How to Write a Love Letter: Pocket Manuals and Delhi’s Grammar of Desire with Kanupriya Dhingra

Found on book stalls at railway stations, bus stops, and in Delhi’s book bazaars, these contemporary, ‘cheap’ love letter writing manuals in Hindi and English reiterate the need to write love. Their text and texture resonate with the materiality of their publishing and circulation. Like any other self-help pocketbook, they present an overambitious range of quirky sample letters as a pedagogical tool for a fundamental and indispensable life skill; in this case, the simultaneously private and public act of expressing love in the language and situation of your preference. These conduct books are cautious in teaching how to write a love letter to that someone special––your brother-in-law, your next-door neighbour, your secretary, your boss, or your boss’s daughter––who reciprocates your love. The spontaneity, which according to the manuals is obvious and urgent, is often restricted, and adherence to these manuals is strongly recommended! These ephemeral manuals exist in chorus with other everyday performances of love in the city and are essential to understanding Delhi’s lovescape. They also include various repertoires of love that have survived across temporal and transnational boundaries––Perso-Urdu ghazal and shayari, the poetry of Donne and Shakespeare, or popular Bollywood songs––now available all at once, at your disposal for easy access and easy entertainment.

In this talk, I will place these manuals in a longer history of writing love in South Asia and explore how they become a repertoire of love––one that has evolved out of a hyperlocal as well as a universal cultural history of love, shaped by the region’s distinct print cultures. Yet what makes them unique is their pedagogy: love here is not merely expressed but taught, drafted and rehearsed from a template. This insistence on instruction, I argue, makes these manuals Delhi’s grammar of desire.

Dr. Kanupriya Dhingra is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at the Jindal School of Languages and Literature, Jindal Global University. She is also a Board of Directors member at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). She researches on the History of the Book and Print Cultures, with a focus on Delhi (India). She earned her doctorate under the Felix Scholarship Fund from SOAS, University of London in 2021 on her dissertation titled ‘Daryaganj’s Parallel Book History’, which she is currently revising into a monograph. Her doctoral research is based on oral interviews and rhythmanalysis conducted in Old Delhi. Supported by the SOAS Fieldwork Grant, Kanupriya interviewed more than 200 booksellers and several shauqeen book buyers of Daryaganj.