Delhiwale: This way to Mahila Haat

Mahila Haat, initially a failed artisan market, has transformed into Delhi's vibrant Sunday Book Bazar, attracting thousands and preserving its literary roots.

Place-names are frequently deceptive. Logically speaking, it ought to be a village market for female artisan-entrepreneurs. It actually is Ali Baba’s cave for secondhand books.

Photographer Dayanita Singh. (HT Photo)

Opened atop a basement car park in 2012, Mahila Haat overlooks the Walled City’s vanished walls on Asaf Ali Road. The planners had expected it to be Delhi’s second Dilli Haat, that much-loved Disneyland of art-and-craft stuff. The good intentions failed, and Mahila Haat stayed deserted and squalid. Its kismet turned in 2019, when it was chosen as the site for the Capital’s iconic Sunday Book Bazar, which earlier would unfold every week on the pavement of nearby Daryaganj. (The new location proved far superior due to its traffic-free navigation — plus, it has a lovely sun-soaked lawn.)

Alas, the market’s five-year lease in Mahila Haat ended a few days ago. But no panic attack please! The authorities promptly awarded it a lease of five more years — informs bookseller Asharfi Lal Verma, vice-president of Daryaganj Patri Sunday Book Bazar Welfare Association. Speaking sentimentally, the genial gent particularly expresses gratitude to two officials (who happen to be mahila) — Rashmi Chaudhary, MCD’s assistant director who signed the extended lease, and Veditha Reddy, the then deputy commissioner who, he says, had originally picked the Haat to be the bazar’s next site. Currently, the market has 258 booksellers, and only Asha happens to be a mahila. She is the market association’s treasurer.

And so despite its flop debut as an artisanal fairground, Mahila Haat has still succeeded in becoming a Delhi institution. Every Sunday, the grounds teem with thousands of book browsers, and hundreds of thousands of books on every imaginable theme. Additionally, enterprising street vendors gather at the Haat’s gate to hawk book bags, correctly expecting that the exiting shoppers might need additional bags. While the footpaths outside fill up with stalls dishing out chhole bhature, khasta kachori, mausambi juice, ganne ka juice and machine ka thanda paani to the hungry-thirsty book lovers.

Moreover, Mahila Haat’s Sunday identity has extended its 21st century origins back to the 1960s. Fifty-five years ago, bookseller Kuldeep Raj Nanda started setting up a stall every Sunday under the long-vanished Lohe Walla Pul iron foot-over bridge. He was gradually joined by a few more booksellers. They would exhaust their weekdays scouting Delhi’s neighbourhood recyclers for discarded books. The rescued volumes would be put up on sale in Daryaganj. Slowly slowly, the bazar extended from the Lohe Walla Pul to Golcha Cinema, then to the Telephone Exchange, near Dilli Gate, and from there to Delite Cinema before finally shifting lock, stock, and barrel to…you know where!

Mercifully, Mahila Haat hasn’t altered the basics of the Sunday Book Bazar. Some Sundays ago, a rare first edition hardbound of Marquez’s celebrated novel Love in the Time of Cholera was sighted amid a pile of black-bordered Penguin classics. Another Sunday, an internationally acclaimed artist, who happens to be a mahila, was sighted browsing the bazar — photographer Dayanita Singh.