Sandhya Fuchs

My research examines issues of law, hate and historical inequality. I explore the relationship between legal institutions, experiences of violence, and social imaginaries of hope, justice and restitution in the context of polarized political landscapes in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in Europe and South Africa. Located at the intersection of anthropology and critical legal studies, my work analyses the potential of state law and human rights regimes to address structural inequalities and counteract culturally specific forms of oppression. My first book entitled Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India, published by Stanford University Press in 2024, won the James Busuttil Prize for Human Rights scholarship awarded by the Royal Asiatic Society and the 2025 APLA Book Prize in Critical Anthropology, awarded by the Assocation for Political and Legal Anthropology. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Dalit (communities formerly considered 'untouchable' within the Indian caste system) survivors of caste atrocities, human rights NGOs, police, and judiciary, Fragile Hope unveils how Dalit communities in the state of Rajasthan interpret and mobilize India's only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). The book shows that the PoA has emerged as a project of legal meliorism: the idea that persistent and creative legal labour can gradually improve the oppressive conditions that characterize Dalit lives. Using the intimate lens of personal narratives, Fragile Hope lays bare how legal processes converge and conflict with political and gendered concerns about justice for caste atrocities, creating new controversies, inequalities, and hopes. My current research focuses on the Indian Supreme Court and analyses how Hindu nationalist ideologies shape judicial arguments around injury and harm in hate speech accusations levelled against religious minorities, and how these arguments, in turn, generate new historical discourses. The project analyses how court rooms can become a stage for the performance and disruption of political projects and interrogates how the politicization of court rooms shapes experiences of exclusion and belonging among different communities. I am currently developing research that focuses on the digital migration of locally-rooted modes of hate speech and culturally specific concepts of "othering". I ask how hateful ideas change meaning as they traverse cultural boundaries and investigate how politially malleable vocabularies of exclusion can me moblized by authoritarian governments. I am accepting PhD students. Please email me to discuss your research proposal.

18/06/2024 Fragile Hope Sandhya I Fuchs Fragile Hope Authored book, Published 24/09/2025 'Spectacles of Whataboutery' Sandhya I Fuchs History and Anthropology Article, E-pub ahead of print 24/09/2025 Supreme histories and brittle democracies Sandhya I Fuchs, Tobias Kelly History and Anthropology Article, E-pub ahead of print 15/01/2026 Vernacular Data Justice: The Politics of Data in India's Justice System Sandhya I Fuchs, Jennifer Cearns Data Justice Chapter in a book, Accepted/In press 01/06/2026 Computational Ethnography, Digito-Vernacularisation, and Transcultural Policing Sandhya I Fuchs Socio-Legal Review Article, Accepted/In press 06/03/2026 Polysemic Hierarchies of "Hate Speech" Sandhya I Fuchs Asian Journal of Law and Society Article, E-pub ahead of print 24/10/2025 Crime and puni