If the challenge is that of ‘theorizing from the global south’ (p. 50), then the question to ask is, to what extent has the author of this book been successful in meeting this call. Madhok’s interest in offering us an empirical account of ‘subaltern struggles and contestations over rights’ (p. 2) from South Asia is to bring to our notice the conceptual vocabulary used in these struggles, pointing to a different notion of human rights. To recuperate the conceptual and intellectual resources available in these subaltern ‘mobilizations around rights’—to assert ‘their epistemic authority’—is to disrupt the dominant narrative of the origin of human rights in the revolutionary moments of 1688, 1776 and 1789 in the ‘West’ and their gradual spread from there to ‘most of the world’. It is to reject, Madhok argues, a conception of ‘the local as a passive receptacle of these global human rights through global projects of translation’ (p. 175). The book points out that the word for rights that is widely used not only in South Asia, but also in North Africa and the Middle East, is haq. Subaltern and non-elite articulations around haq in the global South, as examined through the lens put forward by Madhok, are not enactments of a story scripted elsewhere; instead, the vocabulary used in these movements is a repository of conceptual diversity and ‘pluriversal thinking’ (p. 81) making possible a new story about rights.
Madhok provides us with a description of the struggles of several South Asian marginalized groups for their haq in chapters 4 and 5, ‘The Political Imaginaries of Haq: “Citizenship” and “Truth”’, ‘Resisting Developmentalism and the Military: Haq as a Cosmological Idea and an Islamic Ideal’ of the book. She discusses the right to food campaign in Rajasthan, covering the period from the establishment of the Right to Food Network in 2001 to the jawabdehi yatra (answerability-accountability caravan) from December 2015 to March 2016. The struggles of the sathins attached to the Women’s Development Programme in Rajasthan are also described. Madhok met many of the ‘predominantly Dalit and low caste’ women sathins from 1999 onwards, to find out about their experience of 15 to 16 years of working as a sathin. The fight, in May 2012, of the Adivasis of the Kotra district of Rajasthan against their displacement due to a proposed expansion of a wildlife sanctuary into their villages is analysed.