For the past four years, the best alternative bookstore in Delhi has crouched in an awkward, elongated space in Hauz Khas Village, a warren of narrow pedestrian lanes that dates back to the thirteenth century and has become one of the capital’s bohemian—and increasingly gentrified—enclaves. Parks, medieval monuments, and a reservoir surround the village, which has a single entrance at the end of an access road where cars must park and auto rickshaws drop their passengers. Yodakin, the bookstore, occupies a ground-floor space in a building close to this entrance, which insures decent foot traffic.
The shop’s front door is up a few steps from the lane, with a tiny landing that Arpita Das, Yodakin’s owner, optimistically calls a veranda. The set-up is inconvenient, but the décor is pleasant and almost airy. The books, all from small presses, sit neatly grouped by publisher on well-lit shelving made of reddish wood, alongside pretty posters of cover illustrations. When Yodakin hosts events, which deal with poetry, art, politics, and sexuality, the audience quickly overspills the minute space and backs into the hall, from where it is impossible to see (or properly hear) anything. Others dangle from the mezzanine, where Das has her work area, and where she lets students who visit the shop but have no money to spend hang around and read.
Das is in her late thirties, a warm, direct woman with an air of authority and also a refreshing irreverence that surfaces quickly in conversation. When she opened Yodakin, in 2009, it was not out of any passion for retail but rather a desire to experiment with vertical integration. Her publishing company, Yoda Press, was seven years old, and she was having trouble placing its books—an eclectic range of essays, mostly in elegantly designed paperback editions—in Delhi’s established bookstores. Other alternative presses, representing feminists, outsider-art specialists, translators of vernacular literature, and so on, faced the same problem, and Das suggested they join her in stocking a dedicated store.
“I wanted to see for myself if it was really pointless to run an independent press, in market terms,” Das told me, over Skype. “I realized it was not ridiculous. People were really looking for these books.”
Das was not making money, exactly. She had sunk her own funds into designing and building the store’s interior. She was making sales, but the rent was creeping up, too. Meanwhile, the store—the only one of its kind in Delhi—quickly garnered a following among the city’s growing arts, media, and activist communities: they appreciated it as much for its sheer existence as for the books it carried and its value as a physical meeting point. “I’ve been taken by surprise how much Yodakin has come to mean to people who not just visit but inhabit the city—even people who have never come to the store,” Das said. “It stands for something that reassures them.”
Reassurance is a scarce symbolic commodity in Delhi. The metropolis has made a warp-speed transformation from a bureaucratic seat, shunned by India’s artistic and financial élites, into something vast, vibrant, and—in some good ways and some very bad—out of control. Since India’s economic reforms in the early nineteen-nineties, rampant real-estate development and speculation has driven prices sky-high in the city’s center and its desirable southern districts. Enormous satellite cities have sprung up from fields and industrial zones, with forests of apartment blocks—from the deluxe to the instantly decrepit—and the offices of technology firms. The influx of service workers and a vast number of unskilled laborers to build, cook, clean, drive, and serve everyone else has swelled the National Capital Region, as the resulting megalopolis is called, to an estimated twenty-two million inhabitants. Twenty years ago, people came to Delhi to study or to work in government. Now they come to hustle.
The result is a city with a dynamic cultural and creative scene—its art galleries, for example, now rival those of Mumbai—but also with an air of aggression, pollution, and anxiety. Sexual violence, in particular, is epidemic: the city is thought to have India’s highest rates of rape and molestation (though it’s difficult to prove, since many incidents are not reported). That reputation was underscored last December, when a young woman was gang-raped and tortured on a private bus and later died from her injuries. The crime caused global indignation, national anguish, and, in Delhi, a public outcry and several days of demonstrations that turned destructive—an uncustomary response for a city that usually seems numb to sexual violence. Delhi has become cosmopolitan, but the atmosphere remains patriarchal, and not particularly hospitable to critical discussions of power, gender, and sexuality.
Even as the city’s queer, feminist, and other oppositional cultures have grown in heft and confidence, they face pressure to keep themselves scattered and small. India excels at manufactured outrage with violent overtones; self-appointed invigilators, often backed by local politicians, are on constant patrol. Often these volunteer censors come from the Hindu right wing, with its militias; sometimes they are Muslim clerics. Harassment is rife—in person, through police complaints, and on the Internet. “The city is constantly restraining you,” Das said. “It’s not a city given to experimentation; it’s given to regimentation. It’s an unsafe city. This neighborhood, and Yodakin, is a safe space, not just to sit and read, but also to experiment.”
At Yodakin, Das has hosted events that range from alternative to, by Indian standards, transgressive. “We held a celebration of Husain’s work without being vandalized,” she said, referring to M. F. Husain, the contemporary artist, who spent his final years away from India after Hindu chauvinists protested his paintings that depicted goddesses in the nude. “We’ve had the Pleasure Project, which talks about how sexual fantasy makes sex safer, and where we’ve had people’s personal sexual fantasies being read out. For many months we hosted a group of young queer college students—our loft was that safe space for them. We’ve had a discussion of Palestinian poetry that went into Kashmir azadi writing”—the work of authors who support Kashmir’s independence from India. “I don’t think there are too many places in the city where we could have these discussions.”
