The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

by Neha Dixit, New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2024

Reviewed by Faiz Ullah

Over 90 per cent of the Indian workforce is employed in the informal sector under poor working conditions with little or no social protection. The minuscule formal sector, too, is increasingly informalised through outsourcing and subcontracting. Decent Work, a key Sustainable Development Goal founded on the four pillars of full and productive employment, rights at work, social protection, and social dialogue, with gender as a crosscutting theme, seems more of an uphill task today than it appeared a decade ago. The introduction of the new labour codes in India in the middle of the pandemic has effectively reduced the government’s regulatory and oversight role. The Occupational Safety and Working Conditions Code, for instance, does not clearly specify safety standards and dilutes the duties of the employer. Venture capital and tech-enabled disruptions in trading and retail have put small manufacturers and traders under duress. Cumulatively, these factors have hastened the backsliding of the working conditions and wages of millions of people trying to eke out a living in India. Women tend to be disproportionately affected by this exploitative structure, not only as wage workers, but also as the bearers of the gendered responsibilities of domestic care work.

Neha Dixit’s book, The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian, captures these disturbing transformations and their consequences on the lives of the urban working classes in India in granular detail. Syeda X, the book’s main protagonist, is one among hundreds of thousands of migrants who are constantly moving to metro cities after their lives and livelihoods are upended in villages and small towns due to acute economic distress precipitated by cataclysmic social and political events. In Syeda’s case, the weaving industry of Banaras was already reeling under the devastating effects of the economic policy changes introduced in the early 1990s. The communal violence that swept through large parts of northern India in the wake of the demolition of Babri Masjid further aggravated the crisis for Muslim weavers. She moved to Delhi with her family – husband and three children – in the mid-1990s.

Her husband, a highly skilled saree weaver, finds it difficult to do the backbreaking manual labour, the only kind of work available to him. Taking over the responsibility of running the family from, as Dixit puts it, her ‘manmauji’ (wayward) husband, 22-year-old Syeda swiftly moves from one odd job to another over the next two and half decades, with tenaciousness that consumes her lively personality that lights up the first few chapters of the book because of her self-effacing wit and humour. She begins in Old Delhi by sorting dry fruits and working in a savoury snacks factory and thereafter goes on to dabble in over 50 different trades – from making cycle brake wires to Christmas decorations – as a home-based worker in the migrant hub of north-east Delhi. The work is precarious, wages low, and the hustle ceaseless.

Syeda finds it challenging to keep things moving for her family – children do not get as much care as they need, and meals are meagre. However, she is a quick learner who finds a way to navigate the trade and the neighbourhood deftly. With an eye on the news, for instance, she can tell which product will be in demand weeks or months in advance. She manages to convince the school principals to admit her children, bargains with truant contractors and factory owners for work and payments, and negotiates with neighbourhood strongmen and the police to keep her family out of trouble. However, some things cannot be foreseen or negotiated with – a court-ordered closure of polluting industries in the city, a factory sealed by government authorities, currency notes losing value overnight, a new taxation policy, changes in citizenship laws, communal violence (yet again), and a pandemic.

The one adversary that Syeda and her friends, neighbours, and co-workers do manage to engage and secure a small but symbolic victory against are the traders and contractors who control the almond business. By organising a strike, a difficult labour action strategy for informal workers, they manage to wrest away a small wage bump and its timely payment. This chapter around collective struggle built around organic friendship and camaraderie among women from diverse backgrounds stands out in the book. In recounting this collective action, Dixit weaves in the horrible experiences of caste-based and religious discrimination and sexual harassment that women workers have to endure. Their marginal identities are, in fact, a significant factor in why unscrupulous employers think they can get away with exploiting them.

The effort and care of extensive fieldwork by Dixit over several years is reflected in the richness of information and insights presented in the book. However, the excellent material could have been contextualised more rigorously. While writing and publishing conventions do not place journalists under the obligation to provide an explicit audit trail of sources and a list of references, such a practice, even via simple footnotes, does serve a worthwhile purpose. It leads curious readers to background information that is perhaps not immediately relevant to the text but may help in understanding its place in a wider context. For example, it would have been helpful to general readers to read a footnote on how the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, one of the deadliest industrial disasters, where over 1,100 workers died in Dhaka, Bangladesh, brought global attention to the wretched conditions of workers in South Asia and opened up space for conversation, collectivisation, and demands for reform. Similarly, mentioning that several successful and unsuccessful attempts have been made to organise women workers in the informal sector in India would have been helpful, too. The Self-Employed Women’s Association is one of the most prominent examples of such organising.

The book brims with pathos, but the empathy extended to the protagonist by the author in earlier parts of the book begins to appear obliquely constrained towards the end. On rereading several parts, it appears that the author has put in a lot of effort to understand and represent Syeda, the worker, but not much space has been afforded to Syeda, the woman, or more specifically, a Muslim woman. For instance, a few of Syeda’s outbursts, first against her son and then later her daughter for what amounted to transgressions in Syeda’s eyes, in the last couple of chapters may not necessarily be motivated by or inflected through patriarchal conditioning. They just may have been a genuine expression of disappointment and loss, and perhaps merited a more-sensitive engagement. These are also among the few instances where the author applies a fixed interpretative frame as opposed to letting the readers make up their own minds.

Dixit does a thorough job of chronicling Syeda’s story and the people, places, and circumstances around her. The documentation of conversations and observations is meticulous and gives a clear sense of spaces and chronology. The writing is accessible, and the commentary, wry and cheeky in turns, draws the reader in by validating their emotional response to the narrative. Dixit has briefly flagged important social, political, and economic events that run concurrently with Syeda’s life story through headline-like texts throughout the book. This distant background narrative is complemented by details of the work that Syeda does. The use of repetition and rhythm in describing workspaces, production processes, going piece rates, and monthly earnings works particularly well. The book will interest early career researchers in anthropology, labour, and gender. However, as a document of contemporary journalism, it needs to be read much more widely. Affordable translated editions in other Indian languages will definitely help its outreach.

Millions are spent on advertising, public relations, and much of contemporary mainstream news media to hide or obscure the abysmal conditions in which the masses survive. As Dixit puts it in the book, ‘You can’t show a story on malnutrition if you have to sell pressure cookers and microwaves.’ The Many Lives of Syeda X goes to great lengths to bring into public consciousness the fact that much of what all of us use and consume every day is made by a severely exploited underclass. And, importantly, it even gets the readers to care.