Anniversary issue: maximalism as a function of density

India’s markets show how multiplicity organises itself into commerce, where density and diversity make maximalism the country’s most efficient and democratic infrastructure of trade

20 Jan 2026

Shriti Das

Chaos, cacophony, colour, olfactory overload, layers upon layers of things, textures, sounds and people can feel like an assault until you realise it is also a system. People, climates, calendars, languages, beliefs, trade routes and histories overlap in India’s bazaars. Tarpaulin sags with monsoon water, shop lights burn too white, bangles stack into shimmering towers, spices sit in open sacks and shallow tins, and saris cascade into bright blocks of colour. A vendor’s call ricochets off corrugated shutters, a scooter horn pushes through the crowd, and somewhere a radio competes with a prayer bell, both swallowed by the market’s hum. As the threshold between street and shop dissolves, storefronts become billboards and countertops at once, and options are thrown at you in volumes.

Come festivities, and extra strings of LED lights are pinned to shutters, fresh posters and rate-cards are taped over older ones, temporary counters added to the sides of every street, there are more hands billing and packing, more bundles moving out in bulging bags. Our markets are crowded because they are efficient, loud because they are competitive, layered because the street must also behave like a catalogue and a warehouse. Across cities, they speak the same language of abundance, yet no two markets are identical. They are calibrated to their own clientele, religious majority, seasons and buying habits dictated by each. A jewellery shop gears up for the wedding season, a spice lane for daily replenishment, a repair bazaar for salvage. The only constant is maximalism, amidst many variables.

And sometimes, these markets feel like the city’s counter-image and antithesis. While the modern city advertises its aspirations through its glass buildings, orchestrated order and blankness, the bazaar must survive in the narrowest, messiest parts of town because it still does what the new city cannot. Aggregating trust, competitive prices, repair, credit and choice in one walkable place, at a speed and affordability that no showroom can match, their histories go back to empires, port cities and caravan routes because these places of trade outlived every redevelopment cycle that followed.

Chandni Chowk in Delhi may seem like a relic, but it works harder than most of the national capital region that were built to suit the needs of contemporary life; Photograph by Poras Chaudhary

The oldest continuously operating market in India, Purani Dilli’s Chandni Chowk, often treated as nostalgia, is actually a piece of urban infrastructure that never stopped working. It may not be as convenient or pleasing to the eye as it was when Jahanara Begum, Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal’s daughter envisioned and brought it to life with its markets divided by canals engineered to reflect moonlight. But it is one of India’s largest markets that continues to function efficiently despite its state of disrepair. In a city that measures itself against power, Chandni Chowk is one of its most enduring yardsticks. You cannot separate commerce from power, and the national capital’s most durable systems are the ones that serve it.

However, the commercial capital of India measures itself differently. Mumbai, by contrast, is many empires undone and remade through speed and efficiency. Its best selling item is its speed. It has perfected countless ways of turning time into money and Crawford Market was built for exactly that. Donated by Cowasji Jehangir in 1882, it became the first building in India to be lit by electricity, extending the working day. While the wholesale traders were relocated to the APMC Market in Navi Mumbai, the new complex can never replicate the kind of maximalism Crawford embodies. Unlike Bombay’s more overt imperial monuments, Crawford Market was built as municipal infrastructure, funded by Indian philanthropy, even as it spoke the architectural language of colonial Bombay. William Emerson gave the market a civic costume that was deliberately hybrid: Victorian Gothic bones with gabled frontages, a clock-tower and pointed arches, built in buff Kurla basalt picked out with red stone from Vasai, and organised around a skylight.

At Chor Bazaar, umpteen things, objects and curios, all gather in one place, each individual object carrying the weight of an entire world. And together they prove how many worlds can be bought and left behind; Photograph by Poras Chaudhary

If Crawford Market is the city’s public proof that productivity can be designed, then Chor Bazaar is the counter-proof that Mumbai can also monetise patience. It asks for loitering, rummaging and second glances. Watch a little longer and another logic surfaces. Objects over objects accumulate in piles. Colonial cupboards lean against theatre lights. Porcelain dogs keep company with gramophones. Film posters curl beside carved doors stained with past monsoons. Authenticity becomes difficult to verify and that difficulty is part of the attraction. The more there is, the easier it becomes to invent lineage. A shopkeeper can point to a lamp and say it came from a Parsi home in Grant Road, removed when the grandchildren moved to Dubai. The story may or may not be true. The pleasure lies partly in believing that maximalism in Chor Bazaar operates as a narrative device. With so many things gathered in one place, each individual object perhaps appears to carry the weight of an entire world. In a city driven by cinema, advertising and aspirational real estate, this makes sense. Mumbai builds and sells stories professionally. Chor Bazaar is simply one of the more candid arenas where that instinct is on display. The trade is in tangibles, but the profit often lies in suggestion.

The paradox is that this cluttered landscape allows for very precise desire. A collector knows exactly what proportion of patina feels convincing. A production designer understands how much “period” an interior can take before it becomes a costume. An interior decorator knows which single antique will steady a newly finished, contemporary home. Chor Bazaar mirrors the city’s character that is restless and opportunistic within a seemingly uncontrolled abundance, that is fast and exact.

