Slandering the Sacred

J. Barton Scott is associate professor of historical studies and the study of religion at the University of Toronto. He is author of Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

“A landmark study in the field of religion and South Asia, taking the specific case study of Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits deliberate harm or injury to religious feelings of a community, to raise and address larger and immensely consequential questions connected to the interaction of law, religion, and secular power in India and beyond. A multifaceted intellectual history cum literary analysis of blasphemy law, Slandering the Sacred moves between nineteenth-century and contemporary Britain and India to show that colonial discourses and conceptions of blasphemy were shaped and indebted to the life of this category as it operated among the colonized religious communities of India."

• 1 Introduction: Secularizing BlasphemyPart One: The Merry Prophet2 A Crisis of the Public: The Rajpal Affair and Its Bodies3 Secularism, High and Low: Making the Blasphemy BillPart Two: Blasphemy’s Empire4 Codifying Blasphemy: Religious Feelings between Colony and Metropole5 Macaulay Unmanned, or, Tom Governs His Feelings6 Libeling Religion: Secularism and the Intimacy of InsultPart Three: Polemics as Ethics7 Printing Pain, Ruling Sentiment: A Brief History of Arya Insult8 The Arya Penal Code: Law and the Practice of Documentary Religion9 The Swami and the Prophet: Slandering Lives, Conducting Character10 Conclusion: A Feeling for “Religion”AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex