Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India - Paperback

by J. Barton Scott (Author)

A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law.

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.

Author Biography

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, also published by the University of Chicago Press.