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In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations.

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In this article, I track the deployment of rights in the vernacular across different subaltern citizen mobilizations in Southern Asia. In order to conceptually capture the ethical dynamism, ideational energy and intellectual innovativeness of this language of rights, I argue that we need yet more complex and different kinds of thinking. I propose the framework of vernacular rights cultures to theories and empirically document the rights politics in 'most of the world'. A critical aspect of vernacular rights cultures, as a framework of analysis, is its attention to the languages-both literal and conceptual-of rights/human rights and also to the political imaginaries that these languages embody and make available. An important way of documenting and analyzing rights languages and On Vernacular Rights Cultures and the Political Imaginaries of Haq Around the globe, one is witnessing multitudinous struggles over rights. Several of these are collective struggles by marginal and dispossessed groups over what Walter Mignolo has termed 'life rights' (2014), with some resisting precarity and dispossession heralded in by neoliberal developmentalism and its championing of privatization of natural resources: mountains, minerals, forests, rivers and streams; while others are struggling to redefine the substantive content of existing formal constitutional guarantees. The key question this paper asks is: How do we conceptually capture these rights struggles? In South Asia, and particularly in India, many of these rights struggles have not been without policy and legislative successes and several pioneering and innovative legislative acts are now in place guaranteeing citizen entitlements to information, food, and employment and land rights, and there now exists a growing and sophisticated scholarship analyzing the functioning, shortfalls as well as the impact of these newly introduced acts and policy measures (Dreze 2004; Shah 2007; Khera 2008, 2011; Bannerjee and Saha 2010). Within this burgeoning scholarship and more generally, however, there is less attention paid to the conceptual and epistemic languages of rights underpinning these struggles by marginal groups or of the nature of subjectivities and subjection these mobilizations engender, or indeed to the forms of rights politics these generate. To put it more specifically, we are yet to know of the justificatory premises of rights that informs and activates demands for expanded entitlements, or of the nature of rights languages underpinning 'self making' exercises mobilized in becoming a subject of formal rights, or of the traversal of rights and human rights, or indeed of the ways by which statecraft,

Original citation:Madhok, Sumi (2005) Autonomy, political literacy and the "social woman": towards a politics of inclusion. In: Bates , Crispin and Basu, Subho, (eds.) Rethinking Indian political institutions. Anthem, London, UK.

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