P Sainath: “If hard work made you a billionaire, every woman in rural India would be one”

“I marvel at the capacity of people not to be bitter with their enemies when they have fought and achieved something,” declares P Sainath. He is recounting a story from his childhood in Chennai, when a Scottish man arrived unannounced to meet his grandfather, Varahagiri Venkata Giri, a freedom fighter and the fourth president of India. When Giri could not recognise the man, he handed him a strip of cloth with some numbers on it. “My grandad took one look at it and burst out laughing.”

The cloth carried Giri’s convict number from his time in prison during the freedom struggle. And the Scottish man? Turned out to be the prison governor. “My grandfather asked why he’d kept it. He replied, ‘There were about a dozen of you [political prisoners], but I had a feeling you would amount to something.’”

For a preteen Palagummi Sainath, that sequence of events must have helped shape a fundamental philosophy. One that saves the soul from bitterness. That makes space for hilarity despite a four-decade-long career covering heart-wrenching stories about rural India, much of which he has traversed himself using “16 different forms of transport”, including the one time his fellow travellers convinced him to accompany them to “AC first class”. “They meant the roof of the train. That’s Bihari humour,” he informs me wryly. “And people climb up there with their chickens, goats… Everything is on top of the train. I could not take one decent photograph because it was such a mass of human beings, and each time I stood up, it swayed like hell.”

On the day I meet the award-winning journalist, author and founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) in his Bandra home, Gen Z is organising itself into a powerful movement that will dominate headlines for weeks. The serendipitous choice of interview date is not lost on me—I hope to imbibe something of Sainath’s ability to press on even when the price of staying true to your purpose is exorbitant. Luckily, he’s never been one to hold back.

Vogue India: For someone who has followed your work and PARI’s journalism for a while, it seems like an exercise in optimism. That can often feel greatly at odds with the world we see every day and what you’ve personally experienced over the last 45 years. How does one continue to have hope in what appear to be exceedingly bleak times?

P Sainath: Well, our history gives you hope. It was a bunch of very ordinary Indians, not lawyers returned from Oxbridge, who liberated our country from colonial rule. The people in this book (points to his book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom) are cooks, couriers, farmers, lab­ourers, tailors—and every one of them played an extremely important role, including women whom you don’t normally get to read about. These women took up arms and fought the British physically, while the elites prayed in public for the success of the British troops over their fellow countrymen. When bands of Indians rose up against the mightiest empire in the world, how hopeless it must have seemed. But they brought it down.

When I give lectures, someone in the audience will ask, “Can you say something optimistic?” But if you don’t recognise the gravity of the problem, you don’t have a chance of resolving it. Fake optimism and cynical pessimism are two sides of the same coin. What do they achieve? The fake optimist says, “Growth will solve everything.” The cynical pessimist says, “Kuch sudhrega nahi.” They both absolve themselves of personal responsibility. But between fake optimism and cynical pessimism, there is a territory called hope.

Vogue India: You live there, a citizen of Hope.

P Sainath: That’s where I live.

Vogue India: If you’ve seen the memes and reels going around, everyone admires how Gen Z is injecting humour into a difficult situation. They live with a certain levity because they think, the world is burning anyway, so might as well laugh. The generation that everybody accused of living life passively through a phone screen is the one physically putting itself in harm’s way.

P Sainath: Idealism is the default mode of youth. But now they’re exposed to more and more about less and less. Ask them to name 10 freedom fighters, and they will struggle beyond Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. Many of them don’t see Ambedkar as a freedom fighter; they see him as the father of the Constitution. But he launched the greatest struggle for human dignity on earth.

Every one of the indi­ viduals I focused on in Foot Soldiers had one point to make and one of them put it powerfully: “We fought for two things, independence and freedom. We achieved independence.” Independence was an event. Freedom is a process, maybe never to be achieved in our lifetime.

Vogue India: I watched a recent interview where you spoke about the time you spent reporting on the scale of the farmer suicides and how that destroyed you.

P Sainath: It was the only thing in 25 years of reporting that I couldn’t take. As long as I see people in struggle, I’m inspired, I’m enthused, I’m not miserable, I’m happy. Suicide is the surrender of struggle. Between 2000 and 2016-17, I visited more than 900 households where people had taken their lives. I was consumed by rage that someone took that step when it was in our power as a society to tame the factors that led to it.

Vogue India: Sometimes, rage can be a great motivator to help you stay on track. Does the rage still keep you going?

P Sainath: It did. I was a very healthy guy without any illness. The person who realised something was wrong was my dentist. He asked, “Are you stressed out?” I replied, “Yeah, I’ve been under a bit of stress.” He said, “You’ve chewed off your enamel.”

Vogue India: Just like your rage guides you, you also tend to throw yourself wholly into the things you enjoy. You describe yourself as a ‘cricket fanatic’, a ‘music buff ’. The choice of words makes me think that, just like with documenting rural India, you’re passionate about what you love.

