—Delhi’s backpacker hub of Paharganj brimmed with establishments selling used paperbacks. The title pages of many of these books bore stamps from bookstores in distant countries, left behind by foreign travellers en route to Parvati Valley, Pushkar, or Goa. Most of those shops have shut forever. Except for one.

The book shop holds the capital’s richest collection of used books—in English and Hindi, as well as French, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish. (Mayank Austen Soofi)

Jacksons Books turns 30 this month.

In a city where secondhand bookstores (and even first-hand ones) rarely last, Jacksons has endured. It also holds the capital’s richest collection of used books—in English and Hindi, as well as French, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish.

Founded in April 1996 on Paharganj’s Main Bazar, the shop sits between a narrow alley and a mosque. Its collection spans continents, reflecting its traditional clientele: foreign backpackers briefly boarding up in Paharganj’s economy hotels. Bookseller Deepak Dialani frequently buys books from travellers and resells them to new owners, who are also mostly foreigners. Part of the collection naturally veers toward the eclectic, with titles you won’t easily spot in Delhi’s mainstream bookstores. Sample the sightings one afternoon: Amos Elon’s Jerusalem: City of Mirrors, stamped by a secondhand shop in Rawalpindi; and Andrew Harvey’s A Journey in Ladakh, bearing the sticker of a Buenos Aires bookshop. The title pages of many dog-eared volumes carry handwritten inscriptions—dates, cities, names—quietly mapping their journeys across borders. Sometimes metro tickets of foreign cities fall from the pages.

Indeed, it is these foreign backpackers who are behind the bookstore’s current identity. The shop was named after the bookseller’s father, Jai Kishan, whose name came to be pronounced as “Jacksons” by Western travellers. He had arrived in Delhi as a partition migrant from Karachi.

Jacksons’s endurance is also remarkable because it is trying to outlive the world that once sustained it. COVID-19 slowed the stream of Paharganj’s foreign backpackers. The hotel district has still not fully returned to its former life. Some excellent cafés have shut for good. Yet Jacksons continues to stock hundreds of used Lonely Planet guides covering more than 200 destinations in multiple languages. Flip through them and you travel twice: once through the place itself, and again through the backpacker-reader who came before. For passages are underlined, tips circled, margins filled. A page in Lonely Planet Guatemala bears blue hearts.

Additionally, the bookshop invites browsing beyond the books. You may sit on its road-facing chair and watch the Main Bazar’s churn of rickshaws and pedestrians outside. The shop’s tiny TV is always playing the comedy series Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah. The show’s canned laughter has become the bookstore’s soundtrack.

Bookseller Deepak is very kind, treating regulars to chai from a nearby tea kiosk. Tomorrow morning at ten, he will again step out from his home on Wazir Singh Street and, four minutes later, open the shop—as he has for three decades.