Review of The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Neha Dixit (Juggernaut, 2024)

Neha Dixit’s book The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian is a cross between a novel and a historical account, based on interviews conducted by Dixit, an award-winning journalist, over several years.

The titular character is a real working-class Muslim woman living in Delhi, having migrated from the city of Banaras in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Dixit charts the course of Syeda’s life up until 2020, as she navigates the rise of Hindu supremacy and a climate of increasing hostility toward Muslims in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century North India.

Since its launch in Delhi this August, the book has caused a stir among Indian audiences. Dixit is known for her various investigations into atrocities and scandals involving the Hindutva right. She has long been a target of the clampdown on journalism under the rule of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Her retelling of Syeda’s story is no less daring.

Many Lives

The title itself is indicative of the book’s nature, invoking a combination of universality and anonymity. Instantly we are told that this is not a novel, and yet readers will find themselves as engaged with the narrative as if they were reading a work of fiction. However, interspersed direct quotes from Syeda jolt us out of the narrative, serving as a powerful reminder that Dixit actually spoke to the people whose stories are at the heart of her book.

The phrase “many lives” has more than one meaning. While Syeda’s experience is one that she shares with many others, she is also forced to reinvent her own life several times. This is hinted at by the objects on the book’s cover, such as a spool of thread and a set of tweezers, which Syeda employs as working tools at various points in her life.

Dixit begins by introducing Syeda’s father, Rashid, as a child growing up in a weaver family producing sarees in Banaras shortly after India gained independence from British rule in 1947. She introduces the subject of Hindu-Muslim relations in postindependence India right from the opening page, when Rashid’s own father explains to him that “a saree is not Hindu or Muslim” and that Banaras is a Hindu city “only since the angrez [British] started calling it that. Banaras is a masaaldan, a spice box.” At this point, we see the role of British colonialism in cementing divides between Hindus and Muslims, and the firm resistance against such divisions that characterized the postindependence period.

Interestingly, the opening page mentions the weaving of sarees with the design of the tricolor Indian flag — “the new flag of independent India.” Today, this flag is being appropriated by Modi’s Hindu nationalist regime, which falsely projects itself as anti-colonial despite its complicity in ongoing forms of imperialism through strong ties with multinational corporations based in the Global North. There is a sense of despair in reading Dixit’s first pages and knowing what is to come — both in Syeda’s life and the wider Indian political climate.

The author sprinkles occasional mentions of events like Hindi film releases into the timeline of Syeda’s story, locating it in its cultural context. These take the form of single-sentence paragraphs in bold font. We soon learn of two events from the year 1973: the release of the film Zanjeer, which “popularized the angry young man prototype in Indian movies,” and Syeda’s own birth.

Dixit’s juxtaposition of these two events foreshadows how different forms of patriarchy will shape Syeda’s life throughout, from childhood to marriage and beyond. Over the course of the book, the bold sentences become more politically focused, lending a haunting rhythm to Dixit’s account of a growing and changing economy that is constantly edging closer to fascism.

Prejudice Against Muslims

The first indication of anti-Muslim feeling comes when Syeda’s husband Akmal overhears a snide, seemingly offhand comment on the number of children he has from a local Hindu weaver. Dixit ominously describes this as “the beginning,” explaining how this remark speaks to the harmful false narrative that Muslims will become the dominant group in India by having large numbers of children.

This communal scaremongering later informed the passage of Modi’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), arguably a step toward the ethnic cleansing of India’s Muslim population, which has gone hand in hand with religious leaders openly calling for genocide of Muslims and for India to become a Hindu state. Dixit highlights how such rhetoric was being used to fuel anti-Muslim feeling as Hindutva forces were beginning to gain power in the political sphere. The BJP’s 1996 election manifesto included several policies, such as the proposal for a National Register of Citizens (NRC), that have become a disturbing reality in recent years, as Dixit will later discuss.

The author notes a key distinction between Hindu-Muslim relations within the Baranasi weaving community before and after the rise of Hindutva. Previously, while “distance was maintained in the social sphere,” the overall picture was one of “coexistence and acceptance” rather than hostility: “Traditionally, the weavers were Muslims and the traders were Hindus. Both depended on each other.”

At one point, Dixit quotes four lines from a poem by the fourteenth-century poet Kabir, who was also a weaver from Banaras. According to Kabir, while Hindus and Muslims might have their own gods, “no one was able to know who the real God actually is.” This sense of collective religious uncertainty contrasts starkly with the convictions of Hindu supremacists that were seeping into the weaving community several hundred years later, during Syeda’s lifetime.

Dixit’s account remains focused on Syeda’s experience as a working-class Muslim woman and the ways in which these aspects of her identity intersect. In the early chapters, she chronicles the changing experience of the weavers under the pressures of global capitalism, as the demand for traditional handlooms decreases, putting many weavers out of work. When this shift converges with the rise of Hindutva fascism, Dixit’s narrative creates a haunting atmosphere that culminates in the first major outbreak of violence during Syeda’s life.

Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindutva forces and political leaders in December 1992, many Muslim families like Syeda’s were forced from their homes in a frenzy of communal violence or even killed by armed police, and Muslim men were tortured for days on end. Dixit examines how this violence led to a shift in gender relations within Muslim communities as women had to take on responsibility for tasks outside the home for the first time.

While this experience may have been liberating to some extent, it inevitably added pressure on the women. “The mental load of thinking and communicating what and how things had to be done,” as Dixit observes, fell on Syeda in this period. In the aftermath, Syeda and her family move to Delhi — the first time their lives are upturned, but far from the last.

Journey to Delhi

Dixit’s detailed account of the family’s train journey as they migrate to Delhi, one of many such episodes, underlines the harsh conditions of poverty and Syeda’s firm resilience. It is during these sections that one feels most as if one is reading a novel — a testament to Dixit’s narrative skill and her ability to bring the stories from her interviews to life.

Having paid regular visits to Delhi and the UP border area throughout my life, I often found Dixit’s descriptions of these areas and particular stations and landmarks within them evocative. The presence of the Hindu right was also all too familiar: today BJP-ruled UP is notorious among Indian states for its high rates of anti-Muslim, gender, and caste-based violence.

Syeda’s role in providing for her family expands further once they are in Delhi, as she plays the roles of sole carer as well as main breadwinner throughout her three children’s upbringing. At one memorable point, she has the stark, timeless realization: “Thank god for women, humanity is alive!” This simple sentiment encapsulates the endless burden of invisibilized labor which continues to fall on women globally.

When Syeda is looking for work in Delhi during the mid 1990s, Dixit explains how many people are working as bricklayers for the Ram Temple being built on the site of the Babri Masjid — a classic example of fascist forces building widespread support through creating jobs for working-class people. This is also an early indication that Syeda and her family have not been able to escape these forces by leaving Banaras.

Syeda moves between numerous jobs, eventually starting her own business at home making “per-piece work,” various small items, with the help of her young daughter. She also makes a brief foray into activism. At one point, having struggled with isolation since moving to Delhi, she discovers a community of women workers who begin organizing for their rights with the help of a local union.

Rehearsed Responses

Dixit traces Syeda’s relationship with patriarchy and with other women around her. She develops a “rehearsed response” to women experiencing sexual harassment from male subcontractors in the workplace — “Don’t do things that make the men pay attention to you” — instead of acknowledging the responsibility of the subcontractors themselves. Dixit explains this as a way for women in her position to maintain the “ecosystem” of the local area that “sheltered them, employed them, helped them survive.”

As her children grow up, Dixit notes that Syeda starts to replicate patriarchal attitudes toward younger women that she herself found to be suffocating in her younger days. This does not contradict her independence or her ability to demand her rights in certain contexts. While maintaining complete understanding of her perspective, Dixit never shies away from portraying Syeda’s less sympathetic moments, such as her sometimes harsh treatment of her daughter Reshma.

Alongside Syeda, other characters with their own backstories are introduced, both Hindu and Muslim (a status that is sometimes only indicated by their names). Religion is not always a major focus of their day-to-day lives, yet religious tensions continually reappear against a backdrop of shifting local power dynamics and competition around land and housing.

When Syeda first attempts to send her children to school, the intertwined issues of Islamophobia and xenophobia rear their heads once again as the principal expresses fear that “she could be Bangladeshi” because she does not have an identity card. Dixit explains how identity cards were a requirement for parents to enrol their children in school. Once again, this foreshadows the subsequent introduction of the CAA and NRC, which have disenfranchised Indian Muslims who lack proof of their citizenship.

Eventually, once her children do start school, Syeda’s son Salman makes friends with the son of a local Sikh landowner, only for deep-rooted Islamophobia to manifest itself when he visits their house. Syeda and her family face paternalistic and prejudicial attitudes as working-class Muslims, offered charity and looked after by wealthy non-Muslims while at the same time being stigmatized for their religion.

A Damning Indictment

The book comes with an endorsement commending Dixit for a work that “rescues the lives of ordinary Indians from invisibility.” This is true, of course: like many countries with deep-rooted economic inequalities, many among the upper echelons of society are oblivious to the lives of poor and working-class Indians. But it would be dangerously depoliticizing to focus solely on this aspect of the book.

Economic inequality is not the only factor that shapes Syeda’s life. This crucially intersects with her position as a Muslim woman in a country that has experienced the rise of Islamophobia and Hindu supremacy over recent decades. In the climate currently pervading India under Modi’s decade-long rule, Dixit’s book is a brave and damning indictment of Hindutva fascism that shines a crucial spotlight on the ordinary lives that continue to suffer its horrifying impact. It is also an unapologetically feminist celebration of their daily existence.

(This article is reprinted from Jacobin, October 2024)