SLANDERING THE SACRED

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern

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SLANDERING THE SACRED

Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India

J. BARTON SCOTT

 

 

 

 

The University of Chicago Press

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82488-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82490-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82489-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226824895.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Scott, J. Barton, author.

Title: Slandering the sacred : blasphemy law and religious affect in colonial India /

J. Barton Scott.

Other titles: Class 200, new studies in religion.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Series: Class 200: new studies in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022032907 | ISBN 9780226824888 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226824901

(paperback) | ISBN 9780226824895 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: India. Indian Penal Code. | Blasphemy—Law and legislation— India—History—19th century. | Blasphemy—Law and legislation—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Libel and slander—India—Religious aspects—History—19th century. | Libel and slander—Great Britain—Religious aspects—History—19th century. | Freedom of expression—India—History— 19th century.

Classification: LCC KNS4172.S36 2023 | DDC 345.54/0288—dc23/eng/20220830 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032907e

 

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

1   Introduction: Secularizing Blasphemy 1

PART ONE: THE MERRY PROPHET           31

2      A Crisis of the Public: The Rajpal Affair and Its Bodies 33

3      Secularism, High and Low: Making the Blasphemy Bill 54

PART TWO : BLASPHEMY’S EMPIRE         77

4      Codifying Blasphemy: “Religious Feelings” between Colony and Metropole                  79

5      Macaulay Unmanned, or, Tom Governs His Feelings 105

6      Libeling Religion: Secularism and the Intimacy of Insult 123

PART THREE: POLEMICS AS ETHICS     137

7      Printing Pain, Ruling Sentiment: A Brief History of Arya Insult              141

8      The Arya Penal Code: Law and the Practice of Documentary Religion   166

9      The Swami and the Prophet: Slandering Lives, Conducting Character                   185

10   Conclusion: A Feeling for “Religion” 216

 

Acknowledgments 231  Notes 235  Index 287

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Secularizing Blasphemy

 

 

In twenty-first-century India, “religious sentiments” are often in the news. Bollywood films are said to wound them. So are tweets, political car- toons, television advertisements, Netflix shows, stand-up comedy routines, and scholarly books. In 2014, the pulping of Wendy Doniger’s Hinduism: An Alternative History even made international headlines. Most of these controversies hinge on the interpretation of a single law: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, concerning insults intended to outrage “religious feelings.” In this book, I tell the story of how this law came to be, using its unexpected history to anchor a much larger inquiry into secularism and empire, insult and affect.

Enacted in 1927, after a Hindu group published a pamphlet mocking the sex life of the Prophet Muhammad, Section 295A capped a century of efforts to secularize British-imperial blasphemy law. In the century since, it has dogged books and images from The Satanic Verses to The Da Vinci Code, from the films of Aamir Khan to the paintings of M. F. Hussain.1 It places a chill on free speech about religion. It extends the power of the state over civil society. It probably even exacerbates the culture of religious controversy that it was designed to fix. Many people, understandably, would like to abolish it. Yet 295A demarcates a set of problems with no easy solution. The legisla- tors who enacted it foresaw the damage it could do and passed it anyway, a half-despairing measure to curb injurious speech. Their problems are still our problems. Trigger warnings, cancel culture, trolling, fake news—the twenty-first century has, if anything, compounded modernity’s free-speech

headache.

Section 295A opens a useful window onto these problems precisely because it is a problem too. But what kind of problem? What sort of law is

this? One argument for repealing 295A holds that it is a blasphemy law and thus impermissible under postcolonial India’s constitutional secularism.2 That is not quite correct, as this book will show. Section 295A is neither a blasphemy law nor is it antisecular. Rather, it is precisely a secularization of the British common law of blasphemy. Its story is the story of secular- ism itself, showing how secular law came to govern religion by managing religious affect.

 

BLASPHEMY NOW

 

Etymologically, blasphemy is euphemism’s cruder cousin, its Greek roots indicating rough speech—insults to the gods. Borrowing a phrase from liter- ary historian Joss Marsh, we could define blasphemy as a “word crime” and thus heuristically distinguish it from heresy (a crime of opinion, which need not be verbalized), iconoclasm (an image crime), or sacrilege (an object or body crime, like submerging a crucifix in human urine).3 Such distinctions, alas, collapse in practice. Historically, the word blasphemy has been used to indicate any and all of the above.

Ever since there have been deities, presumably, humans have been hurl- ing imprecations at them. In recent years, however, this venerable practice has commenced a new chapter. Danish cartoons, Satanic temples, Sweet Jesus Ice Cream—in the twenty-first century, slanders of the sacred are seemingly everywhere, with religion sometimes appearing as little more than a membrane for giving and receiving offense.

Why blasphemy? Why now? One factor is clearly the intense intercon- nectedness of our hypermediated world, wherein a thumb swipe across a smartphone can hurl insult around the globe in an instant.4 Religions are not, as once alleged, primarily systems of symbols.5 Still, in an era defined by the rapid circulation of signs, symbols can seem like religion’s most prominent feature—digitalized, decontextualized, and bound for trouble. By this account, our wounded present could be said to have begun sometime around the late 1980s, alongside so-called globalization. To represent it, we could flank Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988) with Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) and Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” (1989) to form a sort of blasphemous triptych, a rent in the fabric of the sacred that tore across the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.

I think our offended present is older than this. To see why, we need to dial

the clock back another half century to the era of high imperialism, globaliza- tion’s oft-disavowed parent. Rushdie himself, that archangel of blasphemy, points the way. The trouble with the British, says one of the characters in The Satanic Verses, is that their history happened overseas, so they do not understand it.6 Much the same could be said for modern blasphemy.

Too often, histories of blasphemy limit themselves to the geography of “the West” or, as I prefer, the North Atlantic region.7 In doing so, they get stuck in what I call the Whig-liberal narrative of blasphemous modernity, reciting a litany of martyrs to freethought who, by dying at the hands of inquisitorial religion, gave birth to our secular age—an enlightened epoch of audacious irreverence and salubrious profanation. This narrative coalesced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and tended (not coincidentally, in the age of empire) to focus on the triumphs of white men. Many of this narrative’s heroes (James Nayler, Voltaire) should indeed be remembered and even celebrated. Still, the performative effect of its amassment of white male flesh is all too clear. It secures a demographically and geographically circumscribed account of secular modernity that is as intellectually unsat- isfying as it is politically objectionable.

