The Secular History of Religious Feelings: A Response
J. Barton Scott, author of Slandering the Sacred
Part of our forum, Slandering the Sacred.
Slandering the Sacred is a study of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code—a law that criminalizes wounding religious sentiments or, more precisely, outraging the religious feelings of any class through insults to religion or religious belief. In twenty-first century India, 295A is seemingly ubiquitous, hurled at novels, scholarly books, tweets, political cartoons, Bollywood films, Netflix shows, stand-up comedy routines, and more. It places a substantial chill on free speech about religion, and many people would like to see it abolished. While working on my previous book, Spiritual Despots Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (University of Chicago Press), I often worried that I might run afoul of 295A.
The law, and the feelings it provoked, were a structuring condition of my scholarship and my writing. For my second book, I thus decided to lean into my paranoia by researching 295A’s history. My book explores how this troubled law came to be, moving from the 1830's to the 1920's, and between colonial India and imperial Britain, to tell a story about the making of transcolonial secularism. For me, 295A became a means of exploring the constitutive contradictions of colonial modernity writ large.
Returning to the book a year after its publication is both a privilege and a pleasure, especially when seeing the book anew through the eyes of scholars SherAli Tareen (organizer) Marko Geslani, Arvind-Pal Mandair, Deonnie Moodie, Anand Taneja, and Tisa Wenger.
In my response for Slandering the Sacred: A Forum, I cannot take up all of the themes my interlocutors raise. My aim is to think with and from their essays, which do such a marvelous job of opening my book out onto broader scholarly terrain.
Insult through the Ages
Let me begin with one of Anand Taneja’s questions—the question of change over time. In the twenty-first century, secular law has become a key medium for religious offense. It is the idiom that makes offense sayable, the structuring condition of its public legibility. A religiously offended subject is, arguably, always already a subject of law. How on earth did we get here?
Taneja helpfully sketches some rough contours of a history that starts before the colonial period and ends after it. He opens with the tale of Tom Coryat, a seventeenth-century Englishman who insulted the Prophet at an Agra mosque during Friday prayers. “The scene,” says Taneja, was “ripe for religious feelings to be outraged,” and yet nothing happened. The assembled faithful simply ignored Coryat, perhaps excusing his outburst by “popular tautology”: only a madman would insult the Prophet in such a context, and a madman’s speech is not to be taken seriously. Taneja then works to situate this episode within the ethico-political schemas of the Mughal world, where, he suggests, pious self-cultivation happened in some sense prior to or independently of the state.
The turn to colonial modernity inverted this early modern structure of feeling, by pushing the state deeper into the affective textures of religious life. (Taneja paraphrases me paraphrasing Michel Foucault: colonial governmentality fostered a societalization of the state and statification of society). No wonder, then, that “the reigning style of emotion in South Asia shifted from balance to fervor” in the late nineteenth century (as Taneja summarizes Margrit Pernau). Fervor relied on state intervention, deepening the symbiosis between social feeling and its legal regulation.
In the twenty-first century, 295A has joined a dubious global elite: legal statutes whose very numbers have become pop-culture touchstones. Much as the Indian Penal Code section on fraud was immortalized by the 1955 film Shree 420, section 295A provided the titled for Punjabi rapper Sidhu Moose Wala’s 2021 song “295.” Moose Wala wrote the song, as Arvind-Pal Mandair notes, apropos of an attempted lawsuit by the Akali Dal. Its chorus proffers jaded advice. In Mandair’s translation: “Everyday you’ll get controversy/ They conduct debates here, dressing it up as religious morality./ If you speak truth, they’ll impose Section 295 on you.” Even in Punjabi, certain keywords here are in English (“controversy create,” “debate”), probably indicating that the cultural script of 295A is linked to an anglophone register of politico-legal discourse. The number 295 thus comes to demarcate a cultural zone in which controversy, and the tactical cultivation thereof, is constitutively opposed to the speaking of truth.
