Sandeep Agarwal was lighting a lamp before an icon of Lakshmi on Diwali night, as is customary among Marwari families, in his electrical shop at Fancy Bazaar in Guwahati when an inferno began just 200 feet away. Within minutes, Agarwal and others in the busy and congested bazaar abandoned their homes and shops for Lakshmi to watch her ferocious other, Kali, take over the tinderbox.
New Market, one of the oldest parts of the sprawling Fancy Bazaar, lit up with flames nearly as tall as four storeys, the cramped fronts of the shops spitting blue and orange fire. Then came the loud bangs – the sound of gas cylinders blowing out of kitchens. A shell landed some distance away from Agarwal’s shop, he said.
The fire, which started at 9 pm on November 12, burned for one and a half days, causing no injury to human life but destroying tonnes of inventory of silk, metal utensils, hardware and such. The wood-based structures caught the flames and the corrugated iron roofs fanned them. On either side of New Market, the concrete buildings of Radha Market and Maruti Hotel acted as fire walls, containing the flames from spreading beyond.
“It isn’t just the loss of property that we have to worry about,” said Raj Dewan, one of three sons who ran Balek Ram Dewan and Sons, selling tea, mekhla chadars (a traditional Assamese dress) and electrical goods. "Our employees who work in the shops rely on us for feeding their families."
Historic marketplaces
Like many other historic marketplaces in India – Chandni Chowk in Delhi, Baraabazaar in Kolkata, Crawford Market in Mumbai – Fancy Bazaar, too, is a deathtrap of loose cables, overrun with encroachments and defaced by hoardings. The lack of municipal indulgences such as streetlights, bins and sanitation make them unsightly by day and invisible by night, except for the illumination by shop lights.
They are not unimportant places, though.
Fancy Bazaar, Paan Bazaar and Paltan Bazaar, located close to the banks of the Brahmaputra river in Guwahati, Assam, form the core of the old city. They are the most important wholesale distribution and retail hubs of the North East, and people migrate to it from around the region in search of livelihoods.
New Market, a part of Fancy Bazaar, is, or was, a warren of shops enclosed in a series of 27 traditional Assam houses built around the time of Independence. Those houses were split up into about 56 business establishments owned by eight landlords. Fewer than five were owner-occupied shops, while the rest were taken up by tenants. There were also five residential properties as these houses were originally built as residential-commercial properties.
Today, with everything burnt down, New Market, that place where mekhlas and lizzy bizzy fabric were sold from decades-old stores, is left only in notion. The affected area, flattened and blackened with soot, looks shrunk, though a shopowner claims it was altogether a bigha of land.
“It was a terrible sight,” said Dilip Sarawgi, a home and godown owner who lived on the first floor of the family-run Shyam Metal Store in New Market, along with his brother’s family. “This place meant a lot to me. I was born here. This is where I have lived for 60 years. We have lost everything. This was our only shop and the only godown, too.”
Many businessmen eyed the wreckage as the inferno was brought under control by hundreds of fire-fighters working relentlessly for two days. They stood as onlookers, shocked at the loss but alert in the hope of recovering something.
Some owners of neighbouring shops, younger men, hung around gossiping about a shopowner and his employees sweating over the hot rubble, looking for a locker which they eventually recovered. “You know Marwaris don’t put their cash away on Diwali night,” said one of them dressed smartly in a pink full-sleeved shirt. “They keep the earnings at home on the night of Lakshmi puja.”
Lamenting a tragedy
It was their grandfathers who had come from West Bengal to set up these shops as young hardy migrants around the time of Independence and who taught them to be tenacious. Indeed, in less than a week since the fire – with the approval of the Deputy Commissioner’s office – some businessmen have returned with new wares as the wreckage is cleared to set up temporary structures.
At a more picturesque time when the shops in New Market were new, they sold only Assam’s exquisite silks and teas. The shops then were frequented by wealthy customers, mostly women, who did not wish to rub shoulders with the crowds in Fancy Bazaar.
“Fancy Bazaar was always crowded, over-spilling garbage and tangled wires,” said one thirtysomething Assamese shopper, a resident of Guwahati. “It was the one place where the lingua franca was Hindi in the midst of overwhelming Assamese nationalism.”
Sharmishtha Borah, from the Deputy Commissioner’s office, who has been supervising the clean-up, said, “It is a shame that this has happened. Everyone in Guwahati came here to buy mekhla chadars. It is a tragedy.”
Traditional architecture
Borah says that this is not the first fire of this kind in the area. The wooden structures are historically important, but they need renovation. Uzan Bazaar, another market that consisted of wooden structures, burned to the ground in a similar fire in 2013. The oldest marketplace to come up by the banks of the Brahmaputra in the 1800s, it originally sold only fish but later transitioned to selling everything from stationery goods to electricals.
Traditional Assam-style houses are built using local wood that can burn easily and are found in both rural and urban areas across the northeastern states of India. They were developed indigenously to cope with earthquakes in this seismologically active region.
The original designers of these houses were not blind to their vulnerability to fire. A typical Assam house has an open space or verandah that separates the kitchen from the rest of the house to prevent fire accidents. They are also not meant to share walls with adjacent buildings to prevent fire from spreading, a rule that is rarely ever observed in the congested market area.