In January, I attended an evening discussion on masculinity and sexual violence at a jam-packed Yodakin, moderated by Rahul Roy, whose illustrated “A Little Book on Men” is published by Yoda Press. It was exactly one month after the rape of the woman on the bus, and two and a half weeks after her death. The city was still seething. The suspects were in prison; editorials called for national soul-searching; a commission, led by a retired Supreme Court Justice, was working on proposed changes to the laws against rape. Protesters and television talking heads called for castration of rapists or the death penalty. Politicians kept a low profile, surfacing occasionally to make retrograde comments about women’s outfits or their need to get home before dark. Spin-off controversies had erupted, one to do with a Punjabi rap star named Yo Yo Honey Singh, whose songs included “Main Hoon Balatkari” (“I Am a Rapist”) and the earlier “Choot” (“Cunt”). Meanwhile, the harrowing stream of daily news items carried on: gang rapes; child rapes; rapes of middle-class women and domestic workers; rapes of men; rapes with murder; rapes with mutilation; rapes on auto rickshaws, at construction sites, in private homes.
The gathering was the Yodakin crowd’s first chance to “think together in a safe space,” as Karuna Nundy, a progressive lawyer who argues before India’s Supreme Court, put it. Poets read cathartic new poems. Activists drew attention to under-reported sexual violence in rural Haryana, outside Delhi. People in the audience—standing and seated every which way on cushions, small stools, and the floor—shared stories of workplace harassment. And people wrestled with the bus rape and the response to it. Many factors contributing to Delhi’s sexual violence were all too well-known, and needed little restating: the myriad disincentives to report rape, from humiliation at police stations and hospitals to the stigma affecting the families of victims; the corrupt police; the city’s sprawl and empty spaces; the selective abortion of female fetuses, now producing a surplus of adolescent males; the especially entrenched patriarchal mores of the regions where most migrant laborers came from; the derisory attention paid to street harassment and groping, still known in India by the euphemism “eve-teasing.”
All this was a given. What was new was the response, which seemed ugly yet contained an unexpected hope. In her anonymity, the woman on the bus had proven to be a universal figure. “We did not know who she was,” said Nivedita Menon, a feminist writer. “No one knew who she was. She was a woman on a bus at 9:30 P.M.” As details of the woman’s circumstances had emerged, they had not particularized her, but rather increased her everywoman appeal: she had been urban, yet from a migrant rural family; a student, but in a humble paramedical field—a Delhi striver, not quite arrived.
But the story of her rape and its aftermath also spread unusually far across the city. It stretched from the Select Citywalk mall, in the south, where the woman and a friend had watched a movie, to her family’s working-class home in Dwarka, in the west. It included the Munirka bus stop, where they got on the bus, and Safdarjung Hospital, where she was treated, both of them quite close to Hauz Khas. It also took in the monumental landscape of Delhi’s administrative center, where demonstrators had gathered outside the President’s residence and at the iconic India Gate. These places had become sites of protest and commemoration, throwing up an alternative map of Delhi that, for a moment, transcended the city’s stifling class and neighborhood boundaries.
This felt like an opening, an opportunity. “What connected us was a collective fury,” said Deepak Mehta, a sociologist. As someone in the audience pointed out, it had mobilized even recalcitrant organizations like the notoriously stodgy resident welfare associations that govern Delhi’s semi-gated residential “colonies.” Now, Mehta said, the task at hand was to “think about the city in progressive ways. What does it mean to inhabit this city? What does it mean to inhabit this incredible culture of cruelty and impunity?” The answer, at that moment, was unclear, but the way the protests and political arguments had devolved into arguments between men offered a clue as to where to begin, one not lost on the men in the room. “The only way it can become a feminist issue is when some men take actual position against the patriarchy in those settings,” Roy said. “That is something we need to bang our head against.”
A few weeks ago, Yodakin’s landlord informed Das that he was doubling her rent, forcing her into a sudden and unwelcome recalculation of the store’s costs, commercial prospects, and all the intangible value it has generated—value that is unquantifiable and doesn’t keep the lights on or pay the staff. Hauz Khas Village is going through what happens to all hip neighborhoods around the world, only at an accelerated pace. Restaurants and bars are moving in; artists and offbeat shops are being pushed out.
For a few days, Das said, she considered closing Yodakin altogether. Any move, even to a cheaper space, would be costly. “But it would be a letdown to completely shut it down,” she said—to the community and to herself. She decided to take a new space in Hauz Khas Village. It will be even smaller, and a good ten-minute walk from the entrance. Foot traffic, for now, is minimal. “But I’m hoping that my regulars will find their way,” Das said. Some of them have launched a crowdfunding campaign to support the move. Das is anxious about the transition but determined. “It will be difficult to do retail after Yodakin,” she said. “I want to stick around a little longer. I’m not yet done with all the experimentation.”
Siddhartha Mitter is a freelance journalist and consultant in New York City. He is an arts correspondent for the Boston Globe and the former culture reporter for WNYC public radio.
Photograph by Sanjit Das/Bloomberg/Getty.
from: New Yorker
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