The Walled City encyclopaedia.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Batasha is an excessively sugary sweet, often offered in temples. Old Delhi has a street called Gali Batashe Wali, named for the many shops that would sell batashe. The Walled City has another street with a phonetically similar name. Curiously, nobody in Gali Batashan is able to explain what “Batashan” means. Nor is anyone willing to connect the word even remotely to the excessively sweet batasha.

Situated in the heart of Chawri Bazar, the street begins as any narrow, Purani Dilli street, but soon reveals itself to be long and twisting, winding through a maze of corners, enclosed spaces, and sudden dead ends. It is full of beautiful gateways; one gateway is completely derelict (see left photo). Some stretches are utterly silent; a few feel eerie, with strange birds chirping aggressively.

Yet parts of the street are densely commercial, crammed with shops and businesses. In fact, Gali Batashan ought to have been named Gali Kagaz Wali, because nearly every establishment here deals in kagaz, or paper. One shop (see right photo) specialises in envelopes of types “shagun, laminated, plastic, polynet, jali, X-ray.” Another manufactures “exercise notebooks, registers, files, practical copies, cash ledgers.”

This afternoon, in a small workshop in Gali Batashan, a solitary figure is silently operating a noisy machine, cutting large paper sheets into smaller sizes. In the workshop opposite, a solitary figure is sound asleep.

In fact, this entire stretch of Chawri Bazar, including Gali Batashan and its sister streets, revolves around paper. But Gali Batashan is clearly the core of the area’s paper trade. One stately building is simply called Kagaz Bhawan. It houses the office of the Paper Merchant’s Association, Delhi. At the moment, the double-storeyed structure is completely silent and impeccably clean; not a scrap of paper anywhere. A man attending the office inside remarks that the association represents paper merchants across Delhi and has 1,500 members.

On the man’s desk lies the association’s “member’s directory” marked 2023, the most recent year in which it was printed. During the conversation, he concedes that computers delivered the first real blow to the world of paperwork. Which is why it feels ironic that the courtyard of the association building displays a banner advertising a computer coaching center—“learn computer accounting in 1.5 months and get a job.”

One long-ago afternoon, a memorable, almost surreal, scene unfolded in Gali Batashan. An impeccably dressed elderly man in a starched kurta, dhoti, and turban stood outside a paper shop. He took a piece of paper from his kurta pocket, slowly tore it to shreds, and flung the pieces in front of him, himself standing still. The pieces of kagaz fluttered briefly in the air, before sinking to the ground.