1 - Bhavani Goes to Badrinath

Summary

I found Bhavani Singh’s travelogue at Subhan’s bookstall on a Sunday visit to the Daryaganj neighborhood of Delhi. Every Sunday, Daryaganj’s shops close their shutters and surrender their sidewalks to independent booksellers. Most of the books in this roadside bazaar are in English: The Lady’s Desire, Commentaries on the Gujarat Sales Tax Act of 1968, The Miracle Berry Diet Cookbook. A few sellers, though, have a niche, and Subhan’s was old Urdu print. His titles were an odd mix. They were often written in obsolete jargon and dealt with obscure topics, including treatises on homeopathy, guides to administrative shorthand, and takfir-laden tracts on stale religious disputes. Subhan acquired his books cheaply, likely enlisting neighborhood scrap dealers (kabari-vale) to pull out promising material. Perhaps he also visited homes where an elderly relative had recently died. The younger generation rarely valued these books and might part with them cheaply. Even Subhan’s rarest books almost never sold for more than ten or twenty dollars.

There are Sunday book bazaars all over South Asia. They are an incredible archival resource, but they are also fickle. You must visit them weekly, because stocks change constantly, and a book once sold may never reappear. Libraries and archives are more reliable and organized, but they are not natural, representative, nor comprehensive. Libraries include books according to their own missions. Collectors only buy items they value. The bazaar’s offerings, though, are not dominated by any consistent ideology, logic, or morality. Here religious manuals for proper prostration are piled below kok shastra and suhag rat guides to sex positions and family planning. This randomness makes the Sunday bazaar a paradise for discovering regional works and lowbrow publications. It is an unstable, uncatalogued archive for everything libraries could not, or would not, accept. And so it was that no matter what city I was in, I would visit the Sunday book bazaar to poke around. The official archives are closed on Sundays, anyhow.

One day at Subhan’s, I spotted a dogeared volume titled Safarnama Shri Badri Narayan-ji Maharaj Ka (Account of a journey to Sri Badri Narayan Maharaj, 1900).