There are many ways in which you could choose to approach Neha Dixit’s first book, The Many Lives of Syeda X: The story of an unknown Indian. First, it is obviously the story of Syeda, the X in her name marking her as an Everywoman migrant, one of 35,000 who stream into Delhi everyday looking for work.
Syeda is also Muslim, and while her preoccupation is survival, she lives in an India where religious identity has, post the 1990s, become increasingly important.
Or you could look at this book, based on 10 years of research and work, as the story of the invisible economy of home-based work, the second-largest sector that employs women, after agriculture. Many Lives peels back the precarity of the 82% of working women in the informal sector being paid ridiculous lows amounts of money— ₹1 a piece for stuffing soft toys with fibre—which will pay that little extra that enables the purchase of a bit of milk or some vegetable other than potatoes.
But whichever way you slice it, Many Lives is an important book that looks at the intersection of class, religion and gender with empathy and a keen eye for research and detail.
I spoke to author Neha Dixit.
I wanted to ask about the premise of your book, which is to visualize not just India’s urban poor, but the life of your protagonist, Syeda X, a poor migrant Muslim woman. What made you want to tell her story?
After meeting a lot of working class women in Delhi in various industrial areas, I decided to write about Syeda because her life in the last 30 years in Delhi as a migrant working class woman is to me the story of what has happened in India in the last 30 years. It was not just urban poverty, internal displacement or migration, but that these displacements happened because of rising communalism and caste violence and how it had an impact on someone like Syeda, a weaver from Banaras who had to leave her skilled work because her house was burned down in the riots. She had to come to Delhi to do 50 odd jobs in 30 years.
To me the story was very important because it spoke to me about various people that build civilisations, build a national capital and build a country, and everything that the country depends on, and still are not acknowledged
Why X? Syeda is a very specific name. So why X?
X because it could also be many other women who we meet and whose labour is always invisibilized always short-changed, always unpaid. And we, as a society, are conditioned to ignore the work that goes in keeping this society and system functional, and in not acknowledging the people who do this work.
The publication of this book–and this is obviously not something that you would have known in advance—coincides with a very unusual moment in terms of public anger over the rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata. In Kochi, you have the Justice Hema Committee report. So, there is a spotlight on the exploitation, and particularly the widespread sexual exploitation of women. Can you comment on this coincidence?
The very fact that we are back to these conversations is good. We’ve been having these conversations in public every year. But the problem remains because there is the lack of consistent will to address sexual violence at every level. When it’s someone like a home-based worker who’s working in different workplaces or from home and dealing with many people, when it comes to sexual violence, there is actually no mechanism for her to address it without having to think of survival first, and bringing food on the table.
Whether it is Kolkata or the Malayalam film industry, it is only when women come out in public spaces and speak in the open that some kind of superficial action is taken to temporarily address it. But things are not done in a systemic manner. There are only band aids, which is why it keeps coming up without valuing and protecting women in public spaces, without stopping impunity to people who are accused. If you do not address the system, it will keep coming up.
If I’m not mistaken, your own career as a freelance journalist began with the 2012 gang rape in Delhi.
The 2012 rape movement was very helpful for a lot of us who were journalists at that point. Before that, at least in my experience, I realized that in newsrooms, each time you would talk about sexual violence, there was a lot of dismissiveness. After 2012, it became possible to write about sexual violence, even though most of the time newsroom coverage was very superficial because they only wanted to report about that event and not what happened before or after.
For me, some of the stories that I started doing because newsrooms were also open to stories on sexual violence stories were, for example, the Muzaffarnagar riots where women faced sexual violence and even went to court to fight it, but a few months later had to go back and work as farm workers on the same farms of the accused.
So for me, the story was not just sexual violence but the story of people as a whole, where sexual violence is one part because women who want to work in public spaces are dealing with sexual violence, and at the same time so many other problems like getting timely payments or getting fair wages. Then they have to deal with circumstances at home; with the perennial and absolute need to bring food to the table.
Home-based women doing piecemeal work actually prop up the economy through their labour—making gajak or cutting the threads of jeans, or making raakhis. It was shocking to learn how poorly this labour is paid: ₹80 for preparing 144 brake wires for bicycles, for example. How difficult was it for you to research this?
It was not actually difficult to find out what jobs they were doing and what they were paid for it because India is the wholesale market for many things that are produced not only in the domestic markets but also in the international markets. The nature of this work is so seasonal, according to the calendar, according to the news cycle—if elections are coming, for instance.
Following the story for the last 10 years was complicated because initially there were questions of trust. Why would anyone in a situation like Syeda where she’s working 16 hours a day trust me to tell her story? It took time for the trust to build and for her to open up.
As a feminist writer how do you see your role in society?
My role is to say that there is a gender lens to anything that you are writing about. Whether it’s aviation, defence or finance, you can’t just talk about one set of people. You have to talk to people from various genders. I see my role as normalizing that.
I see my role as saying that when you come up with the aviation budget, then that also applies to various genders, and it’s not in some neutral space. Everything applies to different people of different genders in different ways, and that needs to be taken into account, whether it’s a Smart City project, whether it’s a Digital India project, whether it’s anything that we see.
What next?
I will try my best to go back to reporting, which I had stopped in the last two or three years. That’s my priority to go back on the ground and start reporting anew.
[The Many Lives of Syeda X: The story of an unknown Indian by Neha Dixit, Juggernaut, Rs799]
The following article is an excerpt from this week’s HT Mind the Gap. Subscribe here.
