India has seen several monumental economic and political developments in the three decades since the 1990s. Several key facets of these have been documented, examined, or commented upon. Government agencies, academics, journalists, and activists have approached these from different perspectives and towards varying ends. India is a growth story of an emerging economy poised for global dominance, we are told. India’s economic liberalisation has given rise to rapid urbanisation with thousands migrating daily to cities leaving their villages and traditional livelihoods behind. The majority of ordinary Indians are employed in the informal sector with abysmally low wages and without social security. They are forced to live in urban poverty and squalor at the margins in big cities such as New Delhi. Rising communalism and the politics of religious division have made matters worse for India’s plural society and particularly for Muslims.
Neha Dixit’s book is uniquely authentic and eye-opening. It is a first-hand account of the life of a working-class Muslim woman from a weaver family in Benaras (Varanasi). Syeda has to migrate, live, and work in Delhi’s slums after losing her meagre belongings in communal riots following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. But how should Syeda be described? She cannot simply be categorised as a Muslim woman. Like most working-class women from marginalised backgrounds, she has multiple identities and manifold burdens. She is a mother, a homemaker, a daily wager, a diligent worker with vast experience, a strategist, the glue holding her family together, a survivor, and an ant-like creature whose life is signified by incessant drudgery and the absence of hope. She toils on unrecognised and uncared for in a male-dominated world both inside and outside the cramped room that is her home. She deals daily with subcontractors who provide piecemeal home-based work to women like her. She has to negotiate with the police when her husband, Akmal, and later on her sons are routinely picked up and tortured merely for being Muslims. And while doing all this, she must not ever forget that she is just a woman. Is Syeda an everywoman?