Neha Dixit's book exposes the brutal underbelly of India’s ‘informal economy’

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. One of the consequences of reading The Many Lives of Syeda X is that referring to what is called “the informal economy" in India will always henceforth seem a willful denial of reality. That part of the economy in Neha Dixit’s telling of many of the 50 jobs that her protagonist Syeda has worked at over a few decades is better described as a Dickensian brutalisation of a vulnerable workforce.

Consider the almond industry, well documented in this book. Almond shells “had to be soaked in acid to soften them faster. Most workers used their bare hands, teeth and feet to break the shells," Dixit reports.

“Lalita, Syeda, everyone had disfigured nails and bruised fingertips. Syeda found it difficult to eat meals with her hands because chilli and other spices irritated the fingers. There was a joke (about this): almond factories teach women to eat with spoons." Women form the bulk of the workforce in this vast underbelly of the economy.

The relentless bleakness of this narrative is the very opposite of the India story on our TV screens and newspapers. To paraphrase what Polly Toynbee wrote about the US in her introduction to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA, this Other India “is a secret continent…the barely reported truth is the essential work done by people paid below subsistence wages". The career graph of Syeda X and millions like her is the alter ego of the Sensex.