P Sainath: I listen to music in different languages; my phone has around 1,438 songs on it. Throughout my travels, music accompanied me everywhere. Once, I was at a bus stop on the border of Pudukkottai (Tamil Nadu), where there was a little tea shop. At the time, I carried a four-kilo Brother typewriter with me wherever I went. As I waited for my coffee, I took a nap using the typewriter as a pillow and covering my face with a newspaper. Suddenly, five young men entered, all dressed in white, which in Tamil Nadu meant they were going for an exam. They began to sing so beautifully, drumming on the table, five songs in a row. I felt very emotional without meaning to; there were tears running down my cheeks. Then, one guy shouted and everyone ran for the bus.

Everywhere I went, I heard people sing. At a place in Gwalior, a man was performing Kishore Kumar songs so beautifully. You are always looking inside yourself for music, and it’s nice to find that others like those songs too.

Vogue India: Perhaps your most enduring project has been Visible Work: Invisible Women. Every story accompanying the images is so heavy that I had to take breaks in between when viewing it. But my perspective is that of a privileged outsider—an English-speaking daughter of feminist parents. I always wonder, for these women who did not choose this life of backbreaking work, what are their moments of joy?

P Sainath: They’re not different from you in that sense. People need to laugh, to cry. One of the photos captures the women of Pudukkottai doing something that brought them more joy than anything they had done in their lives: cycling. The government had started a literacy programme called Arivoli Iyakkam, light of knowledge, but noticed that women were not coming to the classes. Then, Kannamal, an activist leading the programme, suggested that the collector train the activists to cycle so they could go to the women in the villages rather than ask them to come into town. This was met with enthusiasm by the women, not so much for literacy but for cycling. Cycling was officially included as a component of the programme and around 180,000 women came to learn in a very short time.

Until then, these women used to take their produce by bus to the market. They needed to ask their sons, brothers or husbands to load the produce on the top of the bus. Now, they could carry the produce in the basket at the back of the cycle and their babies in the front basket. They no longer had to worry about running home for the child. That was the joy.

Vogue India: It’s so interesting how important autonomy is at every level. Sometimes, we make the mistake of assuming that people who are struggling for daily sustenance might not think of ideas like freedom and autonomy. But you’re saying it’s a basic need.

P Sainath: It’s also an assertion: I am capable, I know myself. There is nobody more capable than rural women. The promise of capitalism is that if you work hard, you can be rich. If hard work makes you a billionaire, every woman in rural India has to be a billionaire. Since they are not, what do we conclude about that principle?

Vogue India: You have this particular sensitivity to women, an ability to see the layers to their struggles. Where do you think that comes from?

P Sainath: I was born in a family of 36 grandchildren. My mother was the sixth of seven sisters, and there were four brothers. The women had really strong personalities and character. And the men were singularly unimpressive. This is sadly the truth in many households. I have three siblings—two brothers and one sister—and my mother made it very clear that if there is any privileged one amongst us, it’s my sister. Today, she is the anchor of the family. Then, I had teachers like Romila [Thapar]. And my wife, Sonya [Gill], is a very strong person.

Vogue India: I was going to ask you about the role of love in your journey. Sometimes, good work just doesn’t move the needle, but the next day, you have to go out and do it all over again. It means something to have a companion who supports and believes in you. How did you get together?

P Sainath: I was a Delhi journalist, and in those days, Mumbai was considered a punishment posting. My salary was a magnificent ₹735. Imagine coming with that to a city in its first gigantic real estate boom. I opted for the Mumbai posting because I was chasing the woman who is now my wife of 40 years. She’d got a job as a lecturer at Sophia College for Women, so I thought it would be easier for me to get a transfer because nobody would opt for Mumbai.

Vogue India: That’s quite a grand, romantic gesture.

P Sainath: I don’t know—I think it was an act of desperation. I didn’t want to lose her. When I was reporting on the work that would lead to Everybody Loves a Good Drought, I was broke. I had sold my cameras, taken out my gratuity and provident funds, but it still wasn’t enough. Everything that I did was because Sonya was working in the Foundation for Research in Community Health. On a grand salary of ₹3,000 in the mid ’90s, she ran the home and kept body and soul together.

Vogue India: There are many great men who say, “I wake up at 5am and go for a run, then sit and write for six hours.” And the labour of the partner or the wife who keeps everything else going so that these great men can wake up at 5am, go for a run and write for hours is never acknowledged.

P Sainath: Well, I do my share of housework. And I designed all these bookshelves. But my contribution stops there. I’m a slob; the neatness and beauty of the home is entirely Sonya. Today, the office is cleaner than it has been in recent times in your honour. I have been well-trained.

[Editor’s note: Sonya Gill sadly passed away on August 25, a month after this interview took place.]

This article appears in Vogue India’s September-October 2026 issue. Subscribe here.

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