New Delhi: Neha Dixit’s The Many Lives of Syeda X takes the reader into an unfamiliar world. Here, the state is an intruder, if not an enemy, creating many hurdles in the lives of its main protagonist, Syeda X.

It’s a world that the mainstream media, in its zeal to represent India as “the next superpower”, has systematically erased from our collective perception and memory. Syeda, and most other characters in the book, are the ones who can be referred to as the stepchildren of a developing India. Even though they keep the nation’s machinery working, their achievements are not seen as ‘success’ in the neoliberal ecosystem.

Syeda, whose name has been changed to protect her, is a migrant worker, a woman and a Muslim. Her family had to leave weaving and their home in Banaras after a few officers of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) allegedly burned their belongings as ‘punishment’ after communal violence in their city.  

Police picked up her husband Akmal and tortured him, forcing the family to move to Delhi, Syeda told Dixit. In India’s capital, an industrious Syeda had to work over 50 jobs as a home-based worker to sustain her family. However, she soon finds out that the state and all its apparatus are bent on pushing most like her to the margins, sometimes in the form of anti-pollution court judgements, sometimes through acts of violence like the 2020 Delhi pogrom.

Dixit’s book is perhaps one of the only biographies of a female migrant worker in India. At the same time, Syeda’s Muslim identity is not airbrushed, like many contemporary authors are guilty of, and showcases the harsh realities of being a Muslim in a Hindu supremacist state. 

At the same time, she is a woman trying to find her way in a city that is often not kind to its urban poor. The in-depth descriptions of Jamna Paar and the lanes of northeast Delhi bring forth Dixit’s acute observation and familiarity with the subject. Eventually, The Many Lives of Syeda X serves as a critical commentary on the human cost of economic growth

Through her insightful reporting and poetic interludes, Dixit crafts a book that is empathic, surprising and intensely readable. She presents a much-needed counter-narrative to clickbait journalism, going beyond often surface-level coverage of issues of gender, labour and communalism. Her female characters especially shine as she pieces together their complex lives, showcasing their resilience and the power of community in facing systemic challenges.

In this conversation with Article 14, Dixit talked about the motivations behind writing the book, the future of civil society protests in India, the cost of economic development for the urban poor, and the differences between Bollywood and real cops. Edited excerpts:

You worked on The Many Lives of Syeda X for nearly a decade, interviewing over 900 people. What motivated you to write this book?

Gender has always been a key area of interest for me. After the 2012 gangrape, I had comparatively more opportunities to report on sexual violence, but I felt even that coverage was limited. Media’s coverage of labour rights only included visual imagery of male workers. One more thing that disturbed me was the lack of female sources in our reporting. When I went to talk about a certain issue, mostly the men came out to talk. 

In South Delhi, where I lived, I’d sometimes go to settlements that served the needs of rich neighbourhoods. In these economically marginalised settlements, every house will have women doing two or three jobs at once. So she may be a domestic worker, yet she returns home to do some piece-rate labour. The media structure I was part of kind of invisibilized this. Then I started seeing the range of things that these women were doing, whether it was making a light bulb, a table, a pen, an electric wire, a mobile phone, a bike or cycle part, a helmet or a door knob.

When I started thinking of the book, I could see whatever we were eating or consuming came from women completely invisibilized in conversations on labour. At that time, this was just to sort of understand this phenomenon and weave all these things together for my own understanding. Then it turned into a book.

You examine Syeda's life through several lenses, uncovering events she may have forgotten or dismissed as unimportant. What were the challenges? How did you detach yourself from your subject?

I have interpreted and written it in the way I have understood Syeda’s story. At the same time, I know I have an immense amount of privilege because I was only a visitor to Syeda’s world. I was not struggling for water or food like her.

The challenge was that I shouldn’t bring in my understanding or judgments we are tutored to. I had to prevent myself from all the ‘woke tutoring’ that has happened to me for all these years. This is why writing and reporting on this was important to me because I kind of also understood that what we say and what unfolds and how we interpret things are very different from the ideas we are taught. 

Majorly, three identities of Syeda are explored — a woman, a Muslim and a worker. How did you manage to explore these identities? Also, were there any other identities that lay somewhere outside this spectrum?

Another, I think, was the identity of a migrant worker. If you ask someone to close their eyes and think of a migrant worker, they will only think of a man. Earlier, India even had a migrant workers act which didn’t acknowledge women workers. It was in 2008 when a new act on the unorganised sector started recognising women as migrant workers. For me, Syeda was also a migrant worker who was displaced, not just because of economic reasons, but also because of majoritarian politics. So that’s one identity of hers.

