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J. Barton Scott, "Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
00:30:28
An interview with J. Barton Scott
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- [00:01]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
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- [01:26]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Welcome to the New Books Network welcome back to the New Books in Indian Religions podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balkar, and more importantly, I have the pleasure today of welcoming Dr. Jay Barton Scott to the podcast. He is an Associate professor at the University of Toronto. He's appointed both to the Department of Historical Studies at the at UTM as well as the Department for the Study of religion at the St. George campus. If that's TMI. About University of Toronto it's just my alma mater, so I feel the need to say these things. Anyhow, we'll be speaking about a brand new University of Chicago Press publication, Slandering the Sacred Blasphemy of Law and Religion and Religious Affect in Colonial India. Bart, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:20]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Thanks for having me here, Raj. And I would add, in addition to being University of Chicago, the book is also out like last week with Permanent Black in Delhi with a slightly different subtitle, Blasphemy Law and the Shaping of Indian Secularism.
- [02:34]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Fantastic. Which means it will reach a larger audience, which means there'll be even more people interested in what we're about to discuss. That's fantastic. And unlike the vast majority of My guests, we have had the pleasure, at least on my part, of meeting in person. But ironically, although I presented at. You had asked some alumni to come back and talk about their interesting careers beyond the professoriate. Although I presented at a presentation a couple weeks ago or last month in Toronto. It was actually on Zoom. But thank you very much for the invite. That was good fun. Thank you.
- [03:11]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
It was a great panel. Yeah, I loved hearing everybody's stories, and Zoom allowed us to bring in people who wouldn't have been able to bring in otherwise.
- [03:20]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Absolutely. Absolutely great. So your book is fascinating. You probably already know that, or at least it was. You know, it fascinated you from. For multiple years, this topic anyhow. But I have to say off the bat that I have come across some books that are accessible. Yours is quite accessible, but you write as a storyteller. I don't know if that is something that you honed for the book, if that was always the case. But typically, as people can probably infer by the rate of production on the podcast and the fact that I teach into my own scholarship, I read fairly quickly. But when I read, it's typically derivation of information. I mean, scholarly reading. But every once in a while I'll come across a monograph such as yours where, you know, the amount of time I set aside is not enough because it's more of a leisurely read where you're telling a story with the sentences, with the paragraphs, with the grander story. So I have to ask you about that. Tell me a little bit about that feature of your writing, if you don't mind. Is that something innate to you? Is it sort of something you do consciously?
- [04:23]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Well, I guess. First, thank you for. I mean, writing is important to me, so I appreciate your noticing that I put a lot of care into the writing. Yeah, it sounds something that. It takes a lot of work. I mean, I think that books are important. Books consist of words and writing. And if we are pouring ourselves into the writing, what are we doing is sort of my feeling. And I like writing that has some kick to it. I like writing that has a strong narrative propulsion to it. And that's the kind of writing I try to make. It takes a gazillion drafts to do because you have to first figure out what your ideas are and get all the research built in there and then just revise, revise, revise until it flows smoothly.
- [05:04]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Well, that's the. And this is not a piece I normally comment on. I mean, there have been a number of accessible books and lucid writers, without question, but you know, when I read academic material, I read it for the information that's typically written for the information for structure, for an argument, for evidence, for et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I happen to. What do I study? I study narrative. What do I do when I'm not studying narrative? I teach through story. I tell stories. Narrative is so important. And when you have that narrative quality to the writing, you actually don't want to just skim through it. The narrative takes you on the journey. So with that quality, it's really important, I think, for teaching, but it's also a joy for academic work. So it's great that you spend that energy. It comes across, at least to me. And I imagine for those, you know, I think it was a comment, if I, if I recall correctly, one of the reviewers commented on sort of, I think sheer. He quipped that it was you, sort of, you know, you're writing about, you know, colonial Indian penal law. You've somehow written a page turner. No small feat.
- [06:11]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Katherine Lenmans at McGill University, an anthropologist of Islam, bless her, she wrote like the best ad copy. It's a page turner about a penal goad. Yes, it is, Scott.
- [06:23]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Indeed. It's hilarious. So how did you become interested in this topic? What's sort of the genesis of this interest or this book? Kernel.
