What it means to be Muslim, female, poor – Neha Dixit’s debut nonfiction gives us a grounding in India’s truth – eShe

By Anuradha Pati

Anywhere you travel in India, you will find things being sold on pavements, at traffic signals, cheap items that are quite time appropriate. Plastic flags around Independence Day, Republic Day, decorations for every festival, sports event, all kinds of trinkets, bindi, balloons, cloth dusters, pens, books, flowers, you name it. These are made in the informal sector by millions of migrant labourers, working in subhuman conditions, who are paid a pittance.  

More than 80 million women – around 7 per cent of the Indian population – are engaged in the informal sector, but were not counted as labourers. Finally acknowledged as ‘home-based workers’ by the government in 2008, their average monthly income is a fifth of the legal minimum wage in Delhi. This is our informal ‘unorganised’ sector: their employment terms and conditions are drawn in such a manner that any kind of claim on continuity, or adherence to basic minimum wage, is tactfully evaded.

Syeda, the protagonist of Neha Dixit’s acclaimed work of nonfiction The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian (Juggernaut, 2024, INR 799) is one such woman. She becomes part of India’s informal labour class when she moves to Delhi from Banaras in 1995 with her husband and three children following the riots after the premediated demolition of the Babri Masjid.

The poor Muslim family’s house is vandalised, looms broken, everything set on fire, threads of Banarasi sarees clogging the drains. The family intends to go to Lucknow but land up in Delhi instead. “How does it matter, Lucknow or Dilli,” asks Akmal, her husband. Approximately 35,000 poor migrants come to Delhi every day in search of livelihoods.

“Ek aur aa gayi aakash naapne.” One more has arrived to measure the sky.

A multiple award-winning journalist based in Delhi, Neha Dixit writes investigative, narrative and long-form articles, and has been published in various anthologies on politics, gender and social justice. This is her debut nonfiction title chronicling the history of those on the margins.

As she explains, documentation requires influence, importance, and resources which the poor don’t have. The state does not document the lives of the poor to avoid accountability. “I don’t intend to be the voice of any community. I have told this story in the way I have understood it, in the hope that it honours the struggle, journey and memories of Syeda and her family and friends, in the hope that India never forgets its diversity of voices,” she writes.

The author was stalked and threatened but continued to write – a labour of nine years, which is reflected in the thorough details captured in the book.

The book follows Syeda, who takes up close to 50 odd jobs over three decades in Delhi, gluing bindis, making decorations, cleaning raisins, shelling almonds, making tea strainers, door hinges and several such things. Her toolbox, jadoo ka pitara or treasure trove – an iron box that holds pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches, needle, thread, nuts and bolts, sequins and beads, tapes and wires – is a reservoir of her skills, a testimony of what all she learnt to do when she could no longer be a weaver in Banaras.

Syeda becomes one of the many faceless working women of the informal sector. Akmal, an exceptionally skilled weaver from a long lineage of Banarasi weavers, becomes a porter pushing carts weighing 200 to 250 kilograms for a meagre 40 rupees.

Syeda’s three children –Shazeb, Salman, Reshma – are all wired differently. The two sons, one shy the other daring, resolve to be independent. Both drop out of school. Shazeb loves bikes and starts working in a repair shop. Salman devotes himself to Islamic puritanism. Only the daughter, Reshma, is interested in studying – she studies with a vengeance to escape her current life. Her mother’s life.

As the book progresses, Shazeb runs away with his Hindu girlfriend to protect his family from fundamentalists; Salman, often picked up by the police regardless of his involvement, dies after part of a mosque roof falls on him; and Reshma is all that remains for Syeda.

What kind of work – and employers – are available to women workers from minority communities, and what wages are offered? The priority is continuous work, because missing even a single day is a survival crisis. If you do not negotiate for high per-piece rate nor ask too many questions, and instead bring your own tools, deliver products on time without excuses, do not ask for an advance or for help during an illness or calamity, do not protest against sexual harassment, and if you can put up with delayed payments, then there is work to do.

Between two riots, a few elections, several government-initiated plans and schemes, demonetisation, the Covid lockdown, unrests, movies, events and festivals, this book puts in perspective how external events impact the life of Syeda and millions of men and women working in the informal sector. The book is a tangled account of factors we sometimes brush aside as rare.

On 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India passed a judgement to allow construction of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya at the site where Babri Masjid had stood. No one was punished for the demolition of the medieval-era mosque and India’s architectural heritage.

Syeda finally came to the realisation that the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 was only the beginning. The Hindu supremacists were not after one mosque. They were after all of them. The warp and the weft that was undone almost 30 years earlier could never be woven back again. The riots were not about proving identity. They were about who needed to be eliminated to create a new India.

Even while the family was residing in the relief camp, having lost all their belongings to the riots, the Indian government declared lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. The camp-dwellers were given 3000 rupees, 20 kilos of wheat, 10 kilos of potato, and asked to vacate the camp.

Despite hardships of all kinds, how does Syeda’s family – and others like them – survive? There is much strength that they draw from each other, from being together, from friends, co-workers, sakhi-saheli. The support of sisterhood.

The book chronicles, how, in the 1980s and 1990s, a number of multinational companies began outsourcing production to poorer countries with surplus labour and cheaper wages – like India. It was easy to create multi-layered local subcontracting networks for manufacturing work. Instead of setting up factories that had to comply with existing labour laws, they simply outsourced the work to home-based workers.

The author offers various examples of trades in which goods are imported from Western countries, processed in India by poor, unorganised labourers for meagre pay, and then exported back at a huge profit for producers and traders.

In one example of an almond-processing unit, it is the women who finally organised themselves and agitated for their due.

Hum apna adhikaar mangte! We ask for our rights.
Nahin kisi se bheekh mangte! Not beg for alms.

Under the Badaam Mazdoor Union, thousands of women gathered to protest in December 2009, forgoing their daily wages, and much more, with the conviction that this may better their lives. The strike resulted in a minor increase in their wages – but it was a win nonetheless. The women had collectively demanded their due and were heard.

After all these years, the women did manage to measure the sky and move the moon!

This book is a starting point to look closely at the faceless women working in the informal sector – all the trinkets that we buy and the realities of people who assemble these. How is it that we do not know? Who cleans the mess we leave behind in the washrooms of the malls? On the streets? The lives and hardships of the mammoth informal sector whom we live off, but know nothing about – how they live, what they eat, what humiliations they face daily. We complain, tag, share on social media, but do not go any deeper.

Sprinkled with generous doses of soul-stirring Urdu couplets, the book is a conscientious chronicling of the routine injustice, neglect and lives lost in the struggle for survival against discriminatory systems that continue to strengthen. Systems that propagate inequality, hatred and supremacy of religion in the governance of our country.

Read it for a grounding in India’s truth.

Anuradha Pati has worked in the development sector in India for close to three decades on natural resource management, capacity building and rural livelihoods. She has also worked on public diplomacy and disaster response. An alumna of Tata Institute of Social Sciences now based in Bangalore, she is the recipient of a Chevening scholarship and a Fulbright fellowship. Reach her on LinkedIn, Facebook or her blog.