RT Book
T1 Slandering the sacred: blasphemy law and religious affect in colonial India
T2 Class 200: new studies in religion
A1 Scott, J. Barton
LA English
PP Chicago
PB The University of Chicago Press
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1815921269
AB "Although blasphemy is as old as religion itself, its history has begun a new chapter in recent years. Slanders of the sacred are everywhere, as in the highly visible Charlie Hebdo case, with "religion" sometimes appearing as little more than a membrane for giving and receiving offense. Where some explain the contemporary preoccupation with blasphemy by pointing to the interconnectedness of twenty-first-century media, J. Barton Scott argues that we need to look deeper into the past at the colonial-era infrastructures that continue to shape our globalized world. Slandering the Sacred examines one such powerful and widely influential legal infrastructure: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code. What would it look like to take Section 295A as a text in, of, and for religion-a connective tissue interlinking multiple religious worlds? To answer this question, Scott explores the cultural, intellectual, and legal pre-history of this law, moving between colonial India and imperial Britain as well as between secular law and modern religion. Section 295A reveals a set of problems with no easy solution. It places a chill on free speech, extends the power of the state over civil society, and exacerbates the culture of religious controversy that it was designed to fix. The legislators who enacted the law foresaw the damage it could do and they enacted it anyway, as a half-despairing measure to curb injurious speech. Their problems are still our problems. The twenty-first century has compounded modernity's free-speech headache. Section 295A opens a useful window onto these problems precisely because it is a problem, too. Its history is a tale about the afterlives of the holy dead, the legal definition of the anglophone category "religion," and the transmissibility of outrage as bureaucratized affect"--
NO Includes bibliographical references and index
CN KNS4172
SN 9780226824888
SN 9780226824901
K1 India : Indian Penal Code
K1 Blasphemy : Law and legislation : India : History : 19th century
K1 Blasphemy : Law and legislation : Great Britain : History : 19th century
K1 Libel and slander : India : Religious aspects : History : 19th century
K1 Libel and slander : Great Britain : Religious aspects : History : 19th century
K1 freedom of expression : India : History : 19th century