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Neha Dixit's book exposes the brutal underbelly of India’s ‘informal economy’
Summary
Written after almost a decade of reporting, Neha Dixit's ‘The Many Lives of Syeda’ is an eye-opening work of extreme courageOne of the consequences of reading The Many Lives of Syeda X is that referring to what is called “the informal economy" in India will always henceforth seem a willful denial of reality. That part of the economy in Neha Dixit’s telling of many of the 50 jobs that her protagonist Syeda has worked at over a few decades is better described as a Dickensian brutalisation of a vulnerable workforce.
Consider the almond industry, well documented in this book. Almond shells “had to be soaked in acid to soften them faster. Most workers used their bare hands, teeth and feet to break the shells," Dixit reports. “Lalita, Syeda, everyone had disfigured nails and bruised fingertips. Syeda found it difficult to eat meals with her hands because chilli and other spices irritated the fingers. There was a joke (about this): almond factories teach women to eat with spoons."
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Women form the bulk of the workforce in this vast underbelly of the economy. The relentless bleakness of this narrative is the very opposite of the India story on our TV screens and newspapers.
To paraphrase what Polly Toynbee wrote about the US in her introduction to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA, this Other India “is a secret continent…the barely reported truth is the essential work done by people paid below subsistence wages". The career graph of Syeda X and millions like her is the alter ego of the Sensex.
In the span of a few pages in the first third of the book, these days in the lives of the Indian workers include an account of a school dropout, Javed, who makes a success of a business running a jeans washing unit; and the story of a raid on a gajak factory. The waste water, which contains acid used in making jeans, flowed into a swamp that had formed near the banks of the Yamuna. Nearby dairy owners warned the jeans washing unit owners about this and revenge quickly follows. “After a calf dies in the swamp, a month later Javed’s body is found in the same swamp… Fear for her other son, Junaid, settled inside Raziya (a close friend and neighbour of Syeda) like a ghost. She gave up construction work and entered the per-piece work life, slicing almond rejects for biscuits, cakes and ice cream for ₹20 per kilo."
Reading these stories about Syeda and other women who work with her, one gets an all-too-unwholesome view of several industries. I will not swallow an almond or a piece of gajak again without being reminded of Dixit’s reporting. The gajak business owners, she reveals, had started mixing starch and hydrogen peroxide “to clean the unprocessed sesame seeds" and adding an anaesthetic pharmaceutical to boost the weight of the candied sesame snack.
The Many Lives of Syeda X is also a grim telling of how increasing religious polarisation has made life harder still for those trying to make a living on the margins of the “world’s fastest growing economy", our 21st century Amar Chitra Katha.
Syeda and her husband Akmal’s lives as migrants to the big city are bookended by riots that break out in their native Banaras (Varanasi) after the Babri Masjid demolition. A few decades later, their home in Delhi is destroyed in the riots that followed protests against the new citizenship laws.
In February 2020, then US president Donald Trump was visiting Lutyens Delhi while in another part of the city, this sad saga of pogrom and demolition played out. “The state government announced that each household that lost their home and household items would get immediate relief of ₹25,000," Dixit writes. “But since Syeda and her family had missed out on applying for compensation in the first week, they were far behind in the queue."
There are many passages such as this one where the reader is left numbed by the pell-mell nature of one misfortune after another that befalls Syeda and her family and friends. Dixit’s reporting of the violence during that Delhi riot in turn brought her hundreds of calls, threatening her with gang-rapes and acid-attacks, as well as chilling warnings that she and her partner were under constant surveillance.
This book, written after reporting on Syeda’s life for almost a decade, is a product of extreme courage. The richness of the reporting and the dogged pursuit of all aspects of this many-layered story—which combines the routine discrimination women face at home and work, the institutional bias against minorities, and the reality of workers with few rights being emotionally and economically abused by employers in today’s India—makes Dixit’s achievement immense.
The pity is the Herculean effort of reporting the book appears to have left little time to thread the narrative better. Several sentences read as if they were written during an all-nighter at the computer. The “author’s note" at the end, in effect an afterword, belongs in the heart of the book; it has some of its most moving and well-written passages.
Still, The Many Lives of Syeda X is one of a kind in Indian non-fiction. It took a steely nerve and strong journalistic conviction not to embellish and embroider an already emotionally wrenching story as well as the boundless empathy of a woman to write it, just as Ehrenreich’s book did.
To repeat the rallying cry Virginia Woolf raised almost one hundred years ago in A Room of One’s Own, a woman’s view of the world—and of other women—remains crucially important.
There will likely not be a better book of gritty Indian reportage for years to come—and certainly none that takes contemporary Indian economic myth-making to task as The Many Lives of Syeda X poignantly does.
Rahul Jacob reported on the economic reforms of the 1990s for Fortune and Time magazine and is columnist for Mint.
