‘Hafta Bazaars’ of Delhi
The pandemic highlights all that we were supposed to be paying attention to all this time — health, environment, education, local businesses, people!
It is in a way, a smudged chaos of the City, when fluorescent blues and greens, and bulb yellows come together to color together a crowd from two ends of it — the middle-class and the laborers — both as simply the customers to the hawkers and small traders at the Weekly (or Hafta) Bazaars of Delhi. Of course, the class sensibility doesn’t shed itself even in this ‘public’ space of a market.
Perhaps one of the signifiers of being the aspirational middle-class is oscillating from one end of these Weekly Bazaars to the other end of retail food stores, like Godrej Fresh, Reliance, Mother Dairy, Big Bazaar, and so on. While haggling with the street vendors over the prices of onions that spike like my mother’s blood pressure, we also tend to buy over-priced tasteless strawberries/kiwis from stores that can’t compete with the mulberry tree right across our street. When the season is right, the mulberries ripen, plop down and stain the pavements into reds and purples. The ones that remain in reach are plucked by us in fistfuls and brought home. And of course, they were shahtoots before they were mulberries to us. I remember a while ago finding boxes in a retail store and laughing at them or myself? Both, perhaps! It has been a while since I plucked mulberries but even then, I would now never want to buy it.
The Weekly Bazaars are very much priority visits for us, precisely because it is here where we find reasonably priced vegetables and fruits at a stone’s throw away from our home or homes (as we have shifted across Delhi, each locality came with its promise of a weekly market — Shukr bazaar, Shani Bazaar etc.).
In an article on Wire (https://thewire.in/culture/the-history-behind-delhis-weekly-bazaars) that I came across, by Sohail Hashmi, he details out how historically old and significant these markets are. They came before what and who is Delhi could even be completely grasped! Each village with its own market grew into its own town decades ago, and the posh localities of today and the suburbs and sprawling buildings of the city came much after — Kishangarh and Vasant Kunj are one of these instances. There is a lot more in the extensive and beautifully put together documentation and writings around ‘Hafta Bazaars’ if you are curious to learn, by Hashmi, as well as many other historians and educators of Delhi.
The historicity of these bazaars evades those like our family that saunters over with cloth bags, like Russian dolls, one into another to be laden with hafte ka ration (a week’s grocery). Despite avoiding plastic bags there are conversations around micro-plastics and chemicals relentlessly had when one picks up the fruit and vegetables in half-reluctance and half-amazement of its luster and color. Once that’s past, the haggling begins; every price is over-priced, and a bargain of even five rupees is a triumph! There is occasional indulgence in items we do not need but will buy, like rubber bands, colorful baskets, graters and mortar and pestles and knives and peelers and anything really. If there is food and we are not yet tired or frightened by upset stomachs, we will eat the samosas and gol-gappas and moongfalis too.
On one such visit, my mother and I were deliberating over cooking kathal ki sabzi (jackfruit curry) for dinner. The man who patiently awaited our argument happened to come from my mother’s hometown. There was a long minute of acknowledgement from both ends. The memory of a home left behind. The dialects of the language revived in simple short sentences. And then as is the order, the two lives were pushed back again as separates. The jackfruit was brought home priced as it was, struck into halves, and that sense of familiarity, the shared nostalgia of a hometown that that couldn’t be priced was left lingering in the bazaar itself.
This is the city we live in. This is the system we built. If we only cared enough to see Weekly Bazaar past its seduction of affordability, we could build on a system of loyalty, on devising ways to support and grow local businesses of traders, and vendors (as was the system before the thrills of shopping malls and fancy departmental stores).
Since Covid crisis, it is now after months that the weekly bazaars are finally reopening, planned as per new guidelines of social distancing. But also, with it the claim made by the Delhi CM is to put together a plan to build on these markets and in the long run, develop them as even important tourist sites not unlike those in various countries of the world. The weekly bazaars, which have come to be such an intrinsic part of the City and their historicity could then be endowed with a sense of respect but also a much-needed support to the local businesses; Traders and small-time vendors who are continually trying to compete with the ever-evolving food retail stores and now online grocery delivery systems. It would mean truly supporting the local, and challenging monopolies of corporate giants. Maybe then, ambitiously so, one could even demand fresh local produce instead of overpriced tasteless strawberries/kiwis one is never allowed to taste/test (a reasonable middle-class habit called upon to be uncivil by some).
But well, all of this is possible only if we were to move in that direction, which is a small but daring dream to have given the current Order of affairs at our country.
