Review: The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit

Sarees clogged the drains in Lohta, a small town known for its weavers in Banaras, during the bloody riots across India after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. “The police destroyed so many looms in the weavers’ houses that... Lohta was engulfed in stench. The looms that wove stardust turned to ash,” writes Neha Dixit in her meticulously reported first book, The Many Lives of Syeda X.

Syeda, the pseudonymous main character, is a Muslim woman from a family of weavers in Banaras, whose life is upended by the destruction of the handloom sector due to government policies and the riots. She moves to Delhi where she has, over the last three decades, toiled for 16 hours a day in more than 50 odd jobs trying to scrape out a living. The book follows her life, focusing on her work as an “invisible worker” from the spice market in Chandni Chowk to Sabhapur on the outskirts of the city, and ultimately to Karawal Nagar, a working-class neighbourhood. Dixit, a journalist who reports on politics and social justice, spent a decade interviewing Syeda and hundreds of others, to piece together the story of an overworked and underpaid woman whose life maps, quite precisely, India’s descent into Hindu nationalism from the 1992 riots to the 2020 Delhi riots.

The book opens almost cinematically, rich in detail. “Banaras is a masaaldan, a spice box,” Syeda’s grandfather used to say talking about the multicultural fabric of the city. Her father Rashid ran away from home leaving the family occupation to follow his artistic temperament. He joined The Gulab Theatre Company, a nautanki (folk theatre) troupe, run by Gulab Bai, a wildly famous performer in the 1950 and 1960s whose music was often brazenly plagiarized by the Hindi film industry. Nautanki work would pause every monsoon, and Rashid visited his wife during the rainy season. And this is how, Dixit writes, “…Three barsaati mendaks were born. Rain Frogs. The last rain frog was Syeda, the only daughter after two sons in 1973.”

Syeda is married off to Akmal, a highly specialised weaver who worked exclusively on high-end sarees. When the riots broke out, Syeda remembers the police, complicit in the violence, setting their home on fire. Later, when she walked into her charred home, she saw, “The sarees were still there on the looms, half torn and half burnt. The black soot on one yellow saree looked like a motif, evenly scattered, a sign of high-quality craftmanship. When the lantern light fell on the broken zari threads around the loom, it shone like the melting lava from dozakh, hell, that she had heard about so often as a child.”

The fabric, the warp and weft of Hindu-Muslim coexistence, that her grandfather believed was inexorably linked, had unraveled. “This was the first time we experienced terror. Because of our religion,” Syeda says. This, coupled with India’s textile policy, which had incentivized power looms and favoured exports, ruined lakhs of weavers and others dependent on the handloom industry. Akmal was forced out of the trade and the craft that his family had honed for generations.

They moved to Delhi where he could only find work as a porter and went from being a fine weaver to pulling heavy rickshaws and carts for ₹40 per day. The money was far from enough, and Syeda had to chip in, finding work she could do at home while taking care of the children. She learnt to work, at appalling rates, like a machine. To remove stems from two kilos of raisins, for instance, she would get half a rupee — so she began working late into the night, making her way through hundreds of kilos, to earn about ₹500 a month. For the next 30 years, the family would survive on Syeda finding similar work — shelling, assembling, stitching — huge quantities of labour for pennies.

Syeda’s life as a worker and a Muslim woman are the two threads that the book trails.

Dixit is able to capture the tragedy of being Muslim and aspirational in the Nineties, that decade which began with the demolition of Babri Masjid and ended with the Kargil war, while writing about the family’s time in the Gujjar heartland of Sabhapur. They moved there when the Delhi government’s policies to tackle pollution in the cities moves factories to the outskirts. Here, we see increasing evidence of open hostility towards Muslims — the fate of Muslims in the area; and where Syeda’s younger son Salman, realising that his Muslim identity made his friends see him as lesser and even as an enemy of the state, develops an inferiority complex that would last a lifetime.

The book has two major flaws — a kind of preachiness, and an incongruent poetry — which are offset in the beginning by the powerful storytelling and character development. But about a hundred pages in, the narrative dips. And Dixit’s intensive reportage is eclipsed by her over-explanation of the Indian political scenario and patriarchy. The platitudes are almost gnawing: A woman’s husband’s home is supposed to be hers, Dixit writes, “except that it hardly ever is.” Indians are coaxed into marriage to meet the last wishes of ageing family members “except that it is never the last wish.” Syeda felt starved of love, “like most women.” At some point, Dixit declares that “Undermining the intelligence of women is a global sport.”

