Bargains, bribes and bombs: An afternoon in Sarojini Nagar Market
10th November 2009
Simon Harding
It’s a warm Saturday afternoon and business is brisk at the market. Middle class Indian families fill its narrow lanes. Dad, in a smart striped shirt, peruses the jeans whilst Mum, in full sari and dripping with jewellery ruffles though a heap of heavily discounted shawls piled up outside a shop, the owner looking on optimistically. The older daughter tries on big bug-eyed sunglasses; a hundred pairs in a huge rack, all subtly different. Unimpressed with what’s on offer - and most likely with the concept of shopping in general - their toddling son clutches his Dad’s trousers, a grip on safety in a world of noise, commotion, feet and legs. A young couple brush past me. With pony-tailed hair, ray-ban shades, a short skirt and sparkly sandals, I doubt she’ll be eyeing the saris as she passes, sucking up an enormous milkshake through a Technicolor straw. Her boyfriend follows her. Slicked-back hair, skinny jeans and a pink playboy-branded shirt suit his causal confident swagger. This isn’t your average Delhi street market with its vegetable stalls, fruit hawkers, milks shops and food dhabas selling whatever you like as long as it’s deep fried; this is Sarojini Nagar Market and it’s where Delhi’s wealthy middle class goes to kit itself out with everything from the latest Western high street fashions to brightly coloured traditional attire. It’s crowded, it’s noisy and it’s seen everything from the slightly dubious and the blatantly corrupt, to the downright terrifying.
In India the word ‘market’ refers to anything from a collection of stalls to a number of semi-permanent and permanent shops clustered together in a small area. Indian markets are mostly a mix of the two. Pretty much every district in Delhi has its own market where the locals buy their food and household goods and pay for small services like haircuts, ironing, washing and increasingly photocopying, internet access and phone top-ups. However, some markets specialise, drawing punters in from all corners of the city: Delhi’s famous Khan Market sells high-end consumer goods to a wealthy clientele, Dilli Haat flogs regional foods and crafts, Bhogal has everything from house fittings and kitchenware to jewellery and huge sacks of flours, rice and dal for the wholesale trade spilling out onto its crumpled pavements. Lajpat Nagar and Sarojini Nahar Markets attract customers with a wide range of clothes and textiles at highly negotiable, if not unbeatable, prices.
Lining Sarojini’s narrow, but mercifully pedestrianised streets are numerous glass fronted boutiques proudly sporting Ralph Lauren, Gap, Levi’s, Van Heusen and YSL posters, to name a few. Shirts, suits, trousers and shoes are stacked up inside ready to be given the hard sell by the team of three or four well-dressed, well-gelled men leaning on the counters. But these shiny stores are outnumbered by the temporary stalls which spew out into the street from deep within Sarojini’s densely packed buildings in a riot of cotton, nylon, check, pinstripe, zips, collars and buttons. Unlike their more polished counterparts who sell at a fixed price (already discounted by 30%), haggling is a major part of their business.
I try on a checked shirt. It’s good quality, but has a button missing (someone has quickly sewn a metal popper on in its place) and some of the stitching doesn’t match. I decide to buy it, if the price is right. ‘Rs.695 (about 9 pounds)’, says the turbaned youth, the first signs of facial hair erupting from his top lip, ’Don’t think price, feel quality’, he adds. ’But the button is missing’, I retort. ‘Design!’, says the young chap, who refuses to lower his price. No sale.
Prices and quality vary wildly at Sarojini. This is because most of the market’s stock are garments which have been rejected by Western brands who outsource their production to the region (India, Bangladesh or Pakistan). If it’s slightly faulty or simply surplus to requirements it’s then released onto the Indian domestic market through small shops in markets like Sarojini, in which 90% of the shops and stalls are family owned. You may have to check zips and seams and they may not have your size, but you can be sure that the goods are almost genuine, rather than poor copies.
Whilst Sarojini neatly demonstrates the gaps and quirks in the global economy, it also has a shady internal social economic system of it’s own. Occasionally the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) sends a lorry load of police to the market to clear ‘illegal stalls‘ - mostly make-shift arrangements of tables and racks on the pavement. When the police arrive ‘illegal stallholders’ collect up their wares and whisk them inside the premises of the nearest ‘friendly’ shopkeeper (who makes a nice little earner from his benevolence). If caught by the police a stallholder faces ruin: his goods will be confiscated. Luckily for the stallholder, when this happens he can liberate his goods quickly and efficiently by paying a small ‘fee’ to the police, who make a few rupees to supplement their meagre wages and avoid a stack of paperwork. Dubious and deeply corrupt, this informal system has two winners: the better off shopkeepers and the police and one major loser: small poor stallholders, who cannot escape paying bribes to someone.
However, the few thousand rupees which change hands in bribes pale into insignificance when compared with what happened at Sarojini on 29th October 2005. At 6:05pm a white Maruti van parked in a busy corner of the packed market exploded. A gas cylinder in the van’s rear caused multiple explosions and set fire to a row of shops. 43 people died and 28 were injured.
The bomb was one of three detonated in New Delhi within one hour of each other causing a total of 61 deaths and 92 injured. The blast at Sarojini was by far the worst of the three. The ’Diwali Bombings’ (timed to happen in the pre-Diwali shopping rush) were planned and carried out by the Kashmiri separatist/Islamic extremist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, states the Delhi police.
Since the blast a shadow has hung over the market. When terror threat levels are elevated by the government, the traders and shoppers at Sarojini know that their market is a potential target. Efforts by the authorities to police the market more effectively have come to little. According to Ashok Randhawa, head of the Sarojini Nagar Market Mini Traders Association, none of the 27 CCTV cameras installed by the police are operational. The Association has hired forty private security guards to patrol the market in lieu of a consistent police presence.
Sarojini Nagar Market sheds some light on the sheer complexity of retail in this mega city. Shop keepers are reliant on the mistakes of others for their stock - be it the machinist who sews a fault collar or the Adidas executive who orders 10,000 T-shirts too many. It also has its own internal arrangements with the authorities to handle ‘illegality’ in an informal manner. But, all the time the market is stalked by those violent events and in the absence of state help, it must strike out on its own to secure its own existence. It is these dynamics which make business in India such a socio-economic labyrinth.
Despite Sarojini’s troubled and precarious nature, I managed to come away with a one-hundred rupee (GBP1.33) Ralph Lauren shirt, plucked from a pile of hundreds of different shirts on a make-shift table positioned under a tree. The stall holder, standing on top of the pile, threw whatever he could find in my size in my direction. Frantic, frenetic and with one eye out for the MCD, he was doing business on the edge, which is sometimes the only way to do it here.
mmunism with such zeal: "It's a scar on my mind," he said, adding he has gone back to his Catholic roots. "I'm unhappy without a strong belief system. For a year or two, after the collapse of Socialism here, I didn't have it. But I found my way back to the Church."