Although still invoked by various religious actors for multiple reasons, Section 295A is, in the twenty-first century, most prominently used to protect majoritarian Hinduism from allegedly injurious speech—a dramatic reversal for a law originally enacted to resolve a controversy centered on insults to a Muslim minority, and a significant departure from the norms of twenty-first century hate speech law with its protections for minorities. As Taneja reports, his Muslim friends swallow their discomfort over office water-cooler insults to the Prophet Muhammad, feeling unable to do anything about it. The “everydayness of insults,” writes Taneja, is “constitutive of upper-caste Hindu empowerment in the Modi era.”
That mood of empowerment reached a crescendo this past January, with the consecration of a new Rama temple on the site of the 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Section 295A played a role in structuring the feelings around this event. Several 295A news stories were percolating in the preceding weeks, including a controversy around a Netflix movie, and a complaint about mated zoo lions named Akbar and Sita. The story that most struck me, however, was a BBC interview with a karyakarta (activist/volunteer) who had helped demolish the Babri Masjid and was now eagerly anticipating the new temple. “Religious sentiments are greater than the constitution,” he proclaimed.
This astonishing claim of vernacular political theory negates the entire constitutional order of postcolonial India, sweeping its secularism away on a tide of religious feeling. In the terms of my book, it elevates “low secularism” (i.e., colonial governmentality, as instantiated in the Indian Penal Code and its regulation of religious affect) over “high secularism” (i.e., the rights guaranteed by postcolonial constitution). Just as important, however, is the performative irony of this moment and others like it. In the moment when he means to seem most passionately and spontaneously “Hindu,” confessing seemingly unmediated feeling, our karyakarta is in fact speaking the language of the Indian Penal Code. His feelings are inflected with entangled colonial histories, born to new life in the present.
Intimate Texts, Tactile Publics
Formations like this bring me to another of the book’s key themes: intimate textuality. What is it for seemingly spontaneous or personal feelings to be mediated in this way? What is the specific phenomenology of such “public feelings,” whether in the late colonial period or more generally? And how might their public-yet-intimate textualities be made manifest in the medium of a scholarly book? Slandering the Sacred works to confuse commonsense distinctions between not only the secular and sacred, but also the public and private. It includes dirty jokes, historical gossip (including about Macaulay’s incestuous longing for his sisters), and one secretly obscene picture. In addition to analyzing the intimately embodied life of legal and religious feelings, then, my book also experiments, at the level of form, with scholarly writing as a means of re-mediating historical emotion and addressing the feeling body of the scholarly reader. As both Mandair and Deonnie Moodie observe, these questions come forward mostly in the second half of Slandering the Sacred, which discusses Macaulay’s personal letters and the print polemics of the Arya Samaj. My book’s title cues the resulting set of category confusions. What would it mean to “slander the sacred”?
Today, slander is usually understood as the oral form of defamation (contrasted with libel, its written form). “Slander” usually connotes personal defamation. As I learned while researching my book, however, this categorization is decidedly modern, and its genealogy was linked to the spread of what Hussein Ali Agrama has called secularism’s questioning power—its impulse to differentiate between the religious and the political, the public and the private. One can still correctly speak of “blasphemous libel,” even if the phrase now has an antique feel (libellus once simply meant a little book). But what would it mean to speak of “blasphemous slander,” nudging the sacred into the domain of rumor, gossip, innuendo, and scandalously divulged secrets?
This conceptually muddled ground is precisely where certain kinds of insults to religion—most prominently, libels of the Prophet Muhammad—grow. Free-speech liberalism consistently fails to understand such insults, as Saba Mahmood clarifies, because it generally understands religion as cognitive assent to doctrinal beliefs and thus fails to grasp religion’s embodied intimacy. Religious insult was certainly intimate in late colonial India, where polemics fused theological disquisitions to slander, obscenity, sacrilege, and more— a kind of “colonial Twitter,” as one reader of my book memorably put it. The visceral charge of such speech derived from embodied structures of caste, class, race, gender, and sexuality.