To narrate the history of the modern West as though that history can be abstracted from empire is to misrecognize what “the West” was in the first place: a North Atlantic regional identity of presumptively universal signifi- cance, crafted from the remains of Latin Christendom through the medium of empire. Empire is the West’s ontological prior, the thing through which it came into being. The Whig-liberal narrative of blasphemous modernity cannot, however, make sense of secularism’s colonial entanglements because it is itself a product of these entanglements—a historical artifact that needs explaining, not an explanatory apparatus.

To think past the Whig-liberal narrative, then, we also need to think past the entrenched forms of contemporary thought that go by the name secularism, not least the modern concept that Talal Asad has dubbed secu- larism’s “Siamese twin”: religion.8 “The category of religion often works to obfuscate relations of power,” writes Lucia Hulsether in a succinct distil- lation of recent scholarship.9 That is, the concept of religion that emerged between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as secularism’s enabling condition worked to create the impression that its referent was a discrete phenomenon, different in kind from other such phenomena (“politics,” “economics,” etc.) and thus theoretically capable of being sequestered in a discrete social sphere. This sequestration seemed possible partly because the religion concept implied that its object was constitutively otherworldly and

therefore disconnected from temporal power relations. Thus did the term religion come to demarcate a zone of ongoing political obfuscation—never more so perhaps than in the hands of its secularist critics, who, in present- ing their critiques of religion as rooted in transcendent values rather than historically contingent circumstance, often seem to have absorbed religion’s own depoliticizing logic.

Consider French prime minister Emmanuel Macron’s 2020 public com- ment on the Charlie Hebdo trial. The French, he insisted, have a “freedom to blaspheme” integral to their still more fundamental “freedom of con- science,” making the satirical newspaper in question justified in lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.10 Speaking in the idiom of transcendent French- republican values, Macron deflected the political specificities of the contro- versy at hand—the racialization and economic marginalization of French Muslims, the unresolved legacies of French colonialism in North Africa—as though questions of “conscience” (i.e., religion) were independent of the political histories of race and empire.11

Something similar might be said for another defender of blasphemy, the poet T. S. Eliot. In 1933, Eliot gave a lecture in Virginia where he suggested that blasphemous modernity had run out of steam: modern profanations, leached of real belief, were increasingly empty. In their place, Eliot urged a return to traditionalism, pointing to a contemporary cohort of white “agrarian” poets from the US South as exemplary.12 What an odd moment in the global culture wars. A Bostonian cosmopolite who, in 1927, became a British-imperial citizen was countering the Whig-liberal narrative of blas- phemous modernity by endorsing a settler-colonial agrarian “tradition” that had emerged as plantation capitalism updated itself into a new racialized regime in the half century after the US Civil War. If modern blasphemy appeared hollow to Eliot, this was because he refused to see it in full. Its history had happened partly overseas, circulating on the crosscurrents of empire. The very year Eliot became a British-imperial subject, after all, Brit- ish India was having its own blasphemy crisis—culminating in Section 295A. As Rajeev Bhargava has suggested, scholars of North Atlantic secular- isms “may need to look sideways” toward India to discover “not only a com- pressed version of their own history but also a vision of its future.”13 To look sideways is to trace the horizontal latticework of empire and the entangled histories that unfold within it. It is both to connect and to provincialize. French republicanism is not the same as anglophone Whig liberalism, and to pry them apart is to see “the West” dissolving into a richly variegated transcolonial landscape that runs from settler-colonial Virginia to metro-

politan Paris to postcolonial Delhi and Bombay. There too, the Whig-liberal narrative of blasphemous modernity has been remarkably tenacious— shaping, among other things, how the Indian left frames its critiques of Hindu nationalism.14 To think past it, we might begin by reconsidering the problem of how to “secularize” blasphemy.

 

SECULARIZING BLASPHEMY

 

It might seem perverse to study blasphemy via what amounts to an absence— Section 295A, which is precisely not a blasphemy law. But, as I hope to show, the conceptually unstable text of 295A can help bring the history of this common-law offense into clearer view.

During the 1927 Legislative Assembly debates over the new 295A, as- sembly member M. R. Jayakar offered an especially succinct definition of blasphemy. Troubled that his colleagues kept referring to the “Religious Insults Bill” by its popular moniker, the “Blasphemy Bill,” Jayakar took the floor to explain why this was a serious mistake. Blasphemy, he said, is an “entirely different offence” from the one proposed: it is an “offense per se against religion.” Although a crime in England, where the state was the “upholder of the Church,” blasphemy could not be criminalized in India. Central Provinces representative and prominent legal scholar Hari Singh Gour concurred. Where the English monarch was the “defender of the faith,” the Government of India was merely the “defender of the peace.” Any laws restricting the criticism of religion must be limited to the basis of preventing potential violence.15

Section 295A keeps to these limits. It criminalizes “acts intended to out- rage the religious feelings of any class, by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” Relegating the noun religion to a subordinate clause, it grants reli- gion per se only indirect protection, reserving direct protection to some- thing else—“religious feelings” (of which more anon).

Defining blasphemy as an offense against religion per se might seem intu- itive; Jayakar’s definition is not wrong. It is, however, misleading—effecting a kind of conceptual sleight of hand. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British reformers had been trying to secularize blas- phemy law. That is, they participated in a cultural logic of secularization that emplotted its actors within we might now call a subtraction story, a drama wherein “religion” would be removed from “law” to purify both.16 Blas-

phemy’s would-be reformers sought to eliminate what had come to appear as a Christian-theological crime and possibly replace it with some kind of secular equivalent; Jayakar and Gour were heir to this ongoing history when they insisted that the new 295A could not concern itself with offenses against religion per se. They were, in a historically specific sense, secularizers. They were also, however, reterritorializing this secularizing impulse with a subtle semantic shift. The English common law of blasphemy did not protect “reli- gion.” It protected Christianity (when the term religion was used, it was typi- cally as a functional synonym for Christianity). By trading terms, Jayakar was engaging in an act of secular translation, reinterpreting common law’s pasts via his late colonial present in a productive anachronism.17

To study the history of English blasphemy law is to discover not a con- tinuous process of secularization, but rather a sequence of historically dis- tinct formations of both the secular (a cultural or epistemic category) and secularism (a political doctrine).18 The illusion of continuity was created by anachronistically rereading the past in presentist terms, as Jayakar did. The shift from one formation to the next was partly driven by secularism’s own questioning power, its impulse to query the line around the religious.19 Even the most ardently separationist of secular states cannot fully disen- tangle itself from religion, because to grant freedom to something called “religion” the state first has to demarcate that concept’s boundaries, officially recognizing certain practices as religious while withholding recognition from others.20 The resulting paradox—to disestablish religion, a state first has to establish it—means that the line separating religion from politics will constantly be transgressed, such that the secular state continually needs to police it. This ongoing boundary-work thus serves a productive function in that it tends to extend the state’s authority over increasingly minute aspects of social life—an essential but underrecognized side effect of secularism’s constitutive language game.

