Dr Sandhya I Fuchs

I am a legal athropologist who specializes in issues of law, hate and historical inequality. My research explores 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. 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, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. 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 completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at LSE in September 2020, where I was affiliated with the International Inequalities Institute (III). I hold an MPhil degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Colby College, Maine, USA. She is a graduate of the United World College of Southern Africa (UWCSA). My research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service. 

I am open to accepting PhD students.