Samprati Pani is a social anthropologist working at the intersection of urban studies, the anthropology of markets, and the philosophy of process. Her PhD thesis titled ‘The Making of Weekly Bazaars of Delhi’ examined the conditions of making and unmaking, dynamism and disruption of neighbourhood bazaars in Delhi through the relationality of practices of diverse bazaar actors. She is the co-founder and editor of the blog Chiragh Dilli, which explores forms of writing the city. Her writings on the blog explore everyday modes of walking, street life, and the ordinary city.
Contact: samprati.pani@gmail.com
Areas of Research Interest
- Marketplace socialities
- Ordinary consumption
- Shop signage and design
- Urban spatial formations
- Walking as a research technique
Ongoing Research Project
Repair Work and Maintenance: Techniques, Materiality and Sociality of Urban Marketplace Infrastructures
The project is part of the research focus area ‘Economy and Knowledge’ of the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF). It looks at repair and maintenance in Delhi’s markets across three registers: First, at the level of individuals and households, it uses repair as a critical lens to extend the conceptualization of consumption from an act of using up objects to one of making things last. Second, as a practice, it looks at the activities, labour, skills, affective and bodily investments, and subjectivities involved in repair and maintenance. Finally, it extends the understanding of repair from ‘fixing the broken’ to practices of improvising objects of everyday use, including spaces such as streets and marketplaces.Arguing that repair and maintenance cannot be simply located at particular moments in economic cycles but rather are entangled with everyday life, the project is aimed at understanding how repair shapes the social infrastructure of the city.
Publications
Pani, Samprati. 2026. ‘Skilling as a Mode of Doing: Techniques and Trajectories of Street Vending in Delhi’s Weekly Bazaars’, in Crafting India’s Skill Ecology: Reproductions, Recalibrations, and Reimaginations, ed. Saikat Maitra and Sebastian Schwecke, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 163–183.
Pani, Samprati. 2025. Review of the book Taming the Oriental Bazaar: Architecture of the Market Halls of Colonial India, by Pushkar Sohoni, London and New York: Routledge, 2023, in Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, 4(1): 77–79, https://doi.org/10.3828/gncs.2025.8
‘Making the City on Foot: Walking Mobilities and Infrastructures in Delhi’, 23 July 2025, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 23, https://polarjournal.org/2025/07/23/making-the-city-on-foot-walking-mobilities-and-infrastructures-in-delhi/
‘Windows to the City’, https://chiraghdilli.com/2025/04/12/windows-to-the-city/, 12 April 2025.
‘Making Paths and Doing Bazaar: Rhythms and Techniques of Walking-as-Dwelling’, City & Society, 35 (2): 112–120, 2023.
‘Walk Economy’, https://chiraghdilli.com/2022/10/17/walk-economy/, 17 October 2022.
‘#MWSLieblingsorte: Ein unscheinbarer Teeladen in Lodi Estate’ (#MWSLieblingsorte: An inconspicuous tea shop in Lodi Estate), https://gab.hypotheses.org/11200, 31 August 2022.
2021. ‘Jamnapaar’, Motherland, special issue on the Yamuna in Delhi, 19 May 2021. https://www.motherlandmagazine.com/yamuna/jamnapaar/
2021. ‘Corona Diaries’, in Of Migration, ed. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee, Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/30/of-migration/81820/corona-diaries
2021. ‘Navigating the City: Rituals, Routines and Relationships in the Making of Delhi’s Ordinary Streets’, in Revista Astragalo, Issue 27, special issue on ‘Delhi and Its Inhabited Imaginaries: Architectures of Living’, ed. Carla Carmona.
2020. ‘Of Basti and Bazaar: Place-Making and Women’s Lives in Nizamuddin, Delhi’, in Urban Neighbourhood Formations: Boundaries, Narrations and Intimacies, ed. Hilal Alkan and Nazan Maksudyan, Routledge Series in Urbanism and the City, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 52–71.

