All the Lives Syeda Ever Lived: An Interview with Neha Dixit
Neha Dixit. Photo: Anshum Badoni
Neha Dixit, the author of The Many Lives of Syeda X, speaks about the story of an ‘invisible’ India through the tale of one working-class woman, her approaches to journalism, and the “collective failure” of Indian society.
If you remember seeing a conventional choke—or a ballast, if you will—you may recollect it always came with a connector affixed on its metal base. Ever wondered how the latter was produced? Plastic granules were poured into a hand-operated moulding machine to make any number of connectors of the mould’s shape. These connectors would then be cooled for a while before they could be prepared with barrel nuts and screws.
This last piece of labour was once performed by my mother—and occasionally her three children stepped in, too. This was years before she began to subcontract this work to other women who were in need of using their time to make some surplus income. For finalizing 100 pieces, they would receive ₹5 each, the standard rate for connectors used in low-wattage copper ballasts. Rates varied with the size of connectors.
If you come to think of it, this invisible life of a connector coming into being can tell a variety of stories. Choose one lens, and you will see a story of women across class and caste seeking whatever financial independence a source of surplus income could provide. Select another, and you have a narrative about how these women built and strengthened a network they could fall back on when in need. Or perhaps their lives could teach you how ‘value’ is added to a product, or what rights are denied in informal working setups.
All this and more is relevant to the New Delhi-based independent journalist Neha Dixit’s debut work of nonfiction, The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian (Juggernaut, 2024). Dixit tells the story of Syeda, a woman from Banaras who came to Delhi in 1995 along with her husband and three children, took up odd jobs over several decades to support herself and her family, and courageously endured a great many injustices in her path. Dixit manages to employ many prisms with which one can leverage Syeda’s lifetime to understand what it reveals about a transforming (or perhaps for many, an already transformed and unrecognizable) India.
This meticulous and masterful work of journalism was published in the UK with a new, and possibly apt, subtitle, A People’s History of Invisible India, by Footnote Press a couple of months ago. Winner of the Kalinga Literary Festival (KLF) Book Award 2025 in the Debut (English) category, most recently, the book secured a place in the 2025 longlist of the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.
[Syeda’s] displacement isn’t just economical… it’s about other aspects—the contemporary history of India affected most people in a way that they felt internally displaced, living in the national capital with no basic resources or conducive working conditions.”
In a Zoom conversation with The Chakkar, Dixit spoke about how the book came to be, where she aligns with old-school journalism and where she’s happy to thwart all expectations, and what, according to her, is the ‘collective failure’ of Indian society. Edited excerpts:
The Chakkar: You followed Syeda’s life for over nine years. Tell us about the moment when you felt that her life story must be documented. In establishing her story over the years, when did you feel that you may be able to reflect on the radical transformation of a nation from a seemingly functional democracy to an authoritative, bigoted, and monolithic one?
Dixit: Initially, I just wanted to write about working-class women in Delhi, because in my work I couldn’t see that I wasn’t getting the space to write about what I thought was journalism. Then, I also realized that as a reporter living in Delhi, I didn’t see adequate reportage—or even information or an idea—about a large section of people. Even in my reporting on gender, I realized I was following templatized, episodic events, without a full-fledged understanding of the people I was writing about. So, the idea of going and meeting women in working-class areas emanated from that frustration. I could do this because I had just started freelancing; I had no idea that it would become a book.
For the first four years, from 2014 to 2018, the conversations I was having with the women, particularly in northeast Delhi, were unplanned—informal discussions with no specific story or script or idea in mind. After four years, I started organising the material chronologically. When I did that, I discovered that a lot of things that I found from Syeda, Lalita, Radiowali, and others in northeast Delhi had something in parallel with what has happened in India in the last three decades. Particularly, Syeda’s life, for her displacement isn’t just economical, which is how migration is thought to be usually, purely economical, that is; it’s about other aspects—the contemporary history of India that affected most people in a way that they felt internally displaced, living in the national capital with no basic resources or conducive working conditions.
