Rakhi Bazaar: a Photo essay

Each time I go to Manek chowk in Ahmedabad, the streets look different, completely different. The last time I went there, it was around the Holi festival and you could tell that Holi was just around the corner, because everywhere, you saw the Pichkaris and the holi colours. If you were to go there in January, around the Sankranti festival, there’s kites everywhere!! And, Diwali time, it’s fire crackers and the paper lanterns and all kinds of lights! The more I see of Manek chowk, the more I wonder about its innate nature to absorb, to adapt. It seems to soak in whatever happens in the city – if people celebrate Holi, the streets of Manek chowk celebrate Holi; if people celebrate Diwali, the streets of Manek chowk are lights and firecrackers!

And right now, it’s the Raksha Bandhan festival and there’s Rakhis everywhere! It’s like seeing the reflection of nature in water…whatever is outside is there inside the water, nothing more, nothing less.

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Holi Bazaar

Gujari Bazaar – the 600 yr old market

I reached Ellis bridge in Ahmedabad on a really hot afternoon in March this year. I was seeing for the first time the Gujari Bazaar. I had heard about it many times before. I had read about it before I came here. This self-managed bazaar was locally called the ‘Ravivari’ or Sunday market. It had more than 1200 registered traders, most of them selling used items and a few selling new goods.The livelihoods of nearly 20,000 households were linked directly and indirectly with this market.

One would think that anything 600 years old would look old. It didn’t. With the way people went about in the bazaar, this did not look like a part of a period film. It just looked like a crowded bazaar that belonged to the present. However, it was a present that was part urban and part rural. As I entered the bazaar from one end of the Ellis bridge, there was a line of street vendors selling fruit on what seemed like high wooden platforms until I realised that they were camel carts (without the camels).

Ahmedabad was a city that had continued to be both urban and rural with nomadic tribes living in some neighbourhoods, with artisan communities settling here from other parts of Gujarat, with the city bearing ways of living that reflected traditional customs alongside contemporary needs that it was never quite urban in the way western societies define ‘urban’. It reminded me of the “urban-rural continuum” that Kerala had been known to have (in discussions about vernacular architectural traditions) with no discernible boundaries between the paddy fields and urban infrastructure.

The question that came to my mind was: How does a bazaar sustain for 600 years? For anything to sustain, it must be resilient enough. We do know that. How was this resilience built into our traditional bazaars? Was it in the nature of the people who sold their wares? Was it in the relationships and networks on which the buying and selling rested, that the resilience was embedded? Was it in the indigenous credit systems? How much of these still survived? Why had this bazaar not gradually faded away or been buried into the history of the city of Ahmedabad?

As I think about it now, knowing that it was a 600 year old bazaar had been so much in my mind before I reached there and after I got there, that I could think of nothing else for some time. As John Berger says in his book, The Ways of Seeing – “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” What I also knew from before was that this vibrant bazaar was in the centre of controversy – the Sabarmati Riverfront development project threatened to displace the bazaar that had been a source of livelihood for several vendors. The Gujari bazaar had a long, long history, but a short-lived future.

The historical background of the bazaar tells us that it was started in 1414 by Sultan Ahmed Shah, the Founder of Ahmedabad. At that time, it operated on Fridays and spread from Teen Darwaza to Bhadra Taar office. The 1941 communal riots had forced the closure of the bazaar for some time. It reopened a few months later, first near the Siddhi Sayyed mosque and later near the old Civil court. It was in 1954 that it was finally shifted to the Sabarmati riverfront at its present location.

Today, the Gujari bazaar is seen as a marketplace that belongs to the ‘Intangible Cultural heritage’ of the city of Ahmedabad. It has been included by the Centre for Environment Education (CEE) in its ‘Project Parampara’ which is a documentation initiative supported by the Ministry of Culture. There are three films on the Gujari bazaar which can be accessed at http://www.paramparaproject.org/traditions_gujari-bazar.html which highlight the role of the Gujari bazaar association and the linkages between artisans and traders who have participated in the bazaar for many generations.

