The Book Boys of Mumbai

Sonia Faleiro

A young book peddler hawks his pirated wares on the streets of Mumbai. India has laws against both child labor and copyright infringement, but both are openly flouted.

As the lights turn red at the Haji Ali traffic intersection in Mumbai, the boy slouching against the railings quickly straightens up. Yakub Sheikh is just 12 years old, but he knows he has only 45 seconds to make some money. Holding aloft his wares, he dashes toward a black BMW and in his cracking preteen voice addresses the woman inside: “ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey'?”

Mumbai once prided itself on its literary culture - libraries, journals and poetry societies flourished; foreign books, though hard to find and prohibitively expensive, were all the rage. It was into this economy of scarcity and exclusivity that, somewhere around the 1970s, the book pirates stepped in.

Initially, these literary entrepreneurs produced only thinly bound copies, their pages spilling out or missing altogether. Popular fiction sold well, as did American cookbooks and Asian volumes of dress patterns. It wasn't until the '90s that best sellers were pirated; today, they dominate the black market, selling at less than half the Indian cover price. (Don't tell E. L. James, but the woman in the BMW bought the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy for the equivalent of $10.) Eagerly anticipated books like those in the “Harry Potter” series are often available the morning of their worldwide release. As a result, the books most readily found in Mumbai these days aren't purchased in the city's established bookstores but outside, where children peddle shrink-wrapped paperbacks.

Ever since children have slept on Mumbai's streets, they have worked on them, whether as sellers of trinkets or of talismans. The city has thousands of street children, but only a chosen few get to sell books. These are children like Yakub, who lives with his family and has a place to call home, even if it is on the pavement and contrived of bamboo poles and scavenged tarp. Such children are considered high-value sellers, more reliable than those who live in gangs without any parental supervision. Because the cost of one book is many times that of a handful of trinkets, book suppliers, who are called “seths,” or bosses, value trustworthiness in their ranks above all else. Suppliers traditionally hire only boys. “Boys move fast in traffic, and they carry many more books,” explained Ganesh, a seth I spoke with in Haji Ali. Ganesh, who uses only one name, is just 19 years old and has 15 boys working under his direction.

Bosses like Ganesh pick child peddlers over adults because they're happy to earn small amounts. And they do exactly as told. Selling in traffic is also considered a starter job. After dodging speeding buses for a few years, inevitably suffering injury, child peddlers typically graduate to safer work as hawkers of fruits or temple flowers. If they're ambitious, they become seths, working a group of children as they themselves were once worked.

India has laws against child labor and against copyright infringement, but both are openly flouted. In fact, most sales of pirated books, which take place at traffic crossings and on railway platforms, occur in direct view of the police. Traffic and railway officers say it isn't part of their job description to round up child laborers or chase down seths. Ganesh is one of several seths who admitted to paying them off. “I know I'm breaking the law,” he told me. “That's what bribes are for.”

Child labor and book piracy have something else in common: In India, at least, they're socially acceptable. Children don't just work on the streets for shady suppliers; they cook and clean in middle-class homes. And while some Indian readers disdain the very idea of a pirated book, most do not. It's routine to watch Hollywood films on pirated DVDs and download American music from file-sharing Web sites. And it's spoken of as openly as if this were legal. Students even buy expensive medical or technical textbooks from street sellers. If the excuse for buying pirated books was once an economy of scarcity, the justification now is that of abundance. It is far easier to buy a pirated book than it is to find a bookstore or library.

Sonia Faleiro is the author of “Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 6, 2013, on page BR27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Book Boys of Mumbai.