The British knew how to use this game to their advantage: it helped jus- tify colonial rule. As Henry Maine argued in 1861, India was stuck in a stage of social evolution where “a rule of law is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion.”21 It thus needed Britain to educate it, civilizing by secularizing. If we understand colonial secularism as itself constitutively unable to discriminate neatly between “law” and “religion,” then its real function would seem to be training the colonized to inhabit its questioning power, learning to query the boundaries of religion to various political ends. This querying happened in multiple languages, with the vernacular press using translation to negotiate

the hegemony of the colonial state by exploiting non-equivalence between religion and words like din and dharma.22 It also happened in English, in official spaces like the Legislative Assembly. As Burmese representative Hla Tun Pru laconically observed in 1927, there remained “certain difficulties with regard to what a religion is.”23 Would the proposed 295A protect atheist or rationalist beliefs? In light of these problems, he asked that the new law not apply to his homeland. (His request was ignored.)

Jayakar too was playing this secularist language game and, in the process, reinterpreting the legal past. For an early modern authority like William Blackstone, blasphemy indicated “contumelious reproaches,” “profane scoff- ing,” or “contempt and ridicule” directed at God, Jesus, or the Bible.24 Black- stone did not mention “religion,” the general category—not yet as widely available in 1769 as it would become over the next century or so, as, starting around 1880, talk of “world religions” erupted into self-evident ubiquity.25 In 1927, then, Jayakar could do things with “religion” that Blackstone could not. He used the concept to rework blasphemy so it could denote insult to any world religion, thus making this legal concept serviceable in religiously plural India (he was not, as we shall see, the first to do so). Conceptual insta- bility was perhaps inevitable. Even a not-blasphemy law like 295A remains in an important sense, blasphemy-adjacent. It circulates in a cultural field where the concept of blasphemy is still alive and well, overdetermining 295A’s possible meanings—as Jayakar saw, to his frustration, prompting him to engage in more conceptual boundary-work.

As an aside, it bears noting that when scholars consider how best to translate blasphemy out of Christianized English, they are engaged in the same historical processes as Jayakar. What does blasphemy look like in Bud- dhism? Hinduism? Islam? Those questions are ultimately beyond the scope of this book. I would simply caution anyone approaching them to exercise hermeneutic care. Although Islamic legal traditions do detail crimes that overlap with blasphemy, for instance, their typologies of offense—organized around such concepts as takdhib, or willful rejection of religious truths, and sabb al-rasul, vilification of the Prophet—are not identical to Christianity’s.26 Hinduism offers an even more complicated case. Would one translate blas- phemy as nindastuti, praising the divine by intimately berating it?27 Or would one study satire, heterodoxy, and polemic?28 What about word crimes like a brahman mispronouncing a syllable while reciting the Vedas? Or a woman or subordinated-caste person uttering Vedic words? Such word crimes are also body crimes, of course, linked to the ritual politics of caste and gender.

FORMATIONS OF THE SECULAR:

BLASPHEMY AS COMMON LAW OFFENSE

 

Jayakar’s definition of blasphemy would seem to beg a fundamental concep- tual question. What is it for religion to suffer offense? To begin exploring this question, one might construct a (surely incomplete) list of the vari- ous harms that have been attributed to blasphemous speech over the cen- turies:29

 

1.  Metaphysical harm, as to God or the cosmos.

2.  Political harm, as to the state.

3.  Harm to the public peace.

4.  Spiritual harm to the population, as by corrupting Christian souls.

5.  Ethical harm to the population, as by corrupting morals.

6.  Harm to the feelings of individuals.

7.  Harm to group feelings.

8.  Harm to human dignity.

 

Which of the above counts as harm to religion, per se? Any of them? This question, I think, needs to be answered historically.

Thinking from the above list, a commonsense account of the history of blasphemy law might run as follows: between the seventeenth and twenty- first centuries, an ecclesiastical crime became a political crime, which was then tempered by Victorian reformers before finally—and belatedly—being abolished in 2008 and replaced by a new “racial and religious hatred” law. This is a classic subtraction story of secularization, set in “Little England,” that self-contained isle.

Further study reveals a more complex tale. The colonies play a promi- nent role in articulating Britain’s understanding of itself as a secular nation; British secularism was arguably invented in the colonies, especially India. Even the narrowly English story is marked by substantial discontinuity. It is a history of sequential formations of the secular, wherein the very notion of the secular shifts along the way. Case in point: the English word secularism is a product of this history. It was coined in 1851 by George Jacob Holyoake, who had been prosecuted for blasphemy a decade earlier.30 For Holyoake, secularism indicated an ethics of being-in-the-world, continuous with the freethinking milieu that drove Victorian blasphemy trials.31 It was not until later that secularism came to denote a political doctrine.

I adumbrate this history here, in schematic form, with particular atten- tion to the nineteenth century.

