Neha Dixit on gender, the informal economy and the invisible work of women

There are many ways to approach Neha Dixit’s first book, The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown IndianFirst of all, it is of course Syeda’s story, the X in her name marking her as an average woman, one of the 35,000 people who flock to Delhi every day in search of work.

Syeda is also Muslim. Although she is primarily concerned with survival, she lives in an India where religious identity has become increasingly important since the 1990s.

Or you could see this book, based on 10 years of research and work, as the story of the invisible economy of home-based work, the second-largest sector employing women after agriculture. Many Lives peels back the precariousness of the 82% of women workers in the informal sector who are paid ridiculously low wages— ₹1 per piece for filling soft cuddly toys with fibre, which gives you that little bit extra with which you can buy a little milk or a vegetable other than potatoes.

But however you look at it, Many Lives is an important book that illuminates the intersection of class, religion, and gender with empathy and a keen eye for research and detail.

I spoke to author Neha Dixit.

I wanted to ask about the premise of your book, which is to visualize not just the urban poor of India, but also the life of your main character, Syeda X, a poor Muslim woman. What made you want to tell her story?

After meeting many working class women in Delhi in different industrial areas, I decided to write about Syeda because her life in Delhi as a migrant working class woman in the last 30 years is for me the story of what has happened in India in the last 30 years. It was not just urban poverty, internal displacement or migration, but that these displacements were happening because of increasing communalism and caste violence and how it affected someone like Syeda, a weaver from Banaras who had to give up her skilled work because her house was burnt down in the riots. She had to come to Delhi to do 50 casual jobs in 30 years.

For me the story was very important because it talked about different people who build civilizations, build a national capital and build a country, and everything that the country depends on, and who are still not recognized.

Why X? Syeda is a very specific name. So why X?

X because it could be many other women that we meet whose labor is always invisible, always underserved, always unpaid. And we, as a society, are conditioned to ignore the work that goes into keeping this society and this system functional, and to not recognize the people who do that work.

The publication of this book – and this is clearly not something that you could have anticipated – coincides with a very unusual moment in terms of public anger over the rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata. In Kochi you have the Justice Hema Committee report. So there is a spotlight on exploitation, and in particular the widespread sexual exploitation of women. Can you comment on that coincidence?

The fact that we’re back to these conversations is good. We’ve had these conversations every year in public. But the problem remains because there’s a lack of consistent will to address sexual violence at every level. When it comes to someone like a remote worker who works in multiple workplaces or from home and is dealing with a lot of people, when it comes to sexual violence, there’s really no mechanism for her to address it without first thinking about survival and putting food on the table.

Whether it is Kolkata or the Malayalam film industry, it is only when women come out in the public space and speak openly that some kind of superficial action is taken to address it temporarily. But things are not done in a systematic way. There are only band-aids, and that is why it keeps cropping up without appreciating and protecting women in the public space, without stopping the impunity of people who are accused. If you don’t address the system, it will keep cropping up.

If I remember correctly, your career as a freelance journalist began with the Delhi gang rape in 2012.

The rape movement of 2012 was very helpful for many of us who were journalists at the time. Before that, at least in my experience, I realized that in newsrooms, anytime you talked about sexual violence, there was a lot of rejection. After 2012, it became possible to write about sexual violence, even though the coverage in most newsrooms was very superficial because they only wanted to report on that event and not what happened before or after.

For me, there were a few stories that I started writing because newsrooms were also open to stories about sexual violence. For example, the Muzaffarnagar riots, where women faced sexual violence and even went to court to challenge it, only to be sent back to work as farm labourers on the same farms as the accused a few months later.

So for me, the story was not just sexual violence, but the story of people as a whole, and sexual violence is a part of it because women who want to work in the public space have to deal with sexual violence, and at the same time they have to deal with so many other issues like getting paid on time or getting a fair wage. And then they have to deal with circumstances at home; with the eternal and absolute need to put food on the table.

Women working from home, doing bits and pieces, keep the economy going through their labor: making gajak, cutting the threads of jeans or making raakhis. It was shocking to hear how poorly this work is paid: ₹80 for preparing 144 brake cables for bicycles for example. How difficult was it for you to investigate this?

It wasn’t really that hard to figure out what kind of work they were doing and how much they were getting paid for it, because India is the wholesale market for a lot of things that are produced not only domestically but also internationally. The nature of this work is so seasonal, according to the calendar, according to the news cycle, if there’s an election coming up, for example.

Following the story over the last 10 years has been complicated because there were questions of trust initially. Why would someone in a situation like Syeda, where she works 16 hours a day, trust me to tell her story? It took time to build trust and open up.

How do you see your role in society as a feminist writer?

My role is to say that there is a gender lens in everything you write about. Whether it’s aviation, defense, finance, you can’t just talk about one group of people. You have to talk to people of different genders. I see my role as normalizing that.

I see my role as saying that when you come up with the aviation budget, it applies to different genders, and it is not in a neutral space. Everything applies to different people of different genders in different ways, and that needs to be taken into consideration, whether it is a Smart City project, or a Digital India project, or anything that we see.

What now?

I will try my best to report again, which I stopped doing for the last two or three years. That is my priority to get back on the ground and start reporting again.

(The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Neha Dixit, Juggernaut, Rs799)

The following article is an excerpt from this week’s HT Mind the Gap. Subscribe here.