J. Barton Scott's "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.

Scott applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India, and reported the following:

I love the quirkiness of the Page 99 Test, and I especially love the quirkiness that results from doing the test on my new book, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India. My page 99 is almost entirely occupied by a photograph of Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s mummified corpse, or “Auto-Icon,” on permanent display at University College–London. A snippet of text appears at the bottom of the page:

Utilitarianism’s calculating passions came at a cost, as Bentham knew. The truths of moral science, he wrote, do not flourish “in the same soil with sentiment.” One reason for this difficulty is soil itself, or, rather, territory. Although the body’s capacity for pleasure and pain is “much the same the world over,” its “corporeal sensibility” is shaped by historical and geographic circumstances.

As a point of entry into my book, page 99 is not just quirky. It is downright macabre, fixating on an extremely particular historical body, now voided of feeling. Either this is a terrible introduction to my book, or the best introduction possible. The book is all about bodies and their capacity to feel.

* * *

Slandering the Sacred tells the story of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which makes it a criminal offense to “outrage” the “religious feelings” of any class of person. Enacted in 1927 by the British-colonial state, this law remains a prominent feature of public culture in contemporary India, where it is often invoked to allege religious offense, especially concerning Hinduism. It also remains law in Pakistan, where it shaped later laws restricting insults to Islam.

When it was enacted, many people called 295A a “blasphemy law.” That, however, is a misnomer. Section 295A was an effort to secularize the British common law of blasphemy at a time when slandering Christianity was still a criminal offense in the U.K. (a London man had been jailed for the crime as recently as 1921). As a law about “religious feelings,” not religion per se, 295A was sort of a proto-hate speech law. It was trying to prevent all-too-human violence.

By exploring this law’s history, I argue, we can see how Western secularism emerged from colonial encounter: British secularism was arguably invented in India. We can also see how legal secularism can have the perverse effect of stoking the very religious feelings it tries to contain. By writing religious feelings into law, a statute like 295A works to educate its subjects in outrage.

How to make sense of such intimate-yet-public feelings? To do that, I delve into contemporary affect theory, as well as a longer history of philosophizing about emotion—including the writings of Jeremy Bentham, one of the architects of the Indian Penal Code. His Auto-Icon grew out of his larger philosophic project, a kind of performance art object attempting to do new things with the rationalized, de-sanctified body. The Auto-Icon thus points to many of the core concerns of my book: bodily sensations, philosophic experiments in feeling. It stands in for the many less-famous bodies that populate the rest of my book’s pages.

Visit J. Barton Scott's website.

The Page 99 Test: Spiritual Despots.

--Marshal Zeringue