Formation 1: The Crown’s Christianity. In late medieval England, blas- phemy was an ecclesiastical crime. It harmed the soul of the speaker. It also potentially caused metaphysical harm. A village church mural from around 1400 depicts a pietà surrounded by men cursing, swearing, and otherwise taking the Lord’s name in vain. Their injurious words literally dismember the body of Christ in heaven. One swearer holds Jesus’s heart, another a chunk of bone, a third his severed foot—freshly yanked from a gorily ren- dered leg that protrudes from the Virgin’s lap.32

A new dispensation coalesced in 1676 after a poor farmer named John Taylor exclaimed, repeatedly, that “Christ is a whore-master, and religion is a cheat.” Taylor (a member of an antinomian prophetic movement called the Sweet Singers of Israel) was first sent to the madhouse at Bedlam for “bodily correction.”33 Found sane, he was then sent to court, where Justice Matthew Hale, who in the 1660s had presided over witch trials, found him guilty of blasphemy. Hale’s decisive words in Rex v. Taylor resounded for the next two hundred years: “Christianity is parcel of the laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law.”34

It is easy to see why Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Jefferson derided Hale as a theocratic Puritan, invoking a version of the Whig-liberal narrative. We should not, however, follow Jefferson’s lead. Hale was a secu- larizer. In saying that Christianity was “parcel” of English law, he was claim- ing that parcel for the king—insisting that Crown courts could try a crime previously belonging to ecclesiastical courts.35 This is secularization in the most literal sense. The verb secularize was first used in English to describe Henry VIII’s seizure of monasteries and other church property for the Crown, converting these sacred or eternal things into worldly or temporal ones. In this early modern formation of the secular, then, Christianity was being appropriated as a political symbol open to worldly administration—a move with precedent in the late medieval period now harnessed to the needs of the early modern state.36

Formation 2: Victorian Decency. English and (after the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) British blasphemers went quiet for most of a century before piping up again in the 1790s to distribute cheap reprints of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1794) and other Enlightenment tracts. Decades of trials fol- lowed, sweeping up alleged blasphemers both famous and obscure before culminating in the case that decisively revised the common law of blas- phemy.

In Regina v. Ramsay and Foote (1883), Lord Chief Justice John Coleridge (a relative of the poet) held that in an age when Jews, Catholics, and Non- conforming Protestants had been granted civil rights, Christianity was no longer part of the law in any simple way. He thus redefined blasphemy as a stylistic offense, a crime of manner not matter.37 “If the decencies of con- troversy are observed,” he wrote, “even the fundamentals of religion may be attacked without the writer being guilty of blasphemous libel.”38 Doubt God all you like, that is, but do not (like the accused publishers of the Freethinker, George Foote and William Ramsay) print a picture of him showing his but- tocks to Moses on Mt. Sinai (a riff on Exodus 33:23: “Thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen”) (see figure 1). One might be inclined to view Coleridge as a secularizer, muting Hale’s theocratic impulse. This reading, however, simply reinscribes the nineteenth century’s own Whig- liberal paradigm. It is more productive to take Coleridge as articulating a specifically Victorian formation of secularism as biopolitical project—one that shifted the paradigmatic locus of the theologico-political from the sov- ereign to the social body as a site for the regulation of manners, morals, and public decency.

“Decency,” that most primly Victorian of terms, implied a constella- tion of raced, classed, and gendered values. Its class valence was especially glaring. The nineteenth century’s most heavily prosecuted rationalist tracts were addressed to working-class readers and often linked to radical po- litical movements. Upmarket “literary” texts (with the adjective conferring cultural status) were prosecuted less frequently because they seemed less threatening to class hierarchies.39 As Freethinker editor George Foote noted, his journal was on trial not just for its “coarse” language (to use Coleridge’s classed adjective), but also because it was cheap. Notably, it featured pic- tures, that most demotic of media.

Empire and its racialized tropes were never far away. Foote called the Bible a Victorian “fetish,” invoking the ethnological term associated with “primitive” religions.40 Another Victorian blasphemer said the Bible was so barbaric as to constitute a “disgrace to orang-outangs, much less to men.”41 Yet another described the biblical God as vicious, like a “painted savage,” and “more bloodthirsty than a Bengal tiger.”42 When blasphemers accused Christianity of savagery, law accused them of a parallel incivility. Everyone seemed to agree on the value accorded “civilization” itself, that racializing, imperial term.43 Victorian debates about blasphemy, one might say, were debates about how best to produce a certain kind of religio-racial subject, trained in proper decorum by both law and social mores.44

 

 

figure 1. “Moses Getting a Back View.” Freethinker. Christmas 1882. Courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

 

Perhaps the decisive move of Enlightenment blasphemers had been to reimagine blasphemy as a tool for social reform, a means of advancing the cause of civilization. Where once blasphemy had been a discrete act (whether sin or recreation), now it would be both an identity and a mis- sion.45 Blasphemy was a moral act, with the blasphemer dedicated in service to reason—an inversion or antithesis of Christian missionaries. These duel- ing missions then smashed together in a religio-racial civilizational assem- blage that sprawled out onto the world stage.

This assemblage’s religio-racial subjects were also gendered subjects. Regina v. Ramsay and Foote belonged to a cluster of intertwined trials that included the 1877 prosecution of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh for obscenity after they distributed copies of a banned birth control tract, The Fruits of Philosophy (1832).46 If Besant, Foote, and company saw freethought and birth control as conjoined causes, their opponents (organizations such as the Society for the Prevention of Vice) saw them as conjoined problems. An image, such as the Freethinker’s divine bottom, could then scandalously concretize this struggle over Victorian bodies.

For Coleridge, it was these bodies’ emotional capacities that mattered most. By redefining blasphemy as a stylistic crime, he also redefined it as an affective crime. Only “indecent and offensive attacks” on religion “calculated to outrage the feelings of the general body of the community” would, by his

standard, be punished.47 (That verb, outrage, would also appear in 295A.) Decent criticisms too were defined by their affect, but Coleridge struggled to find the words to describe it. Legally permissible criticism of religion would need to have “a grave, an earnest, a reverent, I am almost tempted to say a religious tone.” Coleridge proposed John Stuart Mill, the noted agnostic, as a paradigm for his reverent critic—underscoring the irony of describing good criticism as quasi-religious criticism. In Coleridge’s hands, “religion” metamorphosed from message to medium. It became a tone or style, mani- fested in a decorum or habitus that even an agnostic could achieve. Thus transformed, the religious became the precondition of shared civic life.

