One woman, a migrant living in Delhi, worked nearly fifty jobs over three decades and never managed to earn the minimum wage. She carries the burden of being Muslim, poor, and female — identities that place her at the lowest strata of India’s social order. But beyond this structural marginalisation, she also absorbs the shock of almost every major political decision and agitation that has shaped India’s political history.
Her precarity began early, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when handloom weavers in Banaras lost their livelihoods to mechanisation, and soon after, with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. It continued through the constant shutdown of small factories that were ill-equipped for safety in the country’s capital, the sudden rupture of demonetisation in 2016, and culminated in the whims of COVID-19. At every turn, she paid the price of decisions made by those far above and away from her.
If this woman sounds fictional, she is not. She is as real as the skin, sinew, and exhaustion she carries. It is her story and her voice, rendered with care and placed at the forefront in the book ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’ by journalist and author Neha Dixit, who won the Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman award in the category ‘Best Debut’. The award included a cash prize of Rs 50,000, a citation and a trophy.
Meeting Syeda
A journalist for nearly two decades, Neha says she chanced upon Syeda. “In 2012, there were many opportunities to write about gender-based violence in the media. I realised then that a lot of the sexual violence I was reporting on was very episodic in nature. For example, I had written about the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013, where women faced sexual violence. But after they had filed cases with the police, they went back to their villages and worked in the fields owned by the perpetrators,” Neha says, adding, “I realised that such violence is very episodic and that these [survivors] were workers who had more stories to tell. That is when I started looking at several industrial areas in Delhi and met Syeda in 2014.”
Over the next four years, from 2014 to 2018, Neha’s work unfolded through numerous unstructured interviews and informal conversations, which she held through visits to Syeda’s house and workplace. In the process of patiently weaving together the strands of Syeda’s life, Neha also spoke to hundreds of others whose lives were, in one way or another, entangled with Syeda’s.
Neha acknowledges the difficulty of this process, aware that memory can be unreliable. “Fictionalising the account would have been easier,” she says, but instead she chose the more difficult task of corroborating every detail, cross-checking years, events, and political moments, to construct a chronologically ordered narrative. Gaining her subject’s trust, Neha recalls, proved equally challenging as it required reopening wounds and confronting trauma long buried and rarely spoken aloud.
One for India’s workforce
The result of her nine-year-long endeavour, is the book which uncovers the stark gender disparities in pay within the unorganised workforce, documents the harsh, often inhuman conditions faced by new-age workers like Syeda’s daughter Reshma in publicly visible sectors, and even explores the mindset of the poor themselves — how some, including Syeda, regard certain types of work like domestic labour, as “beneath” them. Through her writing, she reveals how the indignities people like Syeda face do not make them immune to looking down on others, revealing layers of inequality within the already marginalised communities.
Interlaced with references to Bollywood films and songs, and the works of Sufi poets, the intersectional writing holds up a mirror to the lives of India’s invisible workforce that is foundational not only to domestic economies but to international trade as well.
This gripping narrative that unfolds over 298 pages carries an ‘X’ in its title. Neha explains, “The book is not just the story of Syeda but the story of millions of women who lead their lives like her and work like her. So the ‘X’ is symbolic of all those women who are completely invisible in public discourse.”
Now, after much praise for the book and an award later, Neha’s heart yearns to return to the ground once again. “I stopped reporting for two years because I wanted to finish my book. I am now longing to go back to the ground and do some reporting, and maybe from that, my next book might come out, and I might get fresh ideas,” she hopes.