- [06:33]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Yeah. So the book is a history of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which makes it a crime to outrage the religious feelings of any class of person. It's a law that anybody who follows the news and contemporary India knows. Well, it seems like every week there's some kind of allegation that somebody has wounded religious feelings. And the law is now most often used, it seems, to protect Hinduism from alleged offense. I, like many North American based scholars of Hinduism, had long been aware of this law. It has shadowed scholarship on Hinduism since the 1990s, and tons of scholars have run afoul of it. Most famously perhaps Wendy doniger with her 2014 book, the An Alternative History, which quite stupendously ran afoul of this law. So, I mean, I, for years had been working on topics in and around modern Hinduism and had been writing under the shadow of just this paranoia of like, oh God, will the thing I write run afoul of section 295A? Will I be dragged to court or have my things pulped? Which never happened because most scholarly writing doesn't get read that much in scholarly writing. And so I decided that for this project I was going to lean into the paranoia and in fact write about the thing that was making me paranoid, which is this law, and wanted to give an account of it and that here we are.
- [07:58]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Well, this is the path to scholarly self actualization. Facing your fear. So how site savvy of you. Okay, so thank you for laying the foundation of this law and some of its implications. And clearly, clearly, what a slippery slope it might be to run afoul of it, as you say. What would you say, what would you hope would be the primary overarching takeaway or subset of takeaways for this book? What does this book hope to accomplish or show, demonstrate?
- [08:39]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
This is the hard question.
- [08:41]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Yes, yes, because it's textured.
- [08:43]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
It's textured. In this case, everything I write ends up having multiple arguments. And so it's hard to extract one. But I mean, I guess in some ways the main argument is to say that section 295A is easy to criticize. Many on the left and other political positions in India would love to be rid of the thing. It places a chill on free speech about religion. I mean, certainly I and other scholars, you know, sort of hate this law because it really does place a chill on free speech and scholarship about religion. But the more I looked into the history of the law, the more I saw that it poses. It just represents a set of problems that have no easy solution. We're still living with this set of problems. Now, how is one, how is a modern state, how is a modern society meant to regulate or proscribe injurious speech? This is a set of questions that's implied in things like trigger warnings, regulations about hate speech and cancel culture. We as a society are even now obsessed with questions of injurious speech. And those are much the same set of questions that 295A was trying to resolve when it was put on the books way back in 1927, nearly 100 years ago. And yeah, so it's a set of questions that are still witness. And to me, these are a bottomless set of questions about the history of secularism.
- [10:01]
Dr. Raj Balkar
This is one of whether or not it's evident to the author of the book. It's more often than evidence myself in terms of how to pan out and why this is relevant in this particular case. You do that brilliantly in the book and you bring in examples, whether it's Rushdie or Madonna or whomever.
- [10:23]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Just to.
- [10:23]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Show that this is. It's important to understand the particular sociocultural contours of a phenomenon that's being studied. But then it's not Such that humans aren't humans on some level and problems aren't pervasive cross culturally. And this may be a variation or an iteration or an exemplification or corollary, at very least, of something that is experienced currently or in your particular culture. Now, given that you make the parallel so clear in your work, do you feel that, is it the case that understanding this tension in modern times will illumine section 295A and this historical juncture? Or is it vice versa?
- [11:11]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
I mean, I think it's both. I think in many ways we're still in the same broad conjuncture of 1927 where how to frame injurious speech, that question becomes visible from within liberalism, a set of political philosophies that place particular emphasis on free speech. And that was the same set of problems that were there in the 1920s. It's the same set of problems we have today. So actually the moment is, broadly speaking, shared. Although there are key shifts between the 1920s and today, not least shifts in media. We're now in the world that the digital, obviously the world that I was Investigating in late 19th and early 20th century India is the world of print media, when there were all gazillions of cheaply printed tracks, pamphlets, newspapers circulating everywhere, and the kinds of slanders that percolated at the time were so caught up with the tactile material technology of print.
- [12:08]
Dr. Raj Balkar
What does your work illumine or have to say about this notion of secularism? Where does that fit into your work?
