Paper short abstract:

This paper is relevant for ethnographers who are archiving ephemerality in a variously unwell world, where the danger of erasure is rising. While restoring narratives from a "community of memory" may produce a collective history absent hitherto; does it perpetuate a "dominant narrative"?

Paper long abstract:

Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar is a weekly market for second-hand books, operating in Old Delhi for the past six decades. It has been officially recognized as a “natural-market”, "where buyers and sellers interact without significant institutional intervention". However, a hyper-institutionalised world that is ambitious about the "beautification" of the cities of the Global South may erase this bazaar. The pandemic has only added to the insecurity. So, what happens when the history of this impermanent yet culturally and economically significant site is absent?

In this paper, I will critically review my methodology of documenting the history of Daryaganj book-bazaar. While collecting narratives from its primary users –– the booksellers and the book buyers –– I asked them, “You are a character in my book; would you like to share your story?”. They narrated their personal histories: their discovery of the bazaar as a space for business or "joy", their everyday and/or repeated “arrival” in the bazaar, their “lagaav” (attachment) for the place. By participating in this project and recalling their experiences of resilience, these users have come to embody the collective history of the bazaar. However, the story produced by this “community of memory” may perpetuate a dominant narrative that excludes the experiences of marginalized members. I will examine such external or internal restrictive “boundaries” (Thomas F. Gieryn), to understand the deficiencies in the process of memory-making and archiving. This study becomes more relevant in a socially, medically, and economically unwell world, where the danger of erasure is only intensifying.