Then, of course, she is a Muslim woman and that's pivotal to the story. In today’s sort of Hindu supremacist majoritarian rule, there's always this stereotyping of a Muslim woman always shown as a victim, trying to fight patriarchy within her household or her family. But that is only one truth. 

In her life, there are other simultaneous battles. She is, after all, a Muslim woman in the Hindu Rashtra. She struggles every day to feed herself and her family. Even in elite conversations around secularism, this kind of deprivation and marginalisation is mostly not addressed. We can’t tell people to be secular and behave well without making sure that people have enough food to eat. When even edible oil or vegetables are too expensive for them, 

it’s almost brutal to expect them to stop thinking of that and only think of larger ideas of pluralism and secularism.

There are numerous examples of law enforcement taking extrajudicial actions against Syeda and other characters in your book. Syeda's family was forced to leave Benares after being tortured by PAC officers. How do such incidents shape the image of police in the minds of the marginalised, and how does this image differ from that of a policeman in Bollywood?

In a time when state governments like Uttar Pradesh, Assam and other places are converting their states into sort of a Police Raj, it’s always the poor who are subjected to police brutality. For example, in UP, most who have been killed in police encounters in extrajudicial killings, put behind bars through the National Security Act (NSA) or got their houses demolished, are the poor. In some cases, states also charge them for crimes instead of the accused, like that in the 2020 Delhi pogrom cases. 

In Bollywood, of course, we have our Singhams, Simbas and Bulbul Pandeys, who glorify encounter killings and extrajudicial killings. So there is a gap between what is happening on the ground and the glorification of cops in Bollywood. That's also the kind of attitude that is rewarded. For example, the UP government gave promotions and cash prizes to cops who conducted extrajudicial killings. But most of the people they killed were poor, Muslims, OBCs and Dalits. Nobody goes to help them. 

Another side of the coin is the media portrayal. One example from the past was during the 2012 Delhi gangrape case. After that, The Indian Express did a profile of the slum in RK Puram from where all the four accused came. They thought that it was okay to profile an entire slum, basing it on four people who committed a crime. But that never happened in #MeToo cases. When big people were involved, no journalists went to profile Defence Colony. 

As a journalist, I also see the book as evidence of particular crimes. There are grim stories of Muslim men ending up ‘mysteriously’ dead, killed by local heavyweights. How difficult was it for the victim's families to get closure, considering the killers lived in the same area?

There is no closure. They just learn to live with it because they know that no matter what they do, the constitutional mechanism and the legal systems are biased against them. They know they don't have the money, resources and the time it takes to fight in the court or to take the case to its logical conclusion. What is the option? Where else will you look for work again? Where else will you go to buy another plot after years of hard work? If you speak up publicly, how will you ensure the safety of your other family members? 

It may not sound very heroic, but this is the reality. There is a systemic bias against poor people, but if you are a person from a minority community, and if you are a man, you're further vulnerable. Unless you have resources, privilege and immense support, you can’t even aim for any kind of logical conclusion or closure. So you just have to live with that.

In your book, the state is almost like an intruder in the lives of workers, changing regulations that transform their lives for the worse. Can you explain how the working class often has to pay the cost of the nation's development?

At one point in the book, Reshma says that the whole conversation about pollution is rather elitist and I agree with her. Do you think you can put one air purifier in your home and your lungs will be safe? What happens to everybody who walks and works on the streets?

For example, several court judgements on Delhi pollution judgments displaced Syeda and others in Delhi. It means that the lungs of one set of people are precious and the others literally have to look for ways to survive. There was no comprehensive thought for those losing their jobs once the industrial units were shut down. 

Another example is Digital India. One day the state suddenly tried to digitise everything because many people were using WhatsApp and YouTube.

They didn't think of how people with low literacy or no literacy or digital skills are going to navigate basic things.

Then they try to introduce something like the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and NRC (National Register of Citizens) saying that everybody has to show documents. The law wasn’t just marginalising Muslims, it was disenfranchising every marginalised person from all communities, as the poor have no means or resources to make those documents. Another example is the smart city project. They create fancy pavements in posh neighbourhoods for people to take evening walks, but they can’t construct cycle lanes in areas where hundreds of people use cycles or small mopeds to reach their factories or do their deliveries. 

During COVID-19, if you look at speeches given by Prime Minister Modi, he was telling us to help poor people if they are around. So the address to the nation was directed to the middle class or upper class, and not to people on the margins. It’s not just a condescending attitude of the ministers, but the state almost invisibilizes poor people who create its structures and keep it running. So this kind of bias exists in this so-called development.

