Journalism Against Forgetting: Media, Power, and Democracy in South Asia

What does democracy from below look like? This talk will look at how ordinary lives are reshaped by surveillance, majoritarianism, and corporate-political nexus in South Asia. Exploring media influence, gendered surveillance, majoritarian and casteist politics, the struggles of urban poor workers and the slow erosion of democratic rights in contemporary South Asia through Neha Dixit’s The Many Lives of Syeda X, this talk explores how journalism can recover erased histories, expose routine violence,

Neha Dixit is an independent journalist and author based in New Delhi. She has covered politics, gender, and social justice for two decades. She reports for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Caravan, The Wire and other notable publications. Dixit has won over a dozen international and national journalism awards including the International Press Freedom Award 2019 from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist 2017, Lorenzo Natali Prize for Journalism from the European Commission, 2011 among others. Her most recent publication, The Many Lives of Syeda X  looks at the last 30 years of India through the eyes of a working-class, migrant Muslim woman in Delhi who becomes a part of the cheap female labour economy and takes up over 50 jobs in three decades without once getting paid a minimum wage. The book is the recipient of multiple prizes including the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman award, and the C. G. Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing in 2026.