The ‘D-Books’ of Daryaganj Sunday Book Market

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.

The Values of Imperfection

Georges Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi ( Life: A User's Manual) was famously based on a number of meticulously crafted lists, including a list of errors that should be made in the writing of each chapter. The engagement with imperfection in Perec's novel is central in the way it balances structure and composition with random and exchangeable elements and throughout his work the random plays a significant role. In this article, I will move from Perec's work to a wider discussion of the values of imperfection in two distinct domains: the idea of the classic and the vision of the posthuman.

Random Pandemic Perambulations: A Brief History of Literary Walks in the Age of Corona

This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic.

No One in Control? China's Battler Poetry

No literary genre is fully predictable or controllable – but some are more unpredictable and uncontrollable than others, and China's battler poetry is a case in point. In China, up to three hundred million people have left the countryside to flee from poverty and make their way into city life. Exposed to the extreme dynamic of global capitalism, these ‘battlers’ are the foot soldiers of China's economic rise but not invariably its beneficiaries. Many live and work under gruelling conditions and are deprived of basic civil rights, as second-class citizens in socio-economic and cultural terms. And… they write poetry. Not all of them by any means, but enough for a phenomenon called ‘battler poetry’ to enter the public eye. What is battler poetry, and what does it do? What happens when dominant logics of ideology, literary aesthetics and cultural expectations encounter the circumstances of battler life? The force field around this poetry is dizzyingly complex and rife with opportunities for disconnect and the unexpected, throwing into sharp relief the randomness that is part and parcel of cultural production.

Subject to the Law of Reason while Belonging to the World of Sense: the Inevitable Randomness of Human Experience in The Brothers Karamazov and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths'

Taking as its starting point the tension between the human condition as subject to the law of reason while belonging to the world of sense in establishing the categorical imperative as described by Kant, this article explores how belonging to the world of sense may be equated with randomness and the temporal as the presupposition for morality in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Borges's ‘The Garden of Forking Paths'. The article also discusses the two authors' views of time and eternity as expressed in their nonfiction.

Thinking Fungi, or Random Considerations

Thinking fungi as a way of considering randomness gives rise, in particular, to thinking about categorization, comparison, as well as creating (more-than-human) communities through strange and unexpected commonalities. These ideas inform comparative literature more broadly, along with the desire to identify and understand culturally codified motifs – that is, meanings as they gather around particular images and generate certain ideas of being in the world. By bringing fungi to the table, this contribution considers agency and ruin with contemporary narrativized deliberations on all kinds of fungi matter(s). Textually, it examines memoirs, (new) nature writing, as well as cultural studies work on fungi; theoretically, it draws on etymology and systems of classification more broadly, impulses from new materialism, as well as STS-informed deliberations on knowledge generation, classification, and circulation.