Formation 3: Racial and Religious Hatred. In 1921, John Gott became the last man in Britain jailed for blasphemy (or, precisely, for outraging “reli- gious feelings”) after comparing Jesus to a circus clown and distributing birth control tracts in East London.48 In 1977, Denis Lemon became the last man in Britain convicted and fined for blasphemy for publishing a homoerotic poem about the crucifixion in his small-circulation paper, the Gay News (judge and jury agreed that saying, of Jesus, that “the shaft still throbbed, anointed with death’s final ejaculation” was in breach of good taste).49 By this time, however, the Victorian formation of the secular was in the pro- cess of collapsing, a vestige of an earlier era. After Ramsay, legal reformers complained that courts should have abolished, not updated, blasphemy law. After Lemon, this complaint grew louder. In 1981, a commission was created to assess whether blasphemy law should be reformed or abolished; it recom- mended outright abolition.50 In 1990, during the Rushdie debacle, the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs joined with the Archbishop of Canter- bury and Chief Rabbi to ask that blasphemy law be broadened to protect all religions, with the Church of England serving as a sort of interfaith anchor, primer inter pares much like England herself in the Commonwealth.51 The Law Lords rejected the proposal.

A solution to the problem of blasphemy did not emerge for another fifteen years. In 2006, Parliament passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which outlawed religious hate speech. Incitement of “racial hatred” had been legally prohibited since the 1960s, and there had been occasional proposals to broaden these laws to include religion. The impetus for finally doing so came from the post-9/11 moment, with its alarming increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes and attendant racialization of Muslimness. The concept of “hate speech,” dating to the 1980s, offered a new basis for restrict- ing religious insult (a development I consider further in chapter 10). With

the new law in place, Parliament was finally, in 2008, able to abolish blas- phemy as common-law offense.52 Hate speech made blasphemy redundant.

 

SECULARISM IN THE COLONIES

 

The Indian lawmakers who enacted Section 295A were thinking via this En- glish legal history. They referenced blasphemy cases from the previous half century, wondered whether English law applied in the colony, and rattled off names of British skeptics who had kept their comments within the bounds of decency.53 Jayakar, a trained lawyer, would certainly have known this material. When he defined blasphemy as an offense per se against religion, perhaps he was thinking of Justice Hale’s ruling in Rex v. Taylor.

Section 295A, however, pointed to a notably different set of harms—and a substantially confused one at that. This confusion grew out of the court case that prompted the colonial government to add a new religion section to the Indian Penal Code: Rajpal v. Emperor.54 The trial concerned an anony- mously authored tract, the Rangila Rasul (The merry Prophet), published by a man named Mahashe Rajpal. Charged under Section 153A of the Code with having created “enmity or hatred” between religious classes, Rajpal was taken to court for what proved a prolonged (nearly three-year) trial. In May 1927, the Lahore High Court finally acquitted Rajpal on appeal. Its decision, written by Justice Kanwar Dalip Singh, conceded that the Rangila Rasul was indeed a “scurrilous satire on the founder of the Muslim religion,” but insisted that it was not therefore also a slander on “the Muhammadan religion as such,” nor did it necessarily render Muslims “objects worthy of enmity or hatred.” Singh thus demarcated three distinct offenses: libel of the dead, defamation of religion (i.e., blasphemy), and group defamation. The court could not, Singh argued, consider the empirical “reaction of a par- ticular class” in assessing whether a given text was offensive, but must base its rulings on textual evidence alone. By this standard, the Rangila Rasul is slippery: the text clearly states that its criticisms of Muhammad do not imply a criticism of Islam. Thus, although “decent persons of whatever commu- nity” should feel “contempt” for the tract, it could not be proscribed under 153A. Singh closed his judgment by suggesting that government create a new section that would directly prohibit insults to religion without making that offense dependent on the production of class enmity.

Singh’s decision seemed downright bizarre to many of his contempo- raries. One bureaucrat scrawled a handwritten note on the official govern- ment file describing the decision as “rather metaphysical”—so convoluted, that is, as to be worthy of a philosopher.55 Perhaps this is why, when gov- ernment bureaucrats proposed a new law two months later, they did the precise thing Singh’s decision would seem to disallow: they made insult to religion criminal only insofar as it produces “outrage” in religious “classes,” thus framing an offense substantially redundant with Section 153A and its class “enmity.” Sensing this redundancy, Hari Singh Gour (the legal scholar and Legislative Assembly member) proposed that the Assembly scrap 295A entirely and instead add a new religion-specific section alongside 153A in the Code’s chapter on “offenses against the public tranquility” (where, in 1898, 153A had been appended to a section about riots).56

To see why colonial bureaucrats were unable to disentangle religious insult (and thus blasphemy) from religious classes or populations, let us visit the history of English blasphemy law once again, resituating it within a transcolonial framework. By the time that John Taylor was dragged to court in 1676, England was already an empire. The British secularism that emerged thereafter emerged contrapuntally, through the interplay of colony and metropole.57 India sounded an especially clear note in this counterpoint, because of both its political and economic importance and its religious diversity.58 It was, and remains, a major laboratory of secular modernity.

For heuristic purposes, one might divide the history of Indian secular- ism into three principal periods: Company secularism (1600–1858), late colonial secularism (1858–1947), and postcolonial secularism (1947–). This schema is potentially useful for seeing how postcolonial secularism emerged from the secularisms that preceded it.

Postcolonial Indian secularism is often celebrated as nationally distinc- tive because it is defined around ideals of religious neutrality (dharma nir- pekshata) and respect for all religions (sarva dharma samabhava) rather than the punctilious church-state separation that animates, in different ways, French and US secularisms.59 Simultaneously a political ideal and a cultural imaginary, Indian secularism’s ethos of pluralist inclusion assumed iconic form on postcolonial cinema screens with their melodramas of Mother India receiving blood transfusions from her Hindu, Muslim, and Christian sons.60

Without denying Indian secularism’s distinctive emphasis, it bears stress- ing that, just as British secularism cannot be extricated from India, Indian secularism cannot be extricated from Britain. Each, as Gauri Viswanathan

notes, is at once “the condition and the effect of the other.”61 Or, put slightly differently, empire is the ontological prior of both. In other words, as Saba Mahmood has argued, the “national-political structuration” of secularism happens from within secularism as global political project, one predicated on transnational institutions and their universalizing impulses.62 By putting India back into this transcolonial framework, we can better see the South Asian circulation of multiple varietals of secularism—not just the 1920s tol- erance secularism that would later be enshrined as postcolonial ideal (see chapter 3) but also the separation secularism that underlaid Jayakar’s and Gour’s insistence on the impossibility of a secular blasphemy law.

