Abstract
This review of Sandhya Fuchs’ Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press 2024) highlights that the book makes a genuinely original ethnographic and conceptual contribution to caste studies and hate crime scholarship. At the same time, the essay argues that there are three limitations to its framework that require greater engagement: the book’s failure to engage with the legal consciousness tradition in socio-legal scholarship, an underdeveloped account of “legal meliorism,” and an unresolved tension between the book’s stated commitment to victim-centred analysis and its ethnographic evidence that frequently discusses movement-level aspirations.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.55496/HVEX2549