Then, there’s a crisis of masculinity, too, faced by Syeda’s husband and sons, the kind that’s noticed in a transitioning world where women are told to be empowered. But the patriarchal world hasn’t taught men how to deal with educated, empowered, aspirational women with agency. But all this came later, after years of reporting.
The Chakkar: When Syeda comes to Delhi, along with her husband and children, she notices beggars’ bowls having a one-rupee coin. Often such details render a journalistic piece of work a fictive quality. How did you manage to get Syeda to recollect these memories?
Dixit: Let me start by saying that your observations are sharper if you’ve faced discrimination. You tend to immediately notice things that other people may not. For example, regardless of caste, class, social position, or where they come from, almost always a woman doesn’t get offered a chair when they enter a room. But a man is.
Secondly, a lot of what you see in the book happened post-2018 when I had developed a level of trust with these women, and I started probing Syeda with questions like, ‘When you came to the railway station, what was it like? There are beggars at the Banaras railway station, too, so what was different in Delhi?’
But you ask these questions when people start opening up. For example, Syeda told me that when she started taking the DTC bus, she realized she couldn’t take dal for lunch; her tiffin leaked once. Another: For the first time in four years of knowing Syeda, I learnt about Shazeb, her son. She was taking her time to trust me with the information that in 2010 when Indian Mujahideen (IM) people were caught in Delhi, Shazeb was also picked up.
The Chakkar: This makes me wonder if immersive reportage can also be read as a state-of-the-nation novel.
Dixit: One’s imagination often doesn’t reach those specifics, because anything that is shaping our imagination culturally, or the public discourse, is the media: what we watch on TV, phones, or social media. However, all this caters to the top 10 per cent only. Imagine, 90 per cent of our population is nowhere represented. So, unless you actually go to people and spend time with them, you can’t build an understanding of how one remembers things like Syeda did, and when they choose to share it with you.
I may be digressing, but here’s an example. During my reporting time, I met a Rohingya woman in Jammu. She was in her 50s. She told me that she was widowed a long time ago, and she used to work at a grocery shop to take care of her daughters. And she had a dog, too. When Rohingyas were attacked by the military, her house was burnt down. Her daughter was raped and killed. All this she told me with a straight face until she shared that when the UN trucks came to rescue them, they didn’t let her take her dog. That’s when she broke down, telling me in between sobs that the dog kept running after the truck and couldn’t reach her.
“In the times we’re living in now, where there’s whitewashing, propaganda, and misinformation, the only thing that’s going to stay is what we tell each other.”
Often we imagine, something like a loss of home or so much violence around that’ll break someone, but it’s something else: an animal perhaps who was probably their only source of unconditional love and affection. Reporting has helped me learn that.
The Chakkar: You document Syeda’s life through the nine objects in this book, rendering it a structure. But the articles Syeda’s life has been associated through, their histories aren’t documented enough. It’s through oral traditions that such histories get preserved. What was it like weaving a story around, objects, objective reality, and orality in this book?
Dixit: I wish I had a profound answer for it, but I wrote these chapters in terms of when these objects entered Syeda’s life. But having said that, to the other point—on historical documentation: For people on the ground, nothing is documented, so the only way information gets passed around is orally. If you come to think of it, contemporary documentation is a privileged enterprise.
Syeda ended up doing 50 jobs over 30 years. When I say this to people, they get amused. But when I tell them that it’s somebody in northeast Delhi, someone doing any sort of manufacturing work, they say: ‘Haan, ho sakta hai.’ (It’s quite possible.) Again, the problem of imagination, right? Because one’s imagination of what a career can be is privileged: of a formalized space. So people tend to disbelieve if you say you’ve moved 50 times in your career, but otherwise, it was fine. That’s one.
Number two: the challenge for a reporter in such a case is to verify things. When Syeda told me Shazeb got picked up, how do I corroborate that? I can’t find the record. Because often such detainments aren’t recorded. Police don’t have it in their diaries. What do I do now? For a marginalized person, therefore, they’ve only got oral history to testify.
The Chakkar: But again, how do you corroborate what people tell you?