This transcolonial history could be said to have begun in 1600 with the creation of the East India Company. The Company subsequently developed alongside political modernity, experimenting with religious “toleration” at the same moment that John Locke was writing on that theme, and talking about religious “free exercise” in 1776, during the moment of the Atlantic- world revolutions.63 Especially from the late eighteenth century forward, Company secularism did not stipulate separation between religion and state. Instead, the Company set out to rule its Hindu and Muslim subjects according to their own laws and customs, thus incorporating religious law (or a version of it) into the secular-state apparatus.

This basic orientation continued when Queen Victoria assumed direct rule of her colony in 1858 through a proclamation that affirmed her own Christian “convictions” while renouncing the “right” to impose those con- victions on her Indian subjects. Her government, she promised, would “abstain from all interference” in “religious belief or worship.”64 Victoria’s very title was shaped by secularist imperatives. When, in 1877, she was pro- claimed “Empress of India,” her advisers translated this phrase into Hin- dustani, slightly awkwardly, as Kaisar-i-Hind, thus avoiding the potential religious association of words like chakravartin or shahanshah.65 She would be a latter-day “Caesar,” the culmination of a grand—and grandly secular— imperial lineage. As Viceroy Robert Bulwer-Lytton opined at an official Delhi dinner celebrating the new empress, India’s diversity of “race” and “creed” posed “administrative problems unsolved by Caesar, unsolved by Charlemagne, unsolved by Akbar.”66 He thus put Britain at the technical- administrative frontier of secular empire as political form, defined by the twinned management of race and religion.

In the late nineteenth century, the colonial state increasingly turned to the new academic discipline of anthropology for authoritative knowledge about South Asian races, castes, and creeds. The result was what has been

called the ethnographic state, a political formation that saw religion primar- ily as an object of empirical study.67 Religion also cued a security question, a problem of endemic populational violence requiring skilled technical man- agement. Bureaucrats were especially concerned about preventing a recur- rence of the 1857 uprisings (a.k.a. the “Sepoy Mutiny”), allegedly sparked by wounded religious sentiments.

It is no mistake that Indian secularism emerged first as a managerial question and only later as a question of rights. As Partha Chatterjee has argued, the liberal-constitutional state came late to colonies like India, where other political rationalities—especially governmentality—predominated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The North Atlan- tic world had citizens; the colonies had subjects. Indeed, according to Chat- terjee, even the postcolonial Indian state more often operates within a logic of governmentality than of rights, giving rise to the distinctive form of counter-politics that Chatterjee calls the politics of the governed.68

When we talk about secularism, we typically think via the citizen (as by discussing Article 25 of the postcolonial Indian constitution, with its guarantee of freedoms of religion and conscience). It is consistently harder to imagine secularism from within the terms of governmentality, which is why both popular and legal discourse have remained consistently unable to see secularism clearly. Secularism has a “dual character,” as Mahmood sug- gests; it is split between a “promise of freedom” and a “regulatory impulse.”69 Refracting Mahmood through Chatterjee’s account of the differential emer- gence of the modern state form in colony and metropole, I argue that colo- nial secularism operated via two distinct political rationalities or logics: a liberal-constitutional secularism, addressed to the rights of the citizen, and a governmental secularism, addressed to the administrative management of empirical populations. The former promised freedom; the latter delivered regulation. In colonial India, the contradiction between these two political rationalities was often resolved through a pedagogic narrative, rendering a conceptual hiatus as a temporal hiatus. One day, religiously excitable sub- jects would mature into citizens. Until then, they required the paternalism of colonial law, a tool for educating subjects toward a perpetually deferred future freedom.

If the structural tension between juridico-legal and governmental ratio- nalities is intrinsic to the modern state form, it is nonetheless articulated in historically specific ways. Here, I give this tension a period-specific gloss by talking about the liberal-constitutional and ethnographic (i.e., governmen- tal) states. I further suggest that, in late colonial India, one important modal-

ity of governmental secularism was penal secularism—that is, a secularism that takes religion as a potentially violent criminal object in need of reform or reeducation.

 

VIOLENCE AND THE EDUCATION OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT

 

The Indian Penal Code was originally written by Thomas Babington Macau- lay, the colonial ideologue now better known for his 1835 “Minute on Educa- tion,” which proposed teaching Shakespeare and Milton in India to create a class of ersatz Englishman—a charter text for colonial mimicry.70 Written immediately after the “Minute,” the Code expressed a parallel pedagogic project. It would turn Indians into “manly” British subjects (Macaulay’s adjective), including by training them to moderate their excitable feelings.71 Here, law serves more than a strictly juridico-legal function. It does peda- gogic work, becoming part of the apparatus of colonial governmentality. It operates via the education of affect.

Macaulay’s 1837 draft Code responded directly to early nineteenth- century British blasphemy trials. In 1833, Macaulay proposed to Parliament a means of reconceptualizing blasphemy as an affective crime. In India, he implemented that proposal. His Code did not include a blasphemy law. Instead, it criminalized “wounding the religious feelings of any person.”72 That language became law in 1860 as Section 298. In 1927, it was supple- mented by 295A. These colonial statutes were part of the same entangled history as the 1883 Ramsay ruling, which similarly redefined blasphemy as an affective crime.

In both Britain and India, “religious feelings” were a proxy for violence. “Blasphemy,” as a Victorian guide to libel law put it, is “an outrage on men’s religious feelings, tending to a breach of the peace.”73 Forty years later, 295A would use nearly identical language. In this phraseology, the meaning of “religious feelings” is overdetermined. To speak of “outraging religious feelings” is to indicate one feeling in particular: outrage. In the lead-up to the passage of 295A, a colonial bureaucrat offhandedly remarked that the “unfortunate state of feeling” between Hindus and Muslim regularly results in “deplorable outbreaks of passion.”74 This was not just euphemism. It was catachrestic displacement. When it came to religion, passion meant violence and violence, passion.