The short-lived future of the Gujari bazaar has been discussed in public meetings and efforts continue to be made by not-for-profit organisations and educational institutions in the City to propose alternatives to the displacement of tradition and livelihoods. In December 2009, a Public hearing was held in Ahmedabad to discuss displacements experienced by the poor and included the case of the Gujari bazaar. This is a link to the Report of Public hearing on Habitat and Livelihood displacements.

The verdict of the jury had said that the Gujari bazaar was a heritage activity of the city and its shifting needed to be re-examined by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation with the participation of the traders. A forum of concerned citizens of Ahmedabad called ‘Our Inclusive Ahmedabad’ had organised this Public hearing and continues to battle with the government for the rights of the vendors.

If an informal, temporal marketplace has been a part of a city for six hundred years, why would we want to let it go? It's time perhaps to reflect on sustainable development as Indians understood it in the past. What cultural processes and planning processes did they deploy that we can learn from? What can we remember from what we know from our past that will help us design a better future for our cities?

Here is a link to: www.gujaribazaar.org which discusses the Livelihood and Community-related aspects of the bazaar and the efforts of management and design professionals from IIMA and NID towards working with the Ahmedabad Gujari Association in the recent past.

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Gandhi Bazaar: Street vendor eviction
The Informal Economy and Urban space
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The Golla wallah

I was walking in Manek Chowk that morning when I saw the golla wallah. It brought back memories from childhood when one desired the golla (ice candy) more than anything else!

The Bazaar is so often a coming together of visual delight and affordable living, a place for the "common man”, a place where every character of R.K. Narayan’s stories would feel at home, a place where many of us would be happy wandering through as we find that which delights us and that which we can easily afford.

If you are thirsty as you meander through the bazaar, what are the choices you have? You can have ‘sada pani’ - just plain water. You can have tender coconut water or sugarcane juice. You can stop at a chai wallah or you can go to the golla wallah. When you think about it, it’s only the chai that you can also get at home, not the tender coconut, not the sugarcane juice, and surely not the golla! (Anjali's comment has proved me completely wrong. Do check out her home-made Kairi Panha slurp recipe!)

The golla is street food at its best. “This food is to die for” you hear Rocky and Mayur say on their television show ‘Highway on my Plate’ every time they are checking out a new eating place. It’s a programme I love watching because it takes you to all those places serving yummy food that you haven’t gotten to yet. There are endless episodes of it because there are endless choices of food in India. For those of us who love street food, there is the book Street food of India that won’t let us forget that street food is as much living heritage as anything else in this country. And, here is a recipe for the Kala Khatta golla…

I think now about all of the local thirst-quenchers and their place in the bazaar. How do they add functional value to the bazaar? How many sugarcane juice stalls might exist in the city compared to the golla wallah stalls? How many people make a livelihood in the city selling tender coconuts? How many invest in a business that sells the kala-khatta golla and more? And then, how does it differ from one city to another? In India, it is not so easy to know the details of operations within the informal sector – its past and its present.

However, we can put our recollections together and build an image of the bazaar. If I asked, what do you remember of the golla wallah? How often did you get to eat a golla? Was it something you did on the way back from school? Is it a memory linked with the summer holidays? If each of us shared what we can remember, we would soon have a bigger picture. So, if you would like to share your thoughts here, we can do a golla wallah collage of memories…

Read about:
The Pani Puri wallah
What is Chai
Tender Coconut in a Street Bazaar

What is Chai

And, why is the chai so much a part of our lives? In India, we believe that time is cyclic and in the many years we live before we are reborn again, the chai is at the core of our existence. It is the cup of chai (tea) that helps us mark time in our homes, in our streets, in our marketplaces. Every home offers its guest a cup of tea. Every street corner offers its visitors a glass of chai. In the marketplace, the chai creates the social space that people need as an introspection, an interaction or a sharing of experiences.

