What does it mean to be poor and working class in India today? What does it mean to be a woman? And what does it mean to be a Muslim? These are some of the themes that journalist Neha Dixit explores with all their interconnections in her dazzling debut The Many Lives of Syeda X.This book, a product of nine years of research and a staggering 900 interviews, reconstructs the life and world of Syeda, a working-class Muslim woman, over the last three decades. And in doing so, Dixit tells us the larger story of how the deadly cocktail of neoliberal capitalism and majoritarian politics is ravaging the lives of those on the margins.The book begins in the early 1990s, a time of tumultuous change, not just in our nation’s history, but also in the lives of those central to this book. Living in Banaras, they were the ones weaving the magic of the proverbial Benarasi sarees. The opening of the market/economic reforms of 1991 that adversely affected the handloom industry, and the communal violence post the Babri demolition, forced Syeda’s family to migrate from Banaras to Delhi.They come in search of safety and security, but those are things that always remain elusive. From being highly skilled weavers, they descend into a life of bare survival in the informal labour market of Delhi. Change, and all its attendant insecurities, becomes the only thing permanent in their lives. Syeda, her family’s primary breadwinner, had to change jobs over 50 times in the next two decades.Neha Dixit The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian Juggernaut (2024).The major part of the book is devoted to Syeda’s life in the Jamna–paar or the trans-Yamuna area in northeast Delhi. It is here that she has spent most of her life in Delhi, barring a brief initial stay in Old Delhi.With fascinating attention to detail, Dixit lays bare the landscape of this area, its unauthorised colonies and clustered working-class settlements, dungeons like eight-foot by eight-foot sweatshops in narrow alleys and small production units in basements illuminated only by a single light source; workers working in abysmal conditions for 12-15 hours a day for a pittance and entire families manufacturing objects in their shoe-sized homes, and getting piece-based wages in return.This is the dark underbelly of neoliberal capitalism, where big corporations outsource work to contractors and subcontractors, and labour laws, minimum wages, and safe and hygienic work conditions remain unheard of. It is, after all, these forms of exploitation that optimise profit margins for the big corporates.The chapters of the book are titled after the various items that Syeda has been involved in manufacturing, including raisins, gajak, doorknobs, almonds, soft toys, incense sticks, tricolour flags, wedding cards and so on.But within these chapters, we find many more things. Jeans, buttons, rakhis, dolls, electrical spare parts, bindis, footballs, cricket balls, garlands, idols – you name a thing and it is highly likely that it has been manufactured in this part of the city, by women workers like Syeda, who still provide cheaper labour than their male counterparts.The book closes with the Delhi riots of 2020 that had a cataclysmic impact on Syeda’s life. She had migrated from Banaras to Delhi in the early 1990s to escape communal violence in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition. And communal violence returned to haunt her in 2020. It is akin to what Harsh Mander describes as Muslim families often narrating their lives as phases between one riot and another.In opening up Syeda’s world, Dixit also introduces us to a wide range of people, contractors, sub-contractors, her fellow women workers, and their sisterhood in times of despair and struggle.She sketches the characters of left-wing activists trying to organise informal workers, right-wing vigilantes tasked with moral policing and keeping the communal pot boiling, policemen, and, of course, her family members. Her husband, who idles away drunk, and her children, who, as they grow up, make choices that are quite not to Syeda’s liking.We meet a factory owner who Syeda works for, who keeps going to jail every time there is a fire or an accident in some factory or the other. It is only later that we discover that he didn’t own any of these factories, but was merely a proxy for the real owners. His ‘job’ was to serve jail time every time something went wrong. The real owners realised it was much more economical to pay these proxies for their services than to ensure safe working conditions for the workers.The people chronicled in the book hardly have much control over their lives. Yet, for Dixit, these people are not mere victims. Among all the constraints weighing on them, they exercise agency, they make choices.There is a vivid description of a strike that turned out to be one of the biggest and longest strikes by unorganised workers in Delhi – that Syeda and other fellow women workers processing almonds pulled off in 2009. In the face of threats and violence from factory owners, their henchmen and the police, as well as (for many women) opposition from their husbands, the women workers stayed resolute in their demands for better wages. They were finally able to force their owners to agree to them.And then there are other forms of agency as well. Syeda’s elder son falls in love and subsequently elopes with a Hindu girl, despite vicious threats from right-wing outfits that start mushrooming in the area around 2014. Syeda’s daughter, who used to work alongside her at home manufacturing various things since childhood, is determined to pursue education and learn computer skills to live a life better than her parents’.Dixit’s gaze is vast and sweeping, and she can situate events in people’s lives within a larger social canvas. And in shifting the readers’ gaze to the Jamna–paar area of Delhi, she makes us look at the city differently.This is not the Delhi of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens or imperial monuments. This is not the Delhi of the rich and powerful living inside gated colonies. This is not the Delhi of politicians and bureaucrats. The Delhi vividly brought to life in the book is working-class Delhi. The city seen through the eyes of its invisible poorest people, the disposables who get covered up with green sheets every time a foreign dignitary comes visiting.Also read: A Book That is a Remarkable, Quiet and Yet Devastating Account of An Ordinary Woman’s LifeThis book also seriously indicts the state for how it abdicates its responsibilities in these working-class areas of healthcare, education, basic living conditions and the enforcement of its own labour laws. And then, for the manner in which the state presents itself, through the police, to maintain this abysmal order, each time the people demand a better life.It also demonstrates how supposedly good causes, like concerns around Delhi’s air pollution or legislations against child labour, end up worsening the lives of the urban poor. These concerns often lead to closures or relocation of factories, which means those working there would have to start all over from scratch, and find work again, even as the rich and powerful factory owners find ways to circumvent the law.By telling Syeda’s story the way she does, Dixit also rescues the story of what it means to be a Muslim in India today, away from the time-worn stereotypical tropes of an Islamicate culture, architectural marvels, Urdu poetry, culinary delicacies and a lament about a decaying Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.For those defending India’s secularism, let me quote the author’s profound advice, “if the conversation of pluralism does not marry caste, class and gender intersection, it will only remain the discourse of the elite”.The major Muslim experience in India is after all the experience of a largely urban working class community of skilled craftsmen, artisans, weavers, iron-smiths, carpenters, locksmiths etc that has been hit hard by the liberalisation of the economy, the closure of mills, the dismantling of the working class and the simultaneous rise of right-wing majoritarian fundamentalist politics. This section of the population now fills the ranks of the urban poor and informal footloose labour.If one replaces the trans-Yamuna area of Delhi described in this book with, say, Malegaon, Dhule, or Bhiwandi, or Aligarh, Moradabad or Kanpur – all erstwhile industrial centres with sizable Muslim populations – one would find many similarities.Noted scholar Anand Teltumbde once referred to the Dalits as the ‘organic proletariat’ of India. Doesn’t this conceptualisation also aptly fit working-class Indian Muslims?Dixit’s conceptual clarity is remarkable and her prose lucid, and she writes with deep empathy for the people. She constructs a virtual social history, or history from below, reminiscent of the flavours one gets while reading the works of old British Marxist historians like E.P. Thompson or Eric Hobsbawm.Dixit reminds us that a journalist’s job is not to act as an amplifier for the establishment’s propaganda, but to bring into focus the people and issues that are conveniently invisibilised and disregarded.This is her first book, and one hopes that it is the first of many more to come.Umar Khalid is a former JNU student leader and PhD scholar in history, known for his activism and dissent against state policies including the amendments to citizenship laws. Arrested under the UAPA in 2020 for alleged conspiracy in the Delhi riots, he remains in Tihar Jail without trial.