Laws like 295A were designed to prevent such passions from form- ing. The dark irony is that they probably just intensified them, with law’s repressive or censorial function perversely inciting a profusion of forbid- den speech.75 Polemicists learned to speak law’s language, alleging that their “religious feelings” had been outraged, and thus performatively constituting those feelings in the very act of transmitting them to others. “Religious feel- ings,” then, were not something external to law that the colonial state could step in to manage. They grew along the trellis of law, taking shape around the bureaucratic state apparatus. This was education of a kind—just not the kind lawmakers said they intended. Law contained the script for communal violence. It educated its subjects in outrage.

If such dynamics are hard to see, it is perhaps because liberalism—as a theory of speech acts, not just a political theory—has a hard time account- ing for the force of political speech. As eminent Victorian Walter Bagehot succinctly glossed the matter in 1867, liberalism indicates “government by discussion.”76 It places ultimate authority in the deliberations of parliamen- tary bodies and thus, by extension, in the critical deliberations of the civic public. Liberalism’s ideal of deliberative reason, as is now well-known, works to occlude the body and its affects as political sites. It has thus also, histori- cally, worked to exclude categories of person understood via the body (i.e., women and racialized people), whether by insisting that their bodies are too particular (thus having insufficient vantage on the general good) or too emotional (and thus insufficiently rational-deliberative).

Victorian liberals, meanwhile, also did a spectacularly bad job of account- ing for the performative conditions of their own speech. All law carries the implicit threat of physical violence, it being the modern state’s monopoly on legitimate violence—its ability to arrest, imprison, or kill—that lends its words the “force of law.” In colonial situations, law’s implicit force tends to be strongly racialized. In British India, for instance, the force of law under- girded the mundane acts of white violence that were a commonplace feature of social life. “Disorderly” whites, in their very bodies, quoted the racial- ized state, thus arrogating its implicit power—and undermining its ability to symbolize the rule of law.77 Colonial officials found various ways to disavow such violence. One important tactic was displacing “state” violence onto Indian “society” as religious conflict, thus refusing to see the state’s role in constituting Hindu-Muslim communalism (a disavowal enabled by the very distinction between “state” and “society,” those grand abstractions)

Metropolitan writers like Bagehot (who inherited his position as edi- tor of The Economist from his father-in-law, who died in India) engaged in

similar acts of disavowal. When Bagehot turned discussion into a political symbol, he invested it with a perlocutionary force that extended beyond Parliament, that temple of deliberation, to facilitate imperial rule. It was discussion, he argued, that had catapulted Britain to the forefront of world civilizations and allowed it to colonize places like India—unskilled at criti- cal chatter, and thus stuck in an arrested state of civilizational development. This racist cant imbues Bagehot’s “government by discussion” with a second- ary sense. If discussion is what justified the British government in India, then discussion became a byword for empire, an ideological cultural norm around which Britain constructed a narrative of global hegemony. Discus- sion exerted force to order colonized bodies.

Nor was Bagehot alone in treating discussion in this way. James Fitzjames Stephen—the writer, judge, and former Indian colonial official (and, later, uncle to novelist Virginia Woolf)—thought extensively about the distinction between force and persuasion in his 1873 response to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Where Mill had suggested that despotic force was appropriate for “children” and “barbarians” (i.e., India), reserving “liberty” and “free discus- sion” for mature nations (like Britain), Stephen insisted that the difference between a “rough and a civilized society” is not that the former uses “force” where the latter uses “persuasion,” but that the latter uses force with more care.78 He then set about undermining the distinction between the two.

This distinction had a venerable lineage. In his Letter Concerning Tol- eration (1689), for instance, John Locke also differentiated between the “outward force” of the magistrate and the “inward persuasion of the mind.” Because outward force cannot change inward belief, he argued, the state must tolerate religious difference. This argument seems to construe religion as a purely mental affair, disjoined from the body. And yet Locke knew (or at least elsewhere seemed worried that) religion refuses such distinctions. It is a habitus that burrows deep into bodies before those bodies have full access to language and thus to deliberative persuasion.79

For Stephen too, religion seemed a site where force and persuasion verge together. (Like Macaulay, he sprang from the clans of Clapham Common, that Anglican-evangelical stronghold, with a certain kind of religious disci- pline written into his family being.) “Religion and morality are and always must be essentially coercive systems,” he fumed. Though they might start with the “persuasion” of a small group, they inevitably culminate in “com- mand,” the forceful conversion of many.80 Indeed, he explained, although the relation between “force” and “persuasion” is sometimes conflated with the relation between “temporal” and “spiritual” power (i.e., politics and

religion), religion’s force is quasi-physical. Religion thus helps show how persuasion and force “are neither opposed to nor really altogether distinct from each other. They are alternative means of influencing mankind. . . .

Persuasion, indeed, is a kind of force  applied through the mind,” just

as force, in turn, is “a kind of persuasion.”81 The secular-liberal Mill is thus more akin to a religious figure like John Calvin than he might care to admit: both men apply force to reform society.82 They install—to use one of Ste- phen’s recurrent metaphors—canals, grooves, and other waterworks to get stagnant ponds moving, creating systems that direct behavior by harnessing external forces (friction, gravity, etc.).83 Liberty, refracted through a theori- zation of religion, dissipates into a structure of well-calibrated constraints. This is precisely why religion provides a useful metaphor for colonial law. As Stephen opined in 1876 (with acute sardonicism), in India, law is the “gospel of the English.” This phrase would seem an ironic (and likely unconscious) reworking of Justice Hale’s dictum that Christianity is parcel of the laws of England. In India, of course, English law was emphatically not Christian, but rather religiously neutral. For it to function as a gospel, then, the gospel would need to be stripped of theological contents—becoming a metaphor for a manner or modality of secular rule. As a “new religion,” wrote Stephen, law would produce a “moral conquest more striking, more durable, and far more solid than the physical conquest which rendered it possible.”84 Here, Stephen is trying to find language to describe the peda- gogic force of law, a force that shapes subjects while remaining distinct from overtly physical conquest. He lands on the word moral, which underscores this force’s proximity to religion (probably echoing the eighteenth-century

sense of moral as including both the sentimental and the ethical).

Stephen’s question here is, I think, still a live one. How does law’s peda- gogic, governmental, or persuasive force differ from and relate to its juridico- legal force? Both act on bodies, but in different ways. To develop an answer to this question, we need not follow Stephen in his antique terminology. What the nineteenth century called moral force, more recent scholarship has called affect.