David Sassoon, a Baghdadi trader who made his fortune in Bombay, created Sassoon Dock as the city’s first fully private wet dock; Photograph by Abhishek Dhotre

While Chor Bazaar is conceptually the antithesis of speed, Dhobi Ghat is the outlier. This open-air laundry is one of the subcontinent’s most revealing marketplaces. It joins the city’s domestic and corporate lives in endless loops of fabric. Rows of concrete wash pens hold water, soap and men who have refined their own choreography of soaking, scrubbing and beating cloth into cleanliness. Overhead, a forest of clotheslines cuts the sky into strips. Hospital sheets, hotel linens, school uniforms, sarees, office shirts, each category follows its own path through sorting, washing, drying and pressing. The numbers are staggering. Thousands of individual garments move through the system every day, each tagged, remembered and returned to the correct owner. The visual impression is maximal. Colour and pattern cross and recross. Steam thickens the air. Bundles are thrown, caught, stacked. Yet the commodity that leaves Dhobi Ghat is the opposite of excess. What the customer receives is a flat plane of order, a pile of identical white sheets, a stack of evenly pressed shirts, a crisp saree folded perfectly. Maximalism here resides in process rather than product. The labour is multiplied so that the result is simplified. Maximum City repeats its systems. Change the medium and the material, but the pattern holds, functional and efficient, each day, everyday.

Hospital sheets billow like sails, school uniforms hang in formation, sarees ripple next to office shirts. At the Dhobi Ghat in Mumbai, they assemble like an architectural installation across the clothesline; Photograph by Abhishek Dhotre

At Sassoon Docks abundance comes with a deadline. The catch arrives wet and shining, prices are decided fast, and the city’s romance with speed becomes a necessity rather than virtue. And then there are the dabbawallas, the most unglamorous miracle of all but also Mumbai’s most elegant trade route. Thousands of identical tins in motion, hand to hand, train to street, day after day. Since 1890, the city’s lunch has travelled by hand, bicycle and local train, carried by a workforce of around 5,000 dabbawalas who deliver approximately 200,000 homecooked meals to office-goers. Thousands of identical tins, an immense choreography of sorting and handovers all so that, at noon, the lid opens to perhaps the most anticipated event of the day: lunchtime.

While Mumbai compresses trade into speed and precision and its maximalism is concealed within systems, Hyderabad’s lies in plain sight. It lets you compare, edit, change your mind, circle back, and still feel like you haven’t exhausted the options. Around Charminar, Laad Bazaar, Pathergatti and Begum Bazaar, abundance is practical. With rows of glass and lacquer bangles arranged by wedding season and region, Laad Bazaar runs along one of the four main spines radiating from Charminar and has been a trading street since at least the Qutb Shahi period in the late sixteenth century, later thriving under the Nizams. Its name comes from laad, lacquer, the material used for the bangles that still define the market. What began as a corridor serving nobles and elite bridal trousseaux is now a kilometre-long strip of glass and lac bangles, pearls and wedding ware that has kept its original logic: jewellery and embellishment sold in dense, repetitive rows rather than isolated boutiques.

Laad Bazaar in Hyderabad. Its name is derived from laad, lacquer, the material used for the bangles that still define the market; Photograph by Poras Chaudhary

Jaipur shows what happens when abundance is structured by city planning. Conceived with a city-plan designed in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II, you feel its order even when you are deep inside its dense shopping lanes. Since jewellery is already a language of small differences, Jaipur’s way of selling it depends on putting those differences in public view, shop after shop, counter after counter, light after light: an accumulation that teaches you how to look. So much of what you see appears similar at first glance, gold and stones and enamel in familiar motifs, but the longer you stay the more the eye begins to separate weight from workmanship, stone from setting, the crispness of meenakari from the softness of a cheaper finish, the confidence of a hand from the nervousness of a machine, and you start doing what the market expects you to do, which is to compare, to return, to edit your own desire, to pick up the same idea in five different versions until one finally feels inevitable. The maximalism here is not a riot, it is a method, and it is powered by density, by the simple fact that a street lined with jewellers makes the buyer more discerning and the seller more accountable, because the next counter is always within walking distance and the price, the story, the craft all have to withstand the possibility of immediate comparison.

Jaipur has been conceived with a layout that is still functional and efficient. Planned in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II, the order remains perceptible even when you are deep inside its shopping lanes; Photograph by Gbruev, Dreamstime

Away from preciousness and into the everyday, Bapu Bazaar yet again finds a similar coherence with textiles, juttis, bandhanis, block prints and souvenirs. Shops yet again mirror one another, stalls repeat the same objects with slight shifts in colour, quality, finishes and the street becomes a catalogue you can physically move through, scrolling, walking, filtering and seeing. It is crowded, but the crowd is part of the mechanism. And there is a method to the madness. Because a dense market needs witnesses, it needs traffic, it needs the pressure of other buyers hovering near the same pile of goods to keep the exchange honest, to keep the seller quick, to keep the prices negotiable. They create their own order, and the order is transactional, it is the promise that whatever you are looking for, you will find a version of it, and then another version, and then another, until choice itself begins to feel like a service being provided. Across cities, the patterns are hard to miss, because these bazaars are not chaotic despite how they can feel at first contact, and they are not crowded because the city failed to modernise, they are crowded because they are still the most efficient way we have built to distribute trust, price competition, repair, credit, customisation, and sheer range, all inside a short walk. Johri Bazaar and Bapu Bazaar outlive trend cycles for the same reason Chandni Chowk does and Chor Bazaar does and Laad Bazaar does, because they allow the modern city to keep performing its glass-and-blankness elsewhere while the bazaar keeps doing the older work of making choice visible, of letting abundance become legible, and of proving, day after day, that density is not the problem, density is the solution.