The Chai glass: in a Street in Udaipur

The tea or “chai” has a special place in the homes of North Indians with its range of flavours to choose from. There is the Adrak-ki-chai (ginger tea), the Elaichi-chai (cardamom tea), the Dalchini-chai (cinnamon tea) or the Pudina-chai (mint tea) and with every cup, you add to your memories of a morning of reflection, an afternoon of family decisions or an evening of sharing with a friend. As I look closely at tea stalls in the streets and bazaars of Ahmedabad, Udaipur or Delhi, I realise that there are so many different ways in which people gather in public spaces "for a cup of chai".

As people participate in the buying and selling of goods in the Bazaar or Marketplace, they exercise control over the space in which they are situated and which surrounds them. For vendors, this control is the ability to transform some part of the bazaar environment to support their economic activity and sometimes their social needs as well. It is this transformation process that the chai stall seems to symbolise as it becomes the point of departure for economic and social exchanges in the marketplace.

1. a Shopowner sipping his morning cup of tea as the street bazaar begins to ready itself for the day’s customers

2. a Chai stall in Ahmedabad that manages its operations on a push-cart with its customers standing around the cart and exchanging the morning news or discussing the day’s work.

3. The functional space requirement for the making of the tea is quite minimal and the tea vendor needs a supply of water for the tea and for the washing to fulfill his operations at the marketplace.

4. While you can have a cup of chai as a shopper in the bazaar, the chai vendor also serves his fellow workers. At Sadar Bazaar in Delhi, the cycle rickshaw wallah, the auto rickshaw wallah and the tempo driver, all of whom bring the agricultural produce and other goods to the market in the early hours of the morning have their tea served to where they choose to rest. 

5. The chai stall in the town of Patan in Gujarat has a generous sitting place that belongs to the street. The tea seller uses a public space for private consumption and this borrowed space becomes a place of social exchange that he offers his regular customers. 

6. Sketch Plan of Chai stall in Patan: The tea vendor is part of a layering process that has spatial elements – those that mark his own territory and those that circumvent his territory

7. In Gujarat as in other parts of India, you can buy yourself adrak chai on the streets and you may have a choice of a plastic cup or a ceramic cup and saucer to suit your own levels of hygiene and nostalgia

I first began to think about the place of Chai in Urban spaces when I had the chance to listen to Philip Lutgendorf present his research work at Dakshinachitra on the Indian Tea. Here is a link to: Chai Why? – The Triumph of Tea in India

And, this is an interesting blog on the Irani cafes in Mumbai: http://www.iranichaimumbai.com/

Read about:
The Golla wallah
The Informal Economy & Urban space
Peanut festival in Bangalore
The Pani Puri wallah

Tender Coconut in a Street Bazaar

You are walking along a Street Bazaar absorbed in looking at the busy sweet-meat stall where you know you shouldn’t go but where your heart takes you nevertheless. You quickly turn away so as to shrug off just one more culinary temptation of the marketplace. Aromas of enticing street food waft towards you from another street corner. You tell yourself that you are not hungry, but then, you are suddenly thirsty!!

1  Welcome to Ahmedabad : the paan stalls, the farsan stalls, the chai stalls and coconut water stalls – Manek Chowk has everything.

In the Bazaar, there is no dearth of drinks to buy. Today, you can buy a bottle of mineral water anywhere. But, it’s such a waste to be in the Bazaar and to spend Rs.12 buying a bottle of mineral water!! Drinking water is what you will get yourself at home, you say to yourself. You can also buy a Coke or another cold drink. But, you look around hoping to find either a Sugarcane juice stall or a Tender Coconut seller. That’s what you get here that you don’t get elsewhere, and that’s what you want now! You find a vendor selling tender coconuts and walk up to him, standing in the middle of nowhere, a bunch of coconuts on a bicycle making brisk business in this hot afternoon. It gets you thinking about coconut-sellers and their place in the bazaar.