In the chapter ‘Almond’, you evocatively describe home workers' fight for better wages for shelling almonds. At another place, you talk of ‘the cost of revolution’ paid by Musahars in Bihar. In that context, how do you see the future of mass protests in India in a time of widespread persecution of activists?

For the last 10 years, we have continuously had protests against the Hindu supremacist state, and against hate crimes, hate speeches or the persecution of people from marginalised backgrounds. The fact that we are constantly having these protests, whether it was Not in My Name, Award Wapsi, Farmers’ Protest or CAA-NRC protest, is promising enough to tell us that the future is bright and it will be brighter than what we've seen in the last 10 years. 

These protests also tell us that more and more people are willing to pay the cost of that revolution. At the same time, there is no compensation for the people who pay those costs. As we speak, Khalid Saifi is in jail and his three children have been struggling for the last four years at school, at home, without a parent. They don’t even know when he is coming out. Who is going to compensate for that deprivation of those four years?

I also have legal cases against me but because I have a Hindu name I'm still not in jail. But the fact that Umar Khalid or Khalid Saifi or other people are in jail, means it is easy to persecute people who are from a minority religion in the current Hindu majoritarian state. So there is a cost when we fight for the revolution. So, anyone interested in the future of the country and who wants to fight for equality, has to come up with mechanisms and support structures for people who are paying this cost. 

When you describe the lives of home-based workers, you list the meagre wages they are paid for that specific work. What are some practical measures the state and civil society can immediately take to improve the lives of these workers?

One immediate thing that can be done is to get a workers card made for home-based workers, so you don't get lost in the category of who's unorganised, who's organised, who’s informal, etc. It will ensure some basic safety net in terms of pension or getting in touch with authorities if they don't get their payments. 

Another thing is that we start noticing who is making what. If somebody is selling toys or selling pirated books on the road or just sitting and working, we should know what they are doing. We should also notice things that we buy at our online shopping apps, the shops, malls, markets and Sunday markets, asking questions like who prepared this, how was it put in a plastic bag, sealed and delivered. These things have been so invisibilized that it has been normalised not to pay attention to them. 

Another reason for this is the mainstream media. Whether it's news organisations, Instagram influencers or Bollywood, nobody is talking about the questions of labour and socioeconomic marginalisation. We have stopped paying attention to them. 

As described in the book, these home workers often have to change their skill set overnight to survive, an example of their innovation, resilience and hard work. What life lessons can we learn from them?

In the lives of these workers, there is no scope to indulge in what one desires and to ‘find yourself’, something that is so glorified in the current world. Most people don't have that option. That in itself is such a stark reminder of resilience. For people like us, it’s a reminder that we should at least try to do something and not be so indulgent. 

There is an idiom that I've heard since childhood ‘karm karo, phal milega’ (do the deed, you will get the fruit). It is a simplistic nonsensical thing to say that poor people are not working hard enough. If working hard was a good enough parameter, then a lot of these workers would have been better off. Wealth is mostly determined by caste, class, gender, religion, race, and location in contemporary India. 

You haven’t portrayed Syeda as an angel. She suspected Bengalis as being Bangladeshis, wanted a dowry for her son, and believed he was lured by a Hindu girl by black magic. In this context, where do we draw a line when telling stories of the marginalised?

Whether or not we are marginalised, we are imperfect and complex people with whites, blacks and greys. I might be very nice to you but extremely evil to someone else. We react to people and things differently. That said, of course, Syeda is a product of her time and circumstances. So she is patriarchal like most our mothers are, and conditioned according to that. For example, Reshma told me that Syeda was against her wearing lipstick. When she got a job, she told her mother she could wear lipstick now because her workplace had told her so. 

One can relate to it because many of our mothers were like that, asking us why we were wearing lipstick or a certain dress. The same patriarchal sort of unfolding happens across classes, religions, and communities. Syeda also had complicated reactions and reasoning. That’s what makes her human. 

You don’t reduce men to one-dimensional images. Like women, they are also shown to be vulnerable to state and systematic oppression, particularly if they are Muslims. What were some of the things you considered when writing your male characters?

It was very helpful to have a feminist understanding of the world, and knowing that patriarchy not just oppresses women or people of gender minorities, but also men. It conditions men to think of themselves and act in a certain way, which they are not. It pushes men to be who they are not. So you can't be yourself or emote. You can't obviously go wrong. You have to be the strong one. You have to be the responsible one. You have to take on the load of being the primary breadwinner of the family. You can’t do frivolous things. You can't chit chat. The oppression of the patriarchy on men is something that needs to be talked about enough. 

