Library Lives: Everyday Reading and Cultural Change in Delhi

From nineteenth-century urban institutions to post-1951metropolitan systems and contemporary community-led andinformal study spaces, Delhi’s library landscape offers a distinctivelens onto everyday reading as a practice shaped by urbanization,migration, pedagogy, and politics. The paper addresses fourquestions: how Delhi’s libraries evolved from elite and associationalcollections to postcolonial public systems; how institutional,community, specialized, and informal spaces facilitate socialinteraction and everyday literary engagement; how libraries figure ascontested civic sites in moments of socio-political crisis; and howhabitual reading practices reflect and reshape cultural change in amultilingual, migrant-heavy metropolis. By synthesizing historicalaccounts, policy reports, institutional surveys, and cultural analyses, Iargue that public and para-public libraries in Delhi are dynamicinfrastructures of access, sociality, and meaning-making, central todemocratizing knowledge and sustaining dialogic urban publics