2  Banjara (gypsy) woman who sells bangles on D.V.G.road in Bangalore stops for a tender coconut

I look at the coconut-sellers in J.P.Nagar in Bangalore. There are two individual shops on the two sides of the road where the Mini-forest meets the Ring road. As I speak to one of these sellers, I learn that he buys a thousand coconuts each time, once in two days. There is a wholesale exchange at the Mandya at Mysore road. He sells about five hundred coconuts per day. The responsibility for carting away the waste of the coconut is that of the coconut-seller. He pays Rs.200 to have it taken away. This is also done once in two days. That’s the story of just one coconut vendor in a city of 9.5 million inhabitants in a country with a population of 1.2 billion.

3  Push-cart vendor has customers from the Brahmin café at Basavanagudi in Bangalore

You realise as you try to remember the different coconut-sellers you’ve seen and photographed that they are sometimes on a bicycle, sometimes with a push-cart and sometimes just with a bunch of cocontus that rest on the footpath. Often times, the vendor sits in the shade of a tree and sometimes he is constantly on the move, with the sun on his head for hours at a stretch. If it is a regular location, the selling space is established mostly at a corner junction, where you would have maximum visibility from as many potential customers as possible.

4  Serving those who worship the Lord: at the Bull Temple in Bangalore

The bazaar has a place for every kind of vendor, the one who walks, the one who cycles, the one who moves with his push-cart and the one who sells from a shop. The bazaar also has a space for every kind of commodity – food, drink, shoe, bangle, utensil, anything that you want to consume in a day or possess for a life time.

5  Tender coconut for the street, water melon for the home : at K.R.market in Bangalore




I do a google search on ‘Coconut water’. I find the lyrics of Harry Belafonte’s song ‘Coconut woman’ that goes:
“The thing that's best if you're feelin' glum
Is coconut water with a little rum
It could make you very tipsy, four for five
Make you feel like a gypsy, four for five
Coco got a lotta iron, four for five
Make you strong like a lion, four for five”

6  Fixed Price: Rs 12 only for tender coconut (No extra charge for the shade of the tree)

Another link is to the Seminar Proceedings for ‘Coconut revival: new possibilities for the Tree of life’ held in Australia by the International Coconut Forum and it says that “More than 11 million farmers, mostly small holders with low income, grow the palm in 90 countries” Indonesia is the largest coconut producing country, followed by the Phillipines, with India occupying third place.

7  Café coffee day: 
a lot can happen over coffee 
vs. 
Tender coconut: 
quenching your thirst 





Coming back to the Tender coconut vendor in the bazaar – it is a question of livelihood. He doesn’t know the Caribbean song and he does not hear what the experts discuss on Coconut. He is unaware that there are emerging new markets for “functional drinks from coconut – the sports drink, the energy drink, welcome drink and well-being drink” His life goes on and so does that of the blogger who contemplates on what goes on in the bazaar and outside of it, thinking that while a lot can happen in a street bazaar, life seems to be about quenching thirst of one kind or another.

Read about :
The Golla wallah
the Garland Makers in the Bazaar
Bollywood Posters
What is Chai

Holi Bazaar

I had NOT been chasing the Holi Bazaar, but it did seem like it was walking just a few steps in front of me wherever I went. As I went from one city to another over the last three weeks, I was not to forget at any time that the festival of Holi was nearing. In Ahmedabad, walking around the Raipur Darwaja area and asking about which streets were sellers of what goods, I had been told I was just a bit early to see the Holi colours. The Holi vendors would occupy the same street where Kite sellers sat during the Uttarayan or Sankranti festival, sometimes they were the same vendors with different goods for a different season.

In Manek Chowk, the colours of Holi are not yet out everywhere, but the Pichkari's (plastic sprays for wet colours) are abundantly available.

“You need to come back three days later to see the Holi colours” I was told. I sighed. I was leaving Ahmedabad the next day. The following two days in Udaipur were spent in absorbing the City palace, the Lake palace, the Monsoon palace. Where was the time to find the Holi Bazaar there, as much as I wanted to? It was finally when I got to Delhi a few days later that Holi was just around the corner and the Sadar Bazaar had the Holi colours all over the place!!