We should also teach the men how to deal with empowered women. Because that's why the violence is increasing. In every school or college result, we see that the girls are doing better than the boys or the women are doing better than the men. Because for women, that's the only ticket out of their situation. For men, there is a certain complacency and few tools available for them not to be the stereotypical male.

When my questions were a little kinder to Akmal, Syeda was very irritated by the fact that I was going soft on her even being a woman. But I know if you are a Muslim man in current India, you can be accused of various things and end up behind bars and nobody will do anything about it. 

Our problems are systemic. Many men come from far away to Delhi because they are the male members of their family and have to work and send money back home. If you are a Muslim man, you can be arrested by the police and stay in jail for many years because your family don’t have the means or resources to look for you or fight for you. So that also emanates from being the man of the house and going out to earn. All of these things are intertwined. So if you do not address this constant oppression of patriarchy, then we will not be able to talk about an equal society. 

Syeda’s husband, Akmal was an artistic weaver who had to change his town and profession after police torture after 1992 riots in Benares. Compared to the industrious Syeda, Akmal comes across as a disillusioned man, whose body and mind is ravaged by hard labour, but he still manages to do his bit. Do you think that Syeda’s sons’ perception of him was reflective of Syeda’s disappointment in him for not being able to rise from being a cart puller?

All of them, including Syeda, are victims of patriarchy, a system where the father has to do something and the woman has to do something else. She expected the man to behave in a certain way and take up his gender role. The sons also, obviously, saw their father failing, which shaped their view of him. 

At the same time, there is also a lack of opportunity to address grief for someone like Akmal. He was once an expert at weaving sarees. Now he was doing hard labour, being beaten up, locked up in the police station and hiding here and there. And then he came to Delhi and faced that again. 

I think we often talk of mental health in a very elite way. Whoever can afford therapy, and whoever can afford to go fix themselves, have that option. 

But for someone like Akmal, there is no outlet, support, or structure to deal with this grief. He faces alienation from his family, the alienation of being uprooted from his city because of something larger than him. There is no redressal or rehabilitation for him. There is no support structure that will help him to stand up on his feet again.

At the same time, there are men we have grown up seeing around us. They are expected to be something, whether it's our fathers, brothers, partners, or friends, but it's not really who they are projecting themselves to be. The same thing applies for Akmal. The fact that Reshma likes her more is not just the typical father-daughter love being glorified. Akmal holds an emotional space for Reshma which Syeda cannot. And here, the gender stereotype is kind of switched because mothers are supposed to be caring and loving. But in Reshma’s case, it was Akmal who was doing that. 

You beautifully use Hindustani words like laee, charkhi, fursat, taking the reader into the world of Syeda’s language. Was the book an attempt to conserve language in an age when such words are becoming less common?

I used these words because you can't translate the flavour of these words in English. In fact, the conversations in the book are basically translations of what I was told by many people. But in the cases of some words, the flavour cannot be replicated in English. 

And that is also the flavour of Syeda's world and her life. Syeda still talks in her UP style. She has not just the language or the dialect, but also the kind of tone and demeanour of Benares. That’s why some of these words keep appearing in the book. In contrast, Reshma’s conversational style is more straightforward and kind of transactional. I think places we spend our childhood affect not just our language but also our body language and cultural conditioning. 

In your introduction, you talk of Indian media’s increased focus on issues pertaining to only the rich and the elite. Do you see it as a product of rapid economic liberalisation? How do you think journalists can face or reverse the trend?

Hartosh Singh Bal, the editor at The Caravan, says that journalism is different from media because media is the commercialised version of journalism. With the markets opening, new channels and media organisations coming in, there is a growth of corporate media driven by profit. So public interest is out of the window. 

Also, as we have seen in the last 10 years, there is a corporate-political nexus with corporate media houses dishing out propaganda and false news for the purpose of profits and political gains. It’s mostly journalists themselves who even think of journalists as a different category. I increasingly feel that a lot of people across the world no longer distinguish between a journalist, content creator and social media influencer. Those boundaries have blurred. 

For example, on Instagram, people sell products and give information at the same time. Nobody is going to question why you didn't include five W's and H's. Nobody will check your facts. So those boundaries have also blurred. In such a situation, all of us are trying to survive and maintain some sort of integrity or honesty. But in the end, we need to find a better way of putting public interest again back in the centre.

(Zeyad Masroor Khan is an independent journalist and author of City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh.)

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