000			nam a22 4500
999			_c32720 _d32720
008			240214b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9788178246727
082			_a345.540288 _bSCO
100			_aScott, J. Barton
245			_aSlandering the sacred : blasphemy law and religious affect in colonial India
260			_bPermanent Black, _c2023 _aRanikhet :
300			_a294 p. ; _bill., _c24 cm.
365			_b795.00 _c₹ _d01
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
520			_aAlthough 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.
650			_aArya samaj
650			_aRangila Rasul
650			_aReligious sentiments
650			_aColonial India
650			_aIndian Penal Code
650			_aSection 295A
650			_aFree-speech
650			_aSecular law
650			_aImperial Britain
942			_2ddc _cBK