Abstract
Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, is a weekly informal market for used, rare, and pirated books that has been operating on the streets of Old Delhi for the past fifty years. In this essay, I focus on one of the circuits that has been flourishing in this market, that of pirated or ‘duplicate’ or D-books. In order to examine the forms in which piracy thrives in the present-day Patri Kitab Bazaar, and the reasons behind it, I compare two types of pirated books found here: a low-price self-help manual in Hindi and a ‘D’ copy of an English novel by popular Indian author Chetan Bhagat. As I examine the essential role that ‘randomness’ plays in the constitution of pirated texts, I suggest that there is organization to this apparent lack of pattern or unpredictability. Such permutation of order and chaos resonates with the location of the bazaar – a site that thrives on the serendipity of the streets.
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