WHEN BALRAM DASS FIRST SET up his pavement bookstall in Old Delhi, there were just three other dealers: 40 years on, there are 160.

They make up the Great Indian Book Bazaar, often described as the world’s biggest weekly book market. Every Sunday, from 9am to 8pm, Daryaganj, a hectically busy commercial street in the shadow of the Red Fort, is lined by literally a mile of books, mostly secondhand and in English.

If you want a copy of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (slightly scuffed) for about 20p, or Increase Your Height – Well Tried Methods for Wonderful Results (80p), or a clutch of Danielle Steels at 65p each, this is the place to come. There are tales of first editions of A Passage to India changing hands for 60p.

Mr Dass, aged 67, delves into a pile of Mills and Boons and “hot-cakes” (bestsellers) and pulls out the Woman’s Journal Home Cookery manual. With its colonial recipes for stuffed sheep’s heart, sardine sandwiches and Nell Gwynne pudding, it’s the sort of book left behind by British memsahibs when they went home to Pinner or Oxted. “Very good copy,” Mr Dass says. “150 rupees only.” That’s less than £2.

He and his son Manish have a pitch halfway along Daryaganj, the street where all the wonders of the Orient are sold, plus air-conditioning systems.

These shops open during the week, but on Sundays the shutters are pulled down and the bookstalls set up in front of them. The dealers sit crosslegged behind their stock, wads of rupee notes stuffed in their shirt pockets, cannily observing the passing crowds. If it’s raining, they shelter under plastic sheets.

For Mr Dass, the bazaar, which lures customers and dealers from all over India, is his only source of income. Like three quarters of his colleagues, he has no shop, and spends the week scouring Delhi for stock.

Some books come from private libraries; others are left on trains and buses and auctioned by the transport authorities; others still are bought from radhi-wallahs, who cycle around middle-class enclaves collecting wastepaper for recycling.

On a good Sunday, with successful haggling, Mr Dass may take £35; on a bad Sunday, perhaps as little as £10. “It is hard to predict,” he says. “Nothing has a fixed price. People are looking for value, not price.” So what has his best sale been? “ Encyclopaedia of Ports and Cities, 1928 edition,” he intones reverently. “Sold for 1,200 rupees.” At about £14, we are not talking mega-books.

The bazaar is a very different retail environment from Delhi’s main-stream outlets – the chic bookshops of Khan Market and Jor Bagh Market (twin haunts of expats), the glitzy new western-style Oxford Bookstore at Connaught Place, the city’s commercial hub, and the air-conditioned showrooms of upmarket South Delhi dealers.

Daryaganj is a more workaday affair, dotted with street food stalls, pavement cobblers and sari-clad women selling bright, homely posters urging “Smile a lot – it costs nothing” or listing “The Ten Commandments of Success”. Cycle rickshaws, hawkers with trolleys piled high with pineapple and coconut slices, and men with goats on leads weave in and out of the traffic with its bedlam of honking horns.

The book bazaar, with its inevitable pushing and shoving, adds to the congestion and has occasionally fallen foul of the Delhi authorities. A couple of years ago, the dealers were asked to move their stalls to less busy areas.

A similar plan to regulate the book bazaar in Mumbai (Bombay) has seen 50 of its 75 dealers evicted, despite protesters carrying placards demanding “Are books polluting? Are books a menace?” Happily, a public outcry worked in Daryaganj and the bureaucrats retreated.

Some customers come to browse; others have a mission. “I am looking for a book on electrical engineering for my course,” student Anuj Sharma says. “I am trying my best to find it, but so far I am not doing. They say: ‘Just look’, but it is so hard to find a particular book among so many.” In India’s exam-obsessed society, dealers keep abreast of courses at local universities and colleges and stock textbooks likely to be in demand. Hence such technical manuals as Fundamentals of Compressible Flow and Data Warehousing in the Real World.

Vandan Chopra, a young business executive, has an armful of books on advertising. “These are probably worth 10,000 rupees and I’ve got them for 250,” he beams. “It’s a fantastic place to buy books.” There’s commotion alongside a stall displaying Wales in Pictures, The Popular Potato – Best Recipes, and old copies of Hello! magazine at 20p each. A dealer and a customer are deep in debate about the condition of a 50 rupee note. Is it too torn and tatty to accept? A crowd has gathered. The debate broadens. Everyone has his two rupees’ worth. It is, in the Indian term, “a big fat fuss”.

The condition of the books is less of an issue – strangely, because this is no place for the hyper-fastidious collector. Books may be dusty, spine-damaged, loose-paged, or attacked by silverfish, ants and monsoons.

“But what does it matter?” student Venita Nair protests. “What’s in the book is more important than its condition, don’t you think?” What’s in a past-its-best copy of Enid Blyton’s Well, Really, Mr Twiddle! is the carefully inscribed signature of its young 1970s owner, Avontika Singh. Alongside her name, she has drawn a lotus flower. A quintessentially Indian touch.

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