And the poetry — entire stanzas from Urdu poetry and Bollywood song lyrics — are scattered through the text and as epigraphs for chapters, all dutifully translated. There’s also the voiceover of a Fair & Lovely ad from the 1990s, there’s the Tata Young version of the Dhoom (2002) title track (Dhoom machale dhoom machale dhoom), there’s Zauq. The idea, I suppose, was to capture mood, a kind of soundtrack. But the rhythm is lost, the lines pitiably jarring on the page.

The heart of the book is Karawal Nagar where women workers like Syeda are engaged in gruelling work, often under terrible conditions, for poor wages, no rights or safety equipment. It is shocking, even for readers who have followed the (ongoing) news reports of these workers, especially those engaged in almond processing. But Dixit becomes too committed to painstakingly cataloguing Syeda’s work history: making cycle brake wires, photo frames, toys, cloth bags, bindis, door hinges... administering polio drops, a few years working as a cleaner at an abortion clinic... then back to home-based work making small items or parts of things. Crucial as this information is for the book, it forces Syeda, her personhood, into the background. If her life was indeed so mechanical and devoid of joy, we needed to hear about it from Syeda or others around her.

There’s a glimpse of joy amidst the tribulations only later when the book zooms out to tell the stories of other women workers. Syeda finds a group of friends led by Nisha Radiowali, a fiery woman who lives alone and on her own terms. Dixit describes how shelling almonds — a process that involved soaking almonds in acid to soften them — without protective gear had injured the women’s fingertips, so they could not eat with their hands. There was a joke amongst them that “almond factories teach women to eat with spoons.” After a successful strike of almond workers in 2009, Dixit writes, the women who had moved to Karawal Nagar “to measure the sky” were able to “move the moon.” This section is compelling not only because it ends in the rare win — but it feels like the book is able to rest comfortably only on the shoulders of a revolutionary character like Radiowali.

Dixit seems unable to give Syeda agency, especially when it involves complicated feelings that could be considered “problematic.” When Syeda’s children grow up, there’s a condescension with which Syeda is handled.

Shazeb, the conscientious elder son, who had just started to lighten his mother’s workload, elopes with a Hindu woman. Syeda blames her daughter-in-law for doing “some black magic on my son.” Dixit does not allow her protagonist any space for grief, the devastating sense of betrayal and abandonment, the resentment of never being able to share her financial burdens with anyone for too long, the empty nest, and the loss of love. Instead, she pronounces, “It was easier to believe that a daughter-in-law had done black magic than to recognise a son’s desire to break free. Acknowledging the son’s agency is harder than blaming the daughter-in-law.” For good measure, she goes on the denounce the patriarchal “burden of obligation.” To her Indian readers, she explains, “In Indian families, a mutual obligation, even co-dependence, exists between parents and children. When the child is young, the parents must do their best to raise them, particularly if a boy. When a child is grown up, they are obligated to obey their parents and put them before themselves... [Akmal and Syeda] were conditioned to embrace the victimhood of being abandoned as parents when Shazeb left with Babli.”

Salman, the most tragic of the characters, is one that readers would especially come to feel for after following his childhood in Sabhapur as a sensitive and adventurous boy. His life, if explored, could have revealed something about the crisis of Muslim masculinity in India — particularly his inability to recover from the attacks on his identity as a young Muslim man. After Shazeb leaves, Salman tries to cheer his mother up by tonsuring his head. “Now, no girl will look at me to run away with,” he tells Syeda. It’s a moment filled with heartbreaking sweetness, so it becomes particularly unsettling as Dixit seems to turn it into a joke: “With his shaved upper lip and the sparse hair on his face that he was trying to grow into a beard… Salman’s sacrifice of shaving his head was not really needed. No woman looked at or talked to him anyway.”

The climax of the book is life coming full spiral — Syeda must live through another riot only now their circumstances are far more diminished than three decades ago. Dixit presents powerful first-hand accounts of the family’s experience as Karawal Nagar became a war zone. Once again, they’re devastated by the riots, their home destroyed. Once again, they must leave. But their lives are plummeted further into the abyss with the COVID-19 lockdown. Hindu nationalism has been firmly established. But here, led by Syeda’s independent-minded daughter Reshma, the book ends with a sliver of hope.

The Many Lives of Syeda X is an important work, documenting events that have transformed the country and the lived reality of millions of Indians. The problem is that it tries to be many things: a report on the conditions of Delhi’s migrant workers, a chilling record of the reality of being Muslim in this country, an archive of news headlines, a collection of Hindi/Urdu poetry, phrases and words translated into English... In this surfeit of information though, Syeda loses out.

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.