- [12:19]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
So secularism is now a much contested concept in the scholarship. Once upon a time, scholars tended to presume something like a secularization narrative, where once upon a time religion was sort of entangled with all things, and then gradually it was subtracted, and now there's less religion than there used to be. That kind of narrative is utterly untenable on both empirical as well as conceptual grounds. And scholars have now come to understand, as you know and many of your listeners probably also know, that religion is a modern concept that emerges somewhere around the 17th century and really emerges in tandem with what we understand to be secularism. Talal Al Assad, the anthropologist, has described.
- [13:01]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Religion as Siamese twins.
- [13:03]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Siamese twins or twins. I mean, Siamese twins is such like a weirdly colonial metaphor. I've reverberated Ang and Chang, these like, guys from North Carolina who were, you know, performed at PT Barnum circuses, like, it's a weird metaphor, Siamese twins. But there is no secularism if you can't identify something in the world to call religion and then try to map, manage and regulate that religion. So the work that I'm doing in the book is really building on Assad as well as Hussein Ali Agrama, Sabah Mahmoud, of people who've tried to understand secular modernity as really split between, on the one hand, what Mahmoud calls secularism's promise of freedom, that liberal constitutional states want to grant freedom of religion to citizens, and on the other hand, what Mahmoud calls secularism's regulatory impulse. There's this other side of the state, this sort of Foucaultian, discipline, governmentality side of the state that sees religious populations that it just wants to map, manage and regulate. Often when we think about secularism, we really only see the liberal promise of freedom. We have a hard time paying attention to this other face of the state. But arguably that other face of the state is actually more important and more pervasive for how secularism manages religion. Certainly it was, I would argue, in colonial India and possibly in some ways even in post colonial India, although that's beyond the scope of the book. The book, I should say, really ends in 1927. I like glimpse forward to several key moments, but the key story of the book stretches from the 1830s to the 1920s.
- [14:37]
Dr. Raj Balkar
So what are some plot points, touch points of that key story? Talk a little bit about the data and what you're looking at in the book.
- [14:44]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
So the book opens. I'm just beginning everything with the word. So the book opens in 1927amid a major controversy of the late colonial moment called alternately the Rajpal Affair or the Rangila Rasool Affair. There was a guy named Rajpal who owned a press in Lahore that published a tract called the Rangila Rasool, which could be literally translated as the Colorful Prophet. But the word colorful in this case has a strong undertone of sexual impropriety. I tend to just translate it as the Merry Prophet. It was a tract making fun of the Prophet Muhammad's multiple marriages and the sex life of the Prophet. It was a tract that feels calibrated to produce offense and indeed did produce offense amid the Lahore public who mobilized to try to get the track banned under existing sections of the Indian Penal Code, but couldn't. Ultimately, this led to the creation of a new section of the code, 295A in 1927. So I open amid this controversy, trace its eddoes and crannies, and then do a zoom back, a cut back to the 1830s, when the Indian Penal Code was first drafted by a man named Thomas Babington. McCauley, this arch colonial ideologue of the 1830s moment. And then I follow the code through and in particular its regulation of religion through the late 19th century, along the way picking up the history of the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform society that ultimately in the 1920s, would be behind the publication of the Ringela Rasool. So the book as a whole is trying to tell the story of legal secularism, the Indian Penal Code, as alongside of, and is utterly entangled with the history of modern religion, in this case, the Aria Samaj and its tracts and pamphlets.
- [16:37]
Dr. Raj Balkar
So during this journey, this intellectual learning, writing, research journey of yours, did anything surprise you about your findings or what you found yourself writing? Was it a case of sort of finding more evidence for what was suspected to be the case? Were there certain curveballs in this process for you? Anything remarkable in the literal sense for you, in terms of what you were researching?
