From Rawalpindi’s Fading Urdu Bazaar to Kathmandu’s Experimental Book Launches, South Asian Literary Life Keeps Reframing Tradition

Pakistan: a bazaar losing its books

A report published by Dawn on August 3, 2026, has brought new attention to the changing identity of Rawalpindi’s historic Urdu Bazaar, once a familiar stop for families buying schoolbooks and children’s magazines before the academic year. In a reflection on the report, editor-at-large Daman Khalid recalls the excitement of visiting the market in childhood, when its stalls offered illustrated storybooks, serialized adventures, and periodicals such as Umru Ayyar’s series, Taleem o Tarbiat, and Bacho Ka Bagh. That ritual, Khalid notes, now belongs to the past.

According to Dawn’s reporting, many of the bazaar’s book and printing shops have been replaced by bridal and decoration outlets. The change matters not only as a local story of urban commerce, but also as a sign of how literary culture can lose ground when the retail spaces that sustain it disappear. What was once a destination for readers and printers has become a very different market, and with that shift comes the fading of a shared reading culture that was once woven into family routines.

Khalid places the bazaar in a wider historical landscape. Rawalpindi, he notes, sits only an hour from Taxila, long associated with Gandhara civilization, and it also occupied an important place on Silk Road routes during the Ottoman and Mughal periods. Caravans passing through the city would have carried merchants, pilgrims, traders, and scribes from different linguistic and cultural worlds. In that sense, the bazaar’s literary history is inseparable from a much older history of movement and exchange.

That history is also embodied in nearby caravanserais such as Rawat Fort, which still stands outside Rawalpindi. Built in the 15th century by the emperor of the Delhi Sultanate as an inn for travellers and merchants, and linked in some historical records to Sultan Masud, the son of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Rawat offers a material reminder that literary circulation depends on infrastructure. Before books entered libraries, Khalid argues, they passed through places built for rest, encounter, and exchange. Roads, inns, and marketplaces made translation and transmission possible long before modern publishing institutions existed.

For Khalid, the loss of old editions of texts such as Mawlana Rumi’s Masnavi, Daastan e Amir Hamza, and The Arabian Nights is more than nostalgia. It signals the disappearance of a world in which stories and languages travelled together. The changing face of Urdu Bazaar, then, is not only a story about retail turnover. It is also about what happens when the physical settings that once enabled reading, translation, and literary memory begin to vanish.

Nepal: launches that make the book event itself part of the story

If Rawalpindi’s story is one of disappearance, Kathmandu’s is one of literary performance and collective making. Editor-at-large Alfa M. Shakya reports on two launches held one day apart in June, each showing a different way books can come into the world.

The first was Prabal B. Shah’s self-published memoir Of Ink & Breath, launched on June 20. Emerging from Shah’s MFA thesis at Kathmandu University School of Arts, the book links fatherhood with his screen-printing practice. Its production was supported by crowdfunding, and the launch reflected that collaborative spirit: friends and current Kathmandu University students helped with logistics and management, underscoring the social labour behind an independent publication.

The event was structured as more than a conventional book launch. A panel on parenthood featured artists who are also parents, including Rishi Amatya, Kanchan Burathoki, and Shah’s wife Manju Khadka, who appeared alongside the couple’s one-year-old son. The launch also included a DJ session, a mini curated exhibition, and a live screen-printing demonstration, turning the occasion into a hybrid of literary event, art show, and shared workshop. For Shakya, the experience of trying screen printing firsthand reinforced the book’s central link between creative process and lived life.

The next day, a very different gathering drew a packed audience at the Nepal Tourism Board for the launch of Professor Arun Gupto’s Cracks in the Wind, published by Rupa Publication. The memoir, written in the form of an autobiographical novel, is Gupto’s first creative work. Its audience included students, colleagues, and well-wishers from the academic world, and the atmosphere was so full that some attendees sat on the staircase.

What gave the launch its particular energy was the conversation between Gupto and Sanjeev Uprety, both long-time friends and professors of English. Their exchange, as Shakya describes it, felt intimate and familiar, almost like listening in on a Sunday afternoon conversation at home. Gupto spoke of a shared habit he and Uprety call their “chart obsession,” using charts to make sense of almost anything, and he explained how academic theories had helped him shape people from his life into fictional characters. The audience responded with laughter when he remarked, “The people in my life interest me once I am able to fictionalize them.”

Taken together, the reports from Pakistan and Nepal show how literary life in South Asia is being reshaped from both ends: by the erosion of older book markets and by the rise of events that blur the line between reading, performance, and community. In one city, the concern is what is being lost from the bookshop landscape. In another, it is how a launch can become a collaborative work of art in its own right.