Neha Dixit

Neha Dixit is an Indian freelance journalist covering politics, gender and social justice. She has been awarded over a dozen awards including the Chameli Devi Jain Award (2016) as well as CPJ International Press Freedom Award (2019).

Early life

Neha attended school in Lucknow, and graduated in English Literature from Miranda House, University of Delhi. Thereafter, she pursued a Masters in Convergent Journalism from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia in New Delhi."Neha Dixit wins Red Cross award for writing on women raped during 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots"
''TwoCircles'', 1 December 2015

Career

Neha began her career as an investigative journalist with ''Tehelka'', before switching to the Special Investigation Team of India Today. Since 2012, she has been a freelancer. Her works have been published in The Wire, Al Jazeera, Outlook, The New York Times, The Caravan, Himal Southasian, and The Washington Post among others.

Notable reports and awards

In August 2014, Dixit detailed the circumstances faced by seven rape survivors of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. This won her the 2014 Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism and the 2015 Press Institute of India-Red Cross award.

In 2016, Dixit chronicled (for Outlook) the abduction of 31 girls from Assam by a Hindu nationalist organization to infuse them with "nationalist ideologies" — a criminal defamation suit was subsequently filed against Dixit, in what was condemned by Committee to Protect Journalists as a tool of intimidation. The same year, she was conferred with the Chameli Devi Jain Award, the highest honor for women journalists in India: her meticulous nature of coverage and cross-checking of involved facts were admired in particular.

In 2018, she reported on poor Indians, who were unethically drawn into participating in illegal drug-trials by pharma giants. In 2019, Dixit documented a range of extrajudicial killings by police forces in Uttar Pradesh and other states, getting threats from high-ranked police officials, in the process. Her reports prompted a note of concern by Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The same year, she received the CPJ International Press Freedom Award.

She has bee
recognised
as one of the most credible Indian journalists in India because of her painstaking in-depth ground, intersectional reporting that steers clear of binary, opinionated, formulaic mainstream coverage of news.

She has been a visiting faculty at Ashoka University, MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia University, NALSAR, Hyderabad, IIMC and others.

Books

In 2016, Neha was one of the first Indian journalists to use a graphic format for reportage. She contributed a story "The Girl Not from Madras" to the comic book anthology 'First Hand: Graphic Non-fiction from India', about the exploitation of women in India.

She contributed a chapter on Sexual violence during sectarian violence in India to 'Breaching the Citadel, an anthology of sexual violence in South Asia 2016 by Zubaan Books.

She wrote the piece, 'Outcast Outlawed: The Bandit Queen (1996)' for the book ‘Bad’ Women of Bombay Films: Studies in Desire and Anxiety published by Palgrave Macmillan. Details the history of desire and anxiety underlying the cinematic representation of the modern Indian woma

The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

On August 14, 2024, Dixit's first non-fiction book, 'The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian' published by Juggernaut Books was launched in Delhi. The book looks at the last three decades of Indian socio-political and economic turmoil through the eyes of an urban poor, migrant, working-class woman and her family.

The book was published in UK, Ireland, Australia and other commonwealth countries on May 1, 2025 by Footnote Press, an imprint of Bonnier Books.

She received th
New India Fellowship
in 2017 for this book driven by long research and narrative journalism. It tells the story of an impoverished Muslim migrant family in India’s capital, negotiating the pitfalls of politics and economic servitude, holding up a mirror to the shadows behind the sheen of “New India.”

John Reed reviewed the book for Financial Times and wrote:'Ahead of the book’s launch, publicists were comparing it to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), her chronicle of life in a Mumbai slum. However, Dixit goes one step further by zooming out and providing a historical sweep...Dixit’s book is a vivid and memorable account of how post-economic reform in India works. It is a trenchant and invaluable people’s history of the bottom of the pyramid in the world’s most populous nation.'

Rahul Jacob wrote in the Mint Lounge, 'There will likely not be a better book of gritty Indian reporting for years to come-and certainly none that takes contemporary Indian economic myth-making to task as The Many Lives of Syeda X poignantly does.’

Priya Ramani wrote that it is 'the invisible India book everyone must read.'

Priavi Joshi wrote in the Scroll.in, 'The book is a testament to what fine journalism promises to be – rich, complex, empowering the forgotten, and capable of capturing the zeitgeist.'

Ruben Banerjee wrote in The Federal that 'The story that Dixit ends up writing is a paean to the grit and gumption of the untold millions adrift on despair in urban India, narrated without condescension. The book is also as much a testimony to the author’s bottomless commitment to narrate and document real stories of a mass of real and unsung people that should really matter.

Prathyush Parasuraman wrote in the Frontline, 'To read the journalist Neha Dixit’s The Many Lives Of Syeda X then is to see life invade storytelling in one of the most thrilling Marxist texts. It is The Great Indian Marxist Book, a journalist’s account of one woman traced from the early 1990s to the present day, from the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 to the Delhi riots of 2020, threading through 50 different types of jobs...Dixit produces not a protagonist but instead a historical subject.'

Soutik Biswas writes in the BBC: "Ms Dixit’s book shines a spotlight on the invisible lives of India’s neglected female home-based workers."

Urvashi Butalia wrote, 'it is a book that is a remarkable, quiet, and yet devastating account of an ordinary woman’s life...In setting Syeda’s life, and that of the people around her, against these larger developments, Neha Dixit also skilfully weaves in the larger story of ‘India’ and the complexities of “modernity”, attentive all the time to what modernisation means for the poor and vulnerable. And yet, unlike so much writing about the poor, Dixit is never patronising.

...Indeed, her restrained, unadorned prose, does not turn her characters into victims, or indeed gloss over their ‘flaws’. Instead, she brings a storyteller’s skill to her characters who, within the space of a few spare lines, become real people, oppressed, exploited and yet, able to sometimes negotiate with power, and other times defeat it by just stepping away and, on rare occasions, confront it (as Syeda does when she joins a union), vent their anger at it, and win the battle...

...It is precisely for this quietness, this matter-of-factness, this simplicity and truthfulness that this book must be read. It offers those of us who live with privilege, a mirror to the casual cruelty and indifference towards those less privileged, that informs our lives.'

Personal life

Dixit is married to Nakul Singh Sawhney, an Indian documentary filmmaker.

Dixit has been charged with "inciting hatred" by the Government of India, a move that has been criticized by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Because of her reporting, she has been subjected to threatening calls and an attempted acid attack and a break attempt in her house.

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Dixit, Neha
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Indian women journalists
Indian investigative journalists
Writers from Lucknow
Journalists from Uttar Pradesh
Women writers from Uttar Pradesh
Jamia Millia Islamia alumni
Indian feminists
Indian newspaper journalists
21st-century Indian journalists
Indian women editors
21st-century Indian women writers
21st-century Indian writers
Indian feminist writers
Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Mediapersons winners
Miranda House alumni