At the entrance to the Municipal Market building at Manek Chowk. 

It was just the day before Holi and the morning started with getting to Chandni Chowk from Connaught Place. We took an autorickshaw although it was the Metro that had been advised as the travel option to take from CP. A friendly rickshaw driver had made us an enticing offer comparable in cost to the Metro. I was glad we went with him. He said “To shop for Holi, it is Sadar Bazaar you must go to, its not too far from Chandni Chowk”. He dropped us at the Bangla Sahib, the Gurudwara.

Chandni Chowk in Delhi

At Chandni Chowk, the market was just about beginning to open. It was only 8.30 in the morning and around 10am is when most shops would open. The samosa and puri stalls were already doing brisk business. A short walk later we decided to take a Cycle rickshaw and get to Sadar Bazaar right away. It was 20 rupees by the cycle rickshaw and something we hadn’t done for years!!

We got down much before we got to the Holi part of the bazaar. It was a corner that was flooded with flower sellers. There were marigolds everywhere. We were so glad we had come early. The flower markets are almost invariably two hour phenomena that wind up as the rest of the market blossoms into the day and fills the streets with its vitality. It was a corner you could spend enough time in, there was so much going on, pushcarts being wheeled away, baskets being filled and heaps of flowers being bundled into packets.

And, slowly, we went a little further into the street. Now, we saw them!! The colours were laid out as one carpet here, and another one there. The powders of red, yellow, green and purple colours in little packets that a vendor spread in front of him and at some places, large stretches of colour spread out to dry in the sun, ready for the continual and rapid purchase only 24 hours before the festival began!!

Little paper parcels were being made in deft hands that had done this from one season to another. Sometimes, it was a group of little boys shopping and sometimes, it was the elders. Everyone was here to shop for colours!

The morning of Holi – we DID NOT move from our rooms. We had been told NOT to. We had no idea how rough it could get on the streets of Delhi on the day of Holi. There would be coloured water and oil paint and water balloons being showered on friends, on family, on strangers and harmless passers-by. It was the day to stay indoors if you were wise. So, that’s what we did. But, of course, we wanted to know how it was to be playing Holi as a Delhite.

Here’s an account we heard of what happens if you are a student at JNU – Jawaharlal Nehru University, in Delhi : “You wake up and oil yourself thoroughly all over the body. You then wait. You oil yourself again, a second layer. The idea is to have so much oil over your body that it acts as a barrier to the colours - can withstand the rough holi that you will soon be a part of. You then get to the mess to eat a heavy breakfast. You eat your heavy Holi breakfast which ends with filling a bottle from the cauldron of Bhang. If you are a late riser, and get to the mess much after many others have left, you get the most potent Bhang in your bottle with the dregs at the bottom of the cauldron coming into your share of the Holi drink.

You then step out into the college corridors and into the streets of the city, equipped physically and mentally to take the onslaught of the colours of Holi that can come at you from any direction, from any number of people that may gather around you to drown you in the colours and in the joys of the festival. As the day moves on, the intoxication of the Bhang tends to turn the joyfulness into wild celebration. At 2 o’clock, you got back to the JNU mess to eat yet another heavy meal because you were ravenous with all the street exchanges and theatrical excitement of the day”.

And, why is this festival celebrated? The significance of this festival is described as “Holi is an annual spring festival - Basant Utsav celebrated in the month of Phalgun. A festival of colours, Holi is observed as a celebration for the mythological Prahlad’s escape from the pyre that his demon father, Hiranyakashipu wanted him to burn in and for the destruction of his demon sister Holika. It therefore signifies the victory of good over evil. People around the country celebrate with gulaal (dry colours) with their friends and family”

It is in North India that you see the vibrant colours of the Holi Bazaar and it is here that Holi is played in great enthusiasm – some places more than others!

Read about :
Festival of Lights
an Afternoon in Festive Dussehra