“Remodelling of the market and the old structures is the need of the hour,” said Anurag Singh, the Vice Chairman of Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority. “If the government takes the initiative, we will fully support it. It requires a master plan and it must be a joint effort.”
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New Market, one of the oldest parts of the sprawling Fancy Bazaar, lit up with flames nearly as tall as four storeys, the cramped fronts of the shops spitting blue and orange fire. Then came the loud bangs – the sound of gas cylinders blowing out of kitchens. A shell landed some distance away from Agarwal’s shop, he said.
The fire, which started at 9 pm on November 12, burned for one and a half days, causing no injury to human life but destroying tonnes of inventory of silk, metal utensils, hardware and such. The wood-based structures caught the flames and the corrugated iron roofs fanned them. On either side of New Market, the concrete buildings of Radha Market and Maruti Hotel acted as fire walls, containing the flames from spreading beyond.
“It isn’t just the loss of property that we have to worry about,” said Raj Dewan, one of three sons who ran Balek Ram Dewan and Sons, selling tea, mekhla chadars (a traditional Assamese dress) and electrical goods. "Our employees who work in the shops rely on us for feeding their families."
Historic marketplaces
Like many other historic marketplaces in India – Chandni Chowk in Delhi, Baraabazaar in Kolkata, Crawford Market in Mumbai – Fancy Bazaar, too, is a deathtrap of loose cables, overrun with encroachments and defaced by hoardings. The lack of municipal indulgences such as streetlights, bins and sanitation make them unsightly by day and invisible by night, except for the illumination by shop lights.
They are not unimportant places, though.
Fancy Bazaar, Paan Bazaar and Paltan Bazaar, located close to the banks of the Brahmaputra river in Guwahati, Assam, form the core of the old city. They are the most important wholesale distribution and retail hubs of the North East, and people migrate to it from around the region in search of livelihoods.
New Market, a part of Fancy Bazaar, is, or was, a warren of shops enclosed in a series of 27 traditional Assam houses built around the time of Independence. Those houses were split up into about 56 business establishments owned by eight landlords. Fewer than five were owner-occupied shops, while the rest were taken up by tenants. There were also five residential properties as these houses were originally built as residential-commercial properties.
Today, with everything burnt down, New Market, that place where mekhlas and lizzy bizzy fabric were sold from decades-old stores, is left only in notion. The affected area, flattened and blackened with soot, looks shrunk, though a shopowner claims it was altogether a bigha of land.
“It was a terrible sight,” said Dilip Sarawgi, a home and godown owner who lived on the first floor of the family-run Shyam Metal Store in New Market, along with his brother’s family. “This place meant a lot to me. I was born here. This is where I have lived for 60 years. We have lost everything. This was our only shop and the only godown, too.”
Many businessmen eyed the wreckage as the inferno was brought under control by hundreds of fire-fighters working relentlessly for two days. They stood as onlookers, shocked at the loss but alert in the hope of recovering something.
Some owners of neighbouring shops, younger men, hung around gossiping about a shopowner and his employees sweating over the hot rubble, looking for a locker which they eventually recovered. “You know Marwaris don’t put their cash away on Diwali night,” said one of them dressed smartly in a pink full-sleeved shirt. “They keep the earnings at home on the night of Lakshmi puja.”
Lamenting a tragedy
It was their grandfathers who had come from West Bengal to set up these shops as young hardy migrants around the time of Independence and who taught them to be tenacious. Indeed, in less than a week since the fire – with the approval of the Deputy Commissioner’s office – some businessmen have returned with new wares as the wreckage is cleared to set up temporary structures.
At a more picturesque time when the shops in New Market were new, they sold only Assam’s exquisite silks and teas. The shops then were frequented by wealthy customers, mostly women, who did not wish to rub shoulders with the crowds in Fancy Bazaar.
“Fancy Bazaar was always crowded, over-spilling garbage and tangled wires,” said one thirtysomething Assamese shopper, a resident of Guwahati. “It was the one place where the lingua franca was Hindi in the midst of overwhelming Assamese nationalism.”
Sharmishtha Borah, from the Deputy Commissioner’s office, who has been supervising the clean-up, said, “It is a shame that this has happened. Everyone in Guwahati came here to buy mekhla chadars. It is a tragedy.”
Traditional architecture
Borah says that this is not the first fire of this kind in the area. The wooden structures are historically important, but they need renovation. Uzan Bazaar, another market that consisted of wooden structures, burned to the ground in a similar fire in 2013. The oldest marketplace to come up by the banks of the Brahmaputra in the 1800s, it originally sold only fish but later transitioned to selling everything from stationery goods to electricals.
Traditional Assam-style houses are built using local wood that can burn easily and are found in both rural and urban areas across the northeastern states of India. They were developed indigenously to cope with earthquakes in this seismologically active region.
The original designers of these houses were not blind to their vulnerability to fire. A typical Assam house has an open space or verandah that separates the kitchen from the rest of the house to prevent fire accidents. They are also not meant to share walls with adjacent buildings to prevent fire from spreading, a rule that is rarely ever observed in the congested market area.
“Remodelling of the market and the old structures is the need of the hour,” said Anurag Singh, the Vice Chairman of Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority. “If the government takes the initiative, we will fully support it. It requires a master plan and it must be a joint effort.”
