In this episode, I am in conversation with Neha Dixit about her new book, ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian’- an outcome of 9 years and more than 900 interviews to tell the story of an ordinary working-class faceless Indian woman, from the early 1990s to the present day. 

We also discuss her journey as a journalist since 2007 and her extraordinary resolve to report the ground realities of the ‘New India’ in the face of increased corporatisation of the media, ongoing law and order cases and criminal cases against her that take years in the court of law (two days after recording this episode, she had to appear for a hearing in Guwahati), imminent threats and intimidation.

References: 

1. Neha Dixit: Journalism, Twitter, Scroll, The Wire, Outlook
2. The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Neha Dixit
3. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia
4. Operation #BetiUthao: The Sangh’s Stolen Child Crusade 
5. A Chronicle of the Crime Fiction That is Adityanath’s Encounter Raj
6. For Haryana Police, the Holy Cow Is an Excuse for Extra-Judicial Killings
7. Muzaffarnagar riots: This graphic narrative tells the story of the courage of seven rape survivors