- [17:06]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
There were so many things along the way, it's difficult to pick just one or two. I would say that one of the major adjustments I had to make relatively early on was in how I describe and think about section 295A. This is often called a blasphemy law, even in the 1920s when the bill proposing it was called the Blasphemy Bill. But it's precisely not a blasphemy law. It's a law that was going out of its way in its moment to secularize the history of blasphemy in British common law traditions. I had not realized how late blasphemy remained a crime in the uk, that the last man jailed for blasphemy in Britain was in 1921, the ironically named John Gott. G O T T Gott in German and the last man convicted of blasphemy in the UK was in 1977, Dennis Lemonade, what's known as the Gay News case. And blasphemy remained a criminal offense in the UK until 2008. In the 19 late 80s, early 90s, after the Rushdie affair, there was an effort to broaden blasphemy law in the UK to include other religions like Islam, which failed that the House of Lords doubled down and said, no, we protect only Anglican Christianity, the Church of England. That's it. So one of the major sort of surprises, and of course this is not at all surprising at many levels, was that, I mean, India was at the forefront of the development of British secularism. The British were always more secular in the colonies than they were at home, and maybe especially in India, which they understood as a religiously plural space, and one a space that needed to be managed in terms of religion. So the British Empire was devising new means of regulating religion in India that it would then import back to Britain. And so that's. The specifics of this story were new. It's surprising to me. But that background condition that British secularism, Western secularism was invented in the Galanese, was not new to me. We know this already from the work of many other scholars.
- [19:11]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Perhaps comment on some of the examples used in the book. Whatever comes to mind in terms of. Yeah, where do we see continuities in our times? For those who are listening, who haven't read the book, who may very well decide to read the book, could you flesh out why this isn't a particularly colonial indic problem in terms of what's happening at present?
- [19:38]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
So I think the question is, what's specifically colonial about this?
- [19:42]
Dr. Raj Balkar
No, the question is you make a number of references in the book, but for those listening, why is this not just an historical South Asian problem? Where do we see this bubbling up? What are parallels that are occurring in our times? And how do they map on to section 295A or perhaps even how do they contrast there too?
- [20:07]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Sure, I guess maybe there are two ways to answer that question. One is in terms of the cultural politics of contemporary India, and two is in terms of the broader sort of theoretical horizon of the book. I mean, in India at present as well, I would add, as in Pakistan, although in somewhat different form. The Pakistan Penal Code is the direct derivation of the Indian Penal Code. And the laws in the Pakistan Penal Code that specifically prohibit blasphemies against the Prophet Muhammad and other entities within Islam were added in the 1980s, but very much modeled on Thomas McAuley's penal code. So they're this weird hybrid of British colonial law and Islamic law in contemporary India. This section 295A is often used. I mean, indeed, the entire penal coat remains the law of the land. And so the book is trying to provide an account of what happens when people in contemporary India speak in the language of the Indian Penal Code. What happens when they speak in the language of Macaulay? The ironic result is when people are trying to speak from the position of being Hindu, let's say, or, you know, being Jain or Muslim or whatever. But speaking in the language of the code, they're doing two things at once. They're. They're saying we as Hindus are offended as Hindus. But then they by. In saying that they've hybridized Hinduism with colonial legal secularism. In the conclusion of the book, I say that they become Macaulay's children when they allege offense in the terms of the Indian penal code they've entered. And this kind of intimate, embodied, affective relationship with these words written 100 years ago, that maybe tips my hand toward the broader theoretical horizon of the book, where the book is about India, but it's also trying to ask a series of theoretical questions about religion and what in the book I describe as religious affect. I'm very much in conversation with affect theory, with media studies, with a number of different conversations that are trying to get accounts for what is it to feel. What is it to feel in relation to media, be that print media or the digital? There's something weirdly both intimate and public about it at the same time, that the thing that feeling or affect, that thing that is registered sort of most intimately in the body and in seemingly private spaces of reading, is implicated in these public forms, like reading of tracts and pamphlets in newspapers, like reading Twitter. What happens in these spaces is intimate and public at the same time. And so the book is trying to provide one set of theoretical vocabularies or narrative techniques for describing that kind of public intimacy.
- [22:45]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Well, we're certainly well within the age of public outrage, manufactured or otherwise. So there are some fascinating parallels that one might be tempted to draw from your case studies and what's happening at present. You actually preempted this in your last response. But what subfields is your book in conversation with or otherwise put? What sorts of interests or scholars might your book pertain to?
