Centre for Criminal Justice Reform and Research
Invites you to a talk
Insulting Religion, from Blasphemy to Hate Speech:
The Forgotten History of Section 295A
By J. Barton Scott, University of Toronto
27th September / Monday/ 5 pm /
Cisco webex (link to be sent later)
Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes outraging religious feelings, is seemingly inescapable in twenty-first century discussions about religion in India. Simultaneously restricting and inciting religious conflict, and often stoking the very wounding sentiments that it purports to protect, 295A establishes a self-perpetuating feedback loop of indignantly injured emotion. The law’s many critics would, understandably, love to be rid of it. Still, naming precisely why 295A is such a problem can get tricky. It is not, as sometimes alleged, a blasphemy law. Rather, in historical context, 295A was a precise and explicit effort to secularize the English common law of blasphemy by rendering it religiously neutral; as enacted in 1927, it was a site where late colonial lawmakers were experimenting with the emergent idioms of Indian secularism. By exploring the nineteenth and early twentieth-century pre-history of 295A, this talk suggests that the transcolonial tale of this troubled law reveals a provocatively new history of our perpetually injured global present. Closer to a hate speech law than to a blasphemy law, 295A reveals a secularism concerned less with state neutrality or citizen rights than with the governmental management of populational affect—and, with it, populational violence.
J. Barton Scott is Associate Professor in the Departments of Historical Studies and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Primus/ Chicago), and co-editor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia (Routledge). He is currently finishing a manuscript titled Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India.