Dixit: My training did inform me that you can’t put anything uncorroborated. But what gave me confidence to trust what I was learning as a reporter was Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Penguin, 1998). The point I’m making is that particularly in the times we’re living in now, where there’s whitewashing, propaganda, and misinformation, the only thing that’s going to stay is what we tell each other. And let me tell you, even if something gets documented, it may get erased. Or it may never be believed. For example, a few people have gotten into arguments with me regarding the money workers like Syeda get—40 rupees for 12 dozen [of articles]. But people do.
The Chakkar: My mother used to manage women who used to fix connectors. They were paid five rupees for 100 pieces. I’ve done that work, too. So have my siblings. When we were very young, our mother did the work herself, too.
Dixit: See, you know it because of your personal experience. Once I was telling someone in my neighbourhood about the book, informing her how people have no edible oil to add to their aaloo ki subzi; they’re making it with paani ka tadka, because edible oil is so expensive, and so are potatoes. This person turned around and asked me if I was struggling with my monthly budget. Imagine how disconnected people are from ground reality; they’re so individualistic that they don’t have time or care for anyone else’s concerns.
The Chakkar: In telling Syeda’s life story, why was it important to break the narrative with what was happening in India at the time? Was this an intrinsic structure to each chapter that you wanted to render?
Dixit: As I said, I could only sense the need to organize everything in a timeline. But when I started doing that, I realized, okay, these are three decades of our lives, let’s check what was happening at a national level in these three decades. For example, with Chandrayaan-1 being launched, what are its implications, forget Syeda, on anyone’s life? Concerning Syeda, it was important to reflect on the Right to Education Act being passed, because, at the same time, Shazeb and Salman were dropping out of school. Initially, nothing of that sort, making connections, was planned; it happened eventually.
The Chakkar: Given that Syeda was a cinephile, I was wondering about how, over the past few decades, the visual medium has in many ways divorced itself from representing working-class lives. But even if it were to, theatres and cinema halls are no longer affordable, accessible spaces. Reshma’s (Syeda’s daughter) job in a mall is a case in point in demonstrating how an infrastructure is put in place to further the gap that already existed in society. What do you make of it?
“There’s a pressure to monetise even a doodle you’re making; or if you’re baking for pleasure, there’ll be people telling you to make profit out of it. This, I believe, is the biggest failure of everyone collectively.”
Dixit: That’s an important point. Before that, while we are making a distinction between cinema, social media, journalism, and whatever, we must understand how for people everything is basically ‘content’, because of the commercialization of news, information, and art. In the sense that there’s a pressure to monetise even a doodle you’re making; or if you’re baking for pleasure, there’ll be people telling you to make profit out of it. This, I believe, is the biggest failure of everyone collectively.
Now, what goes around producing cinema is corporatized, too. For example, you can say that we’ve made a Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017) but there’s no Bareilly in Bareilly Ki Barfi, because someone somewhere imagined that Bareilly, which select people who can buy a 500-rupee-ticket can come and watch.
The Chakkar: In the same vein, what do you think about the change in media accessibility?
Shouldn’t information be available for all to access? I disagree when someone says that everyone should pay for independent news. Because that may even mean that those who cannot afford to pay for an authentic news organisation’s subscription don’t deserve verified news. The fact that nobody is accountable any longer for the public interest is a collective failure.
The Chakkar: As a writer-reporter, how do you maintain a distance between the story you report and the kind of relationship you may have nurtured over the years with the subjects of your work?
Dixit: All my reporting life, I haven’t been able to follow the textbook format of what a reporter should do while speaking to people. You can’t expect any stranger to answer questions till you’re willing to put in the effort and make yourself understood and be trusted enough to answer anything—forget deep, personal stories. It’s basic human decency in exchange: to open up about your life with people too. Then, one mustn’t forget that it takes time for people to open up.
Regarding distance: if, for example, I’m reporting on someone for the last four years whose house has been burnt down, and this person calls me up, then I can’t have objectivity. In such a situation, you try to do what you can. And I’ve been in touch with most people I’ve reported on. I feel this objectivity thing is a corporate way of understanding the world; it’s transactional.
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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