- [23:19]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. It's a book that I am hoping garners a number of different kinds of scholarly audiences. So it should certainly appeal to scholars of South Asian religions, many already very aware of 295A. It should certainly appeal to historians of modern South Asia, as well as the anthropologists interested in public culture of modern South Asia more broadly. It should appeal to scholars interested in secularism in a number of historical contexts. It should appeal to scholars interested in religious affects and religious feelings, emotion discourses in religion. And I think it should appeal to people interested in histories of great media. I'm trying to hook it to theoretical conversations that really open it out and show the relevance of the study of South Asia to people working in other kinds of geographic contexts.
- [24:17]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Let's just say I'll write. What's this? Let's just say you had a magic wand. Just say, just for kicks. Magic wand or something. Crazy genie bottle oof what do you think? How do you think? I realize you're a K sample of one and you have a particular vocation and outlook, but what do you think? How do I phrase this? What might you like to see change about the landscape with respect to this law or this situation?
- [24:51]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
So that, I would say, is the policy question that I punted in writing the book. And that is ultimately out of respect for lawyers and policymakers. To decide what policy should be or what law should be is ultimately a different task than the task of historical and critical scholarship. My job is to provide an account of the history of the law, is to provide a genealogy of the law, is to observe its effects and its limits, and not ultimately to propose, say, a shift in law. And that's just a different skill set. And I respect the people who do that too much to presume in terms of shifts that might happen in discourse around this law. I think we are off. People when they critique this law, are often unaware of the kinds of histories that their critiques participate in. So, I mean, I came to suspect in writing the book that sometimes contemporary Indian left critiques of 295A, when they describe it as a blasphemy law, and they're like, oh, we as India are secular. We should not have a blasphemy law. I was like, you sort of read these and you're like, wait a minute. There is a really prominent blasphemy law in South Asia that gets talked about a lot of the Pakistan penal Code. I mean, when the Indian left is sort of disavowing 295A and calling it a blasphemy of law, when it's precisely not a blasphemy law. It's like a proto hate speech law. Is there like an implicit sort of, we're not Pakistan in that kind of critique of the law? I think it's just very easy. And thus you meet perhaps implicit Islamophobia and that kind of secular left critique of 295A. I just think it's so easy when we talk about religion and when we try to espouse positions that we understand as secular, to put our foot in it in all kinds of ways, that the history of secularism is complex. Its politics are not always as savory or as clean cut as we want them to be. And those of us who position ourselves personally within secularism need to do a much better job of understanding the complexity of what secularism is and has been as a cultural form and a political.
- [27:01]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Perhaps paying a bit of attention to the Siamese twin to which it is attached?
- [27:04]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Absolutely.
- [27:06]
Dr. Raj Balkar
Is this clearly passionate about this topic and is this work that you're continuing? You mean what's what what are you working on now? If, if anything related to this work?
- [27:17]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
This is why otherwise. Oh well, I mean I've got a number of side projects I'm trying to get out the door at the moment, but the next big project which I've barely begun work on, is still within the space of like global transnational Hinduism. My scholarship as a whole thinks about modern Hinduism and modern South Asia as it connects to sort of the world stage. My first like Slandering the Sacred and my first book, Spiritual Despots, we're thinking about India in connection with Britain. The new book is taking a different angle and is set in Los angeles between the 1920s and the 1950s. It's following the friendship between Christopher Isherwood, the British novelist and his chain smoking Bengali guru, Swami Prabhavananda. To think about what the guru was doing as political form in the trans colonial moment around World War II.
- [28:14]
Dr. Raj Balkar
There needs to be at least some sort of Netflix docu series on this chain smoking guru. But anyhow, that sounds like fascinating work. Is there anything else about Slattering the Sacred that you hope to be touched on and you'd like to say when we close?
- [28:27]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
No. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
- [28:31]
Dr. Raj Balkar
My pleasure. Thank you for yours. Thanks for being on the podcast.
- [28:34]
Dr. J. Barton Scott
Of course.
- [28:35]
Dr. Raj Balkar
For those listening, we have been speaking with Dr. J. Barton Scott of the University of Toronto on brand new publication called Slandering the Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India. Keep well, keep listening, keep reading and keep contemplating the inextricability between the sacred and the profane. Take care.