Why, asks Moodie, were religious polemics so central to subject-formation in late colonial India? Polemic, one could say, did at the register of the intimate what colonial governmentality did at the register of the population: it produced divisions between self and other, helping to articulate the new social forms we now describe as “communalism.” To tarry at the register of the intimate is perhaps to see those ossified social forms in new light, toward a project of seeing beyond them. SherAli Tareen does something similar in his study of friendship and the friend/enemy distinction among Muslim intellectuals. The late colonial ‘ulama, as he shows, defined Muslim distinctiveness over and against Islam’s others, both internal and external. Yet, if the self can only achieve is sense of sovereignty by extruding some Other, then its sovereignty must remain constitutively incomplete. The extimate Other, as founding condition of the self, can never be fully dislodged.
Mandair uses the psychoanalytic language of “cathexis” to describe these kinds of processes. He is especially interested in how colonized subjects unconsciously transferred some portion of their sense of self to “the external authority manifest as the empire of secularity/law/reason,” and, in the process, reconfigured the remaining space of the self around the seemingly oppositional category “religion” that was, in fact, a colonial category. The process of what Mandair elsewhere terms “religion-making” is a process of colonial cathexis, a restructuring of the subject via the colonial state and its legal categories. Reading Mandair alongside Tareen, one might say that a related form of cathexis fueled religious conflict.
Polemic was the literary genre of choice for this intimately visceral boundary-work. And, as I stress in my book, polemic was visceral. Not only did religious polemic make extensive use of corporeal metaphor (often sexual or scatological), but its printed tracts and books were tactile artifacts that shaped human bodies and their affects in tangibly physical ways. In form as well as content, they traversed a social field structured by caste, race, and gender.
The Queer Tale of Poor Tom
The strangest chapter in Slandering the Sacred and the one that mostly obviously jumps out from the rest of the book (the “page-turneriest” of them all, says Moodie) is Chapter 5, “Macaulay Unmanned, or, Tom Governs His Feelings.” The chapter’s fundamental aim was to produce the kind of the archival symmetry that Marko Geslani mentions: it would be too easy to write a book about 295A that replicated the rhetorical structure of the Indian Penal Code itself, which depicts Indians as hyper-emotional and in need of governance by a coolly rational British state. I tried to flip that script by exploring Macaulay’s ungovernable emotions. I do not, of course, have unmediated access to those emotions. What I do have access to are his private letters, which I take as historically situated media objects, shaped by style guides and postal systems, that were a tool for the cultivation of historically specific forms of feeling.
Scholarly writing can provoke feeling too, which has certainly proved true of this chapter. Readers have reported various reactions, ranging from prurient curiosity to methodological discomfort to postcolonial indignation (“Who the f*ck were these f*cks,” one reader mused of Macaulay, and thence the British). The chapter was meant as a kind of experiment in scholarly thought and feeling. I would take such responses—every bit as thorny and complex as my nineteenth-century material—as indicating that the experiment was generative.
Let me turn, then, to Moodie’s generative discomforts with “Macaulay Unmanned.” One of these has to do with how I divided intellectual labor between two chapters on Macaulay. His fear of the colonized multitude— a public feeling written into the text of the Indian Penal Code— appeared in the previous chapter, but I did not return to it here. I agree that this was a missed opportunity.
Moodie’s other discomfort has to do with whether, and in what ways, an analysis of Macaulay’s letters to his sisters Hannah and Margaret could be claimed as a “feminist” project. I invoke the term in signaling my debts to Catherine Hall’s indispensable book Macaulay and Son, which builds on her career’s worth of work researching the intersections of gendered family structures with capitalism and empire. My chapter’s more obvious affinities are to the tangle of postcolonialism, Foucauldianism, affect theory, and queer theory that emerges from the work of scholars like Lisa Lowe, Leela Gandhi, and Ann Laura Stoler, as well as Patricia Spack’s recuperation of gossip as mode of moral reasoning.
It perhaps bears elucidating the queer subtext in particular, as means of addressing Moodie’s understandable concern that feminist scholarship often involves self-disclosures of “hidden affects” on the part of the author (that is, it should do precisely what Macaulay did not do in the text of his penal code, and which I thus did for him). To wit: The key to one possible reading of this chapter comes at the end. I.P.C. Section 377 criminalizes “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and was interpreted as criminalizing homosexuality until ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2018. My interest in the Indian Penal Code derived as much from 377 as from 295A. The latter bore on my professional life. The former, for me as for many in my circles, was acutely relevant to the daily textures of life itself. Each law seemed to stipulate a different register of the unsayable. So, when I discovered that Macaulay had understood his own love of his sisters as making a barely-sayable “war on nature”—his phrasing echoing 377 with remarkable precision—I couldn’t not write about it.
