Boi Mela runs for twelve days from late January. It is not a rights fair and there is almost no trade business done at it. It is a retail fair for the general public, and the footfall runs to over two million people, which makes it the largest of its kind anywhere.
It began in 1976 on the Maidan, moved when the courts ruled the Maidan could not host it, and now sits on the Central Park ground in Salt Lake. Roughly a thousand stalls, a guest country each year, and a gate arch built as a replica of some famous building, which changes annually and is photographed by everybody.
What it is instead
It is the year's largest social event that is not a religious festival. People go in groups, walk for four hours, buy three paperbacks and eat a great deal of fish fry from the Bengal stall. Little Magazine Pavilion, where a few hundred tiny literary magazines sell hand-stapled issues, is where the actual literary culture is, and it is at the back.
The books are cheap and mostly Bengali. Publishing in the language is unusually decentralised: hundreds of small houses, thin margins, print runs of a few hundred, and a readership that will still buy poetry at scale, which almost no other market anywhere does.
College Street is the trade the rest of the year. Boi Mela is the twelve days when the trade comes out onto a field and the whole city walks past it.
“You do not go to buy a book. You go to be seen having bought one.”
That is a joke made in Kolkata about Kolkata, and it is affectionate, and it is also somewhat true, and the two million people go anyway.
