Delhi’s weekly markets, window to city’s culture, back in business
As it started raining on Sunday afternoon, Mohammad Ishmail quickly ran into his foursquare-metre residence at the Jagdamba Camp slum cluster near Chirag Dilli to check if the roof was leaking once again. Inside, there was a mattress with no bedsheet, a plastic chair, a table made of plywood and an intriguing assortment of plastic soap cases, tiny mirrors, pocket-sized combs, cheap wallets and razors lay spread over a thin rug on the floor.
“There is more inside the trunk,” said the 38-year-old pointing towards a metal trunk that looked heavy, as he quickly fixed a plastic sheet covering a tiny hole on the tin-ceiling of his residence in Jagdamba Camp slum cluster.
Ishmail is a travelling merchant, who keeps moving from one weekly market – popularly called Hafta Bazar – in the city in usual times, for a living. At a hyperlocal level, most such Hafta Bazars are named after the day of the week on which they operate – such as Mangal Bazar for weekly markets operating on Tuesdays, Budh Bazar for those operating on Wednesdays, and so on.
Most such markets are closed for months in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. He expects to be back in business from Monday, and the products that lay spread on the floor were fished out of the same trunk.
On Sunday, the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) issued an order allowing all weekly markets in the city to operate from this Monday. As Delhi witnessed its worst Covid-19 wave, which left the city’s health infrastructure overwhelmed, the government implemented a full lockdown on April 19. As Covid-19 cases started to decline, the government started with a phased relaxation process from May 31 and by mid-June they allowed one weekly market to operate per day per municipal zone.
Delhi has 12 municipal zones which essentially means 84 weekly markets have more or less been functional in the city for the last two months.
“But Delhi has around 2,500 to 2,700 weekly markets. From traders to suppliers and labourers, they engage lakhs of people. Around 250 such markets are quite prominent in the city including the ones in Shastri Park, Red Fort, Yamuna Pushta, Mandawali, Vasant Kunj and Karkardooma. So, the one market per day per municipal zone means many of them were suspended and the traders associated with those markets were in distress,” said Arbind Singh, national coordinator of the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), an advocacy group.
The lockdown imposed because of the pandemic threw thousands into distress and Ishmail was among them. He recalled how he had to send his wife, who is a domestic worker, and nineyear-old son, to his extended family which resides at a village in Bihar’s East Champaran district.
“Not having the weekly market functional in the neighbourhood was a problem. They offer a wide range of household essentials and we depend on that,” said Ganga Devi, a resident of New Ashok Nagar neighbourhood in east Delhi where three weekly markets in the vicinity have been non-functional for the last two months.
Weekly markets in Delhi sell a wide range of products and largely cater to lower-income group households.
“I see them more as a cultural thing,” said Rana Safvi, a Delhibased historian and writer. “Where do you find bangle sellers in Delhi these days who used to walk around in localities selling their merchandise? In the weekly markets, you see such merchants. Traditionally a lot of them offered space to village residents in Delhi to display handmade products. In most of them, the traders know their regular clients and they often form a bond.”
It is quite likely that such bonds between merchants and clients have helped the former read the demographic demands better and innovate merchandise. Several weekly markets in the city which function in areas inhabited by large numbers of people from Bengali and Odiya communities sell fish, several of them located in areas inhabited by North-East Indian communities sell packed dried fish and bamboo shoots.
Filmmaker and writer Sohail Hashmi highlighted historical roots of Delhi’s weekly markets. He said, “When contending armies fought for the control of Delhi, the residents of its villages had to suffer violence. It is said that Mohammad bin Tughlaq once erected a wall around his new capital city of Bijay Mandal, which is located near current-day localities Begum Pur, Sarvodya enclave and Sarvapriya Vihar. It would be a wall that would enclose within its folds his fort and all the surrounding villages and their lands. He named it Jahan Panah.
“The villages enclosed within the walls and those in its peripheries continued to exist for centuries producing all that they needed to survive or buying what they did not, from the weekly markets, held on fixed days of the week near each village. These markets were run by small travelling salesmen who set up shop at a new location each day of the week, coming back to each location once a week. Each travelling merchant catered to a fixed set of six or seven villages. Much has changed in the wares that the hafta bazaar merchants sell today; and yet much remains in these markets that needs to be preserved,” said Hashmi.