This queer subtext is cued by a light allusion to E. M. Forster in the chapter’s opening paragraphs: “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” It is subtended by several footnotes along the way, which support a representation of the Macaulay hetero-family unit as strange unto itself, trapped in a mirrored funhouse of unseen and deflected desire. This all builds toward a rereading of the Indian Penal Code as a form of sex in public, a scandalously official record of a very secret desire, and one that, because of its normative legal force, can conscript other bodies into its structure of suppressed feeling.
Why leave this material largely subtextual, a scholarly experiment in the aesthetics of the closet? My general view is that subtextual experiments often produce greater and more generative critical vertigo than forthright arguments do. It is certainly also the case, however, that this particular instance of suppressed speech resulted from the doubled pressure of 295A and 377 (or at least the heternormativities that outlive it). When writing a book about blasphemy, it is easy to decide that one already has enough problems. This is perhaps especially true when one is acutely aware of being a white North American interloper on histories that are not one’s own—except this last point requires immediate qualification.
295A and the U.S. Empire
For, as my book argues at length (building on the contrapuntalism of, especially, Edward Said, and Gauri Viswanathan), the history of colonial South Asia is so entangled with the history of the North Atlantic world that neat divisions between one’s “own” history and “other” histories become untenable. North America shares in the history of 295A. Louisiana and Guatemala contributed to the slurry of legal codes that shaped Macaulay’s penal code, an “Indian” text that then circulated across the British Empire, from Nigeria to Fiji, with an indirect stop in Canada (J.F. Stephen’s Macaulay-inspired English criminal code provided the template for the 1892 Canadian Criminal Code, used to consolidate the authority of the settler state after the 1885 Northwest Rebellion of Métis and First Nations peoples).
The U.S. empire also makes a significant appearance. A doubled imperium, British and U.S.-American, was already evident when 295A was enacted in 1927. That summer, the Rangila Rasul controversy overlapped with the Mother India controversy that, as Mrinalini Sinha has argued, presaged the rise of the U.S. as imperial power. That twinned legacy continued to shape the circulation of 295A into the twenty-first century, when invocations of this British-colonial law circulate via the technological infrastructures of U.S.-based digital capitalism (i.e., WhatsApp and Twitter/X).
Geslani, Moodie, and Tisa Wenger all explore the U.S.–India axis much more thoroughly than I was able to in my book. Moodie looks to business schools as sites for the extension of U.S. hegemony in the postwar period, and for the twenty-first century circulation of what the late Srinivas Aravamudan dubbed “guru English.” Geslani asks how colonial legacies were remobilized from within the North American field of Hindu studies. If, as he puts it, the “field has traditionally contributed to an image of Hinduism as exemplar of tolerance”— making Hinduism a model minority religion—it did so by building on the twinned legacies of U.S. multiculturalism and Indian secularism. The latter and its tolerance ideal (to recall Cassie Adcock) is incarnated in Slandering the Sacred primarily in the person of Sarojini Naidu.
Wenger, meanwhile, marshals her own considerable expertise as historian of U.S. religions in framing a comparative—or, perhaps better, connectively transcolonial— question about secularism. Are some of the seemingly portable concepts developed in Slandering the Sacred useful for studying U.S. religions? Wenger takes one pair of concepts for a test drive to find out: “high secularism” and “low secularism.”