 

RELIGIOUS AFFECT AS PUBLIC FEELING

 

The interdisciplinary field of affect theory, which emerged in the 1990s at the intersection of queer theory and poststructuralism and later absorbed

various strands of British cultural studies and psychoanalysis, has, more recently, entered conversations in religious studies, critically reframing an older set of scholarly themes.85 “Religion always begins with an emo- tion,” declared Cornelis Tiele in 1899, writing toward the end of a period in which theorists of religion—from Friedrich Schleiermacher in the 1790s to Rudolph Otto in the 1910s—had increasingly come to see their object of study as primarily a species of feeling.86

While affect theory lurks behind much of the analysis in Slandering the Sacred, it only occasionally steps into the limelight. To me, it has seemed rel- atively more productive to think with (and also against) the period-specific concepts circulating in my historical archive, with the term affect a tool for getting critical traction on phrases like “religious feelings.” In the eighteenth century, one spoke of passions, sentiments, and affections—philosophical terms that conjoined the mental to the moral, often with theological valence. In the early nineteenth century, this moral lexicon was partly displaced by the word emotion, which previously had denoted political or meteorologi- cal unrest; now it was redeployed as a scientizing term for describing the human mind. Its popularizers included James and John Stuart Mill, key patrons of the Indian Penal Code.87 These shifting English-language con- cepts shaped developments in South Asian vernacular languages. For ex- ample, an Urdu-language treatise on modern psychology like Abdul Majid Daryabadi’s Falsafa-e Jazbat (The philosophy of emotions, 1914) separated the emotional from the moral, a sharp departure from older discourses on civility or the “polishing of ethics” (tahzib ul-akhlaq).88 These concept- histories also inflected colonial jurisprudence. In 1915, a lower court in north India held that because religion is “rooted in the emotions and sentiments,” religious arguments are pointless. They never change minds. They only hurt feelings.89

This book’s dive into historical feeling is not just empirical, however. Throughout, I work to develop modes of theorization immanent to my his- torical archives. I also consistently make critical moves indebted to con- temporary affect theory, especially around the question of what have been described oxymoronically as “public feelings.”90 What better phrase to cap- ture the “feelings” of 295A? Writing sentiment into the very text of law, 295A turns law itself into something like a sentimental literary genre—a mode of writing defined by the transmission of affect.

To understand this sentimental text, we need to dispense with the notion that emotions somehow exist interior to the individual human psyche. Even inward feelings, after all, are more outward than we like to think. They creep

along the skin, linger in rooms, connect us to embodied others.91 The word affect brings this connectivity into clearer view: it denotes a body’s ability to be affected by forces external to it (so too, etymologically, do emotion and passion, respectively indicating “moved” and “passive” bodies).

By focusing on public feelings—or, rather, on affect as a mobile force that is neither public nor private/personal—we can also productively reframe the history of secularism. As Joan Wallach Scott has argued, what we under- stand as secularism emerged in tandem with the modern public/private distinction that coalesced in the late eighteenth century. This distinction was strongly gendered, linked with the newly regnant ideal of the bour- geois home as temple of feminine domesticity. For long-nineteenth-century secularism, then, woman, sentiment, and religion appeared as correlate enti- ties, all constitutively disbarred from public. Secularism was a patriarchal project. (Only later, as Scott argues, did secularism reinvent itself as a femi- nist project, defined against racialized, and especially Muslim, postcolonial populations.)92

We can see these histories converging on a turn-of-the-twentieth- century figure like William James. Famously, his Varieties of Religious Expe- rience (1902) defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of indi- vidual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”93 This sequestering of religion within the confines of the heart was both a protestantizing and a gendered move. In a telling aside, James quips that to study religion is to be “literally bathed in sentiment” and confesses that he is “almost appalled at the amount of emotionality” in his text.94 Try to imagine James deliver- ing what was originally a lecture series to a roomful of besuited Scottish gentlemen in Edinburgh, narrating intense emotional experiences (includ- ing a few of his own, duly anonymized) in a paradigmatically public venue. Turning solitary feelings into public ones, he staged a kind of performative contradiction—registered in his body as a gendered squirm. James inhab- ited a gendered structure of secularist feeling.

This structure looked slightly different in turn-of-the-century India. Because colonialism disbarred elite Indian men from full participation in public life, these men turned to the inner sphere of literature, culture, domesticity, and religion as a zone of potential sovereignty, one where they could exercise self-rule without British interference.95 The result was what some scholars have depicted as a sort of secondary colonization, an invasion of the home by bourgeois men who set about imposing new restrictions on the lives of bourgeois women, including through language education as

site for the production of sexual difference.96 Duly sentimentalized, these women then became the symbolic heart of the religious “communities” that mediated elite-male access to the institutions of the colonial public.

This bourgeois-masculine public was, importantly, a formation of the parlor not the street.97 Its mores were savarna (privileged-caste) mores, with the question of the late colonial public thus inseparable from the late colo- nial rearticulation of the caste sensorium. If caste, in its various iterations, implies both a spatial-sensory order (a distribution of bodies in urban and village spaces phenomenologically coded around affectively charged prac- tices of touch, smell, sight, etc.) and a sexual order (a violent enforcement of caste endogamy), both orders were undergoing structural transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.98 This shift in the sensible infrastructures of caste was evident in the new modes of political religion that followed from B. G. Tilak’s reinvented Ganesh Chathurti festival, bring- ing religious images out of the sacred enclosure of brahmanical temples and into the public or sarvajanik street.99 It was likewise evident in the cheaply printed pages of polemical religious tracts, which developed an aesthetics of obscenity that stoked affects integral to the savarna sensorium (repul- sion, disgust)—often by referencing either saliva (linked to the brahmanical ideology of purity/pollution) or forms of labor traditionally associated with subordinated castes (sex work, human waste removal)—even as the promis- cuous circulation of cheap tactile print potentially unsettled caste mores.100 Caste reterritorialized Victorian “decency” by overlaying a savarna habitus onto the bourgeois-Victorian habitus of bodily or spatial enclosure. A similar overlay of caste and class informed the mores of ashraf (elite) Muslims.

This was the affective structure into which the Rangila Rasul was launched in 1924. The tract satirizes the