Fragile hope: Seeking justice for hate crimes in India By SandhyaFuchs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. 358 pp.

A legislative history of India suggests a progressive march toward “uplift” for Dalits and other marginalized caste communities through the evolving mechanism of the law. Indeed, the story of legal redress for generational harm is theoretically linear and positive—Article 15 of the Indian Constitution (1950) prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth; Article 17 (1950) prohibits the practice of untouchability; the Prevention of Atrocities Act (1989) outlawed hate crimes against scheduled castes and tribes; and the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations (1990) created a program of ameliorative reservations for “Other Backward Castes” (OBCs) to complement those already enshrined in India's Constitution for Dalits. Of course, as Dalit writers have noted across literary genres, these “reforms” do not always deliver what they promise. In Fragile Hope, Fuchs demonstrates this with considerable care in the context of her extensive fieldwork with the Meghwal jati in Jhunjhunu District in northeastern Rajasthan. For historically marginalized communities, hate crime laws can become sites for the creation of new social resources and foundational legal epistemologies which aim to eradicate the institutional biases and bureaucratic inequities that make hate crime legislation necessary in the first place. (p. 15) The book is organized into three sections. Part 1 explores the bureaucratic vision and promise as well as the practical and epistemological challenges of the Atrocities Act, particularly how it morphs in the face of localized specificities of gender, politics, and community activism. Part 2 examines the disjunctures between personal and communal narratives of atrocity and their rendering as legal cases. While different stakeholders—victims, their families, and social activists and advocates—use the Atrocities Act to challenge the normative operations of what Fuchs calls “legal truth regimes,” they do so in different ways and with varying effects. Part 3 discusses the “symbolic power” of the Atrocities Act at its dualistic extremes, offering both profound disappointment and sincere hope. Fragile Hope has many strengths; foremost among them is Fuchs's attention to the cadences, vocabularies, silences, and translations of the stories that survivors of atrocities tell as they negotiate the legal process of making a claim under the act, which differ depending on context and subjectivity but always demand “conceptual and methodological adjustments within general criminal law to create space for the truth regimes that govern marginalized lifeworlds” (p. 18). One of the principal strengths of Fragile Hope is that it brings India, and in particular the question of caste, into an international scholarly and activist discussion around hate crimes. As Fuchs herself points out, “India and crimes against Dalits rarely feature in these debates, despite the historical parallels between caste exclusion in India and structural racism in countries like the United States and the frequency and brutality of caste atrocities” (p. 13). Her contention that in Rajasthan the Atrocities Act “has become a canvas on which Dalit families and communities paint their own ideas of agency and restitution” (p. 11) engages the idea of “epistemic reparations” (Jennifer Lackey), or the reparative act of telling one's own story. As with South Africa's flawed Truth and Reconciliation Commission and fledgling efforts in the United States to restore the humanizing power of being known to people caught in a profoundly racist carceral system, Fuchs emphasizes—for all the law's failed promises—the undeniable profundity of the victims of caste-based atrocity to name it as such. The book's dedication is “To everyone who told their stories.” Another strength of Fuchs's book lies in its many personal, powerful stories. This is a testament to the care that Fuchs took in establishing trusting relationships, particularly with women victims and family members of victims of caste atrocities (she explains that her credentials as an anthropologist never got her very far, but her “ability to bond with the women of the household” always did). It also highlights her literary sensibilities. This is a monograph of cultural and legal anthropology, yes, but it is also a series of harrowing and moving portraits of both human cruelty and human strength in the face of tremendous adversity. While the reported atrocities in the book are not all gender related, many are, as Dalit women are routinely assaulted by “upper” caste men as a means of maintaining local caste hierarchies. Attentive to gender throughout and particularly concerned with the vicissitudes of women's autonomy during the journey of lodging a case, she demonstrates how engagements with the Atrocity Act both re-create patriarchal harms to women and throw “existing and emerging hierarchies of masculinity into stark focus” (p. 20). Fuchs writes with a true literary sensibility. For example, in chapter 3, she describes the case of a social boycott against a man named Choti Lal, who defied the orders of a Rajput council not to make “ostentatious” additions to his house; she frames the difficulty of filing the FIR (initial police report) as one of translation. The disinterest, or outright refusal, of largely “upper” caste police officers to understand a victim's story “indicates a translational barrier between the normative universe enshrined in the linguistic registers of the law and the local cultural nuances that inhere in the metaphors which govern marginalized lifeworlds.” This sensitivity to the challenges of being known—political and legal, as well as linguistic and metaphorical—will resonate with scholars and readers of Dalit literature and other forms of anti-caste cultural expression. Indeed, while reading the chapter about Choti Lal, I could not stop thinking about the eminent Hindi-language author Uday Prakash's famous short story “Mohandas,” in which a marginalized caste man, graduating with honors and promised a white-collar job, has his identity stolen and slowly loses his grip on reality as he fights for years to regain it, ultimately stymied by an impenetrable and casteist legal system. Fragile Hope is a meaningful and compelling contribution to a growing body of work on the legal, social, and political life of caste in contemporary India. While it is located with admirable cultural, linguistic, and geographic detail in Jhunjhunu District in northeastern Rajasthan, its arguments resonate across India's varied national and local legal and social landscapes—especially those arguments that touch on the nuances of the political and social life of the Atrocities Act, as well as those subjectivities who seek—successfully or not—to engage with it, not only for legal redress and compensation but also for personal and communal legibility. Even more broadly, the book offers a global audience a powerful methodological approach to exploring the opportunities, pitfalls, and oftentimes unintended consequences of hate crime legislation, and the undeniably creative strategies of those who appeal to it.