What do these terms mean? Briefly: In a Foucauldian argument that fuses Mahmood to Partha Chatterjee, I suggest that secularism, like the modern state form more generally, is bifurcated into two competing but complementary rationalities: liberal-constitutionalism and governmentality. The former, or “high secularism,” speaks of the abstracted citizen’s right to religious freedom. The latter, or “low secularism,” manages religion as an empirical attribute of mappable populations. Speaking in very broad terms, high secularism was initially reserved for the North Atlantic, as paradigm of Enlightenment modernity. The twentieth century brought a surprise twist, however: governmentality (as honed in the colonies) would emerge as the paradigmatically modern face of power worldwide. I argue that the 1920s “crisis of the public” (indexed by thinkers like Walter Lippman, John Dewey, and Carl Schmitt) was a hinge moment in governmentality’s northward swing.
Wenger refines this narrative through close attention to the nineteenth-century U.S. and its starkly racialized division between “high” and “low.” The very notion of “religion,” as enshrined in the First Amendment, seemed reserved for white settlers. Black and Indigenous communities were regulated via religion’s shadow-concepts, including “superstition,” “conjuring,” and “magic.” Blasphemy was a significant issue during this period— state-level blasphemy statutes, indexing an early modern formation of the secular that predated the U.S. constitution, were often used against white male radicals and freethinkers. Their speech was legible as “religion,” with blasphemy marking the zone where the proprieties of religious speech could be debated. This zone firmly excluded Black and Indigenous bodies, who had no “religion” or rights pertaining thereto.
Compared to the settler U.S., then, the distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century British Indian state was its application of the term “religion” at both registers, high and low. The British could hardly, after all, deny religious status to the grand textual traditions of Hinduism and Islam. The resulting inclusion of South Asians (especially male elites) within the category “religion” was the precondition for the popular description of 295A as a “blasphemy law,” as well as for ongoing contestation about whether and in what contexts South Asians were entitled to religious freedom. For that form of contestation to be possible in the U.S., colonized groups first had to assert that—as Wenger put the matter in her work on the 1920s Pueblo Indian dance controversy— “we have a religion” too.
To mark the difference between North America and South Asia, Wenger coins the term “settler secularism.” The phrase does concise conceptual work, prompting precisely the kind of theoretical re-elaboration that is required if theory is to travel successfully across different historical and geographic terrain. One might then further ask how U.S. settler secularism shifted as it entered the twentieth century. What to make, for instance, of the notion of “hate speech” that emerged in the 1980s to map a set of offenses similar in some ways to 295A?
Hindu Assemblages in the Twenty-First Century
I bring this response to a close by turning to what Geslani identifies as a key theme of my body of scholarly work: what he calls “Hindu assemblages.” “Hinduism is not,” Geslani writes, “a religious tradition comparable to Christianity by virtue of its textuality, ritualism, or pietism, but an assemblage laboriously tied to it through the history of British imperialism” and its late-capitalist successors. In trying to figure out how to study such an entity, my work thinks from within the space opened up by Tomoko Masuzawa’s Invention of World Religions. I ask what religious studies can do as a field once it dispenses with the comparativist grid of “world religions” discourse, looking not for symmetry or commensurability among taxonomically parallel “traditions” but instead tracking wildly dissimilar processes, intensities, and crisscrossing lines of historical flight.
To think in this way is find one’s critical questions transformed. Thus, as Geslani asks, when US-based Hindu studies scholars contest the censorship of the Hindu right in the name of free speech do they not replicate Whig-liberal rhetoric that has been entangled with Hinduism since at least the 1830s and that was, in its own way, “religious”? Does this mode of critique thus deepen the conceptual grooves of the Indian Penal Code? Such entanglements are part of why it is so difficult—to turn to Mandair’s major question—to imagine what a “decolonial” Hinduism would look like. It is so linked to majoritarian projects with their own set of neocolonial ambitions on the territorial margins of the subcontinent. In this regard, Hinduism is situated quite differently from a formation like “Sikhism,” even though the homogenizing world-religions suffix -ism works to obscure those differences.
Slandering the Sacred offers no exit from such problems. As I observe on the book’s first page, “295A demarcates a set of problems with no easy solution.” Its problems are still our problems. By mapping this problem-space with greater precision, I simply hope to have brought such contradictions into crisper view— a precondition of any resolution of them.
J. Barton Scott is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (University of Chicago, 2016) and Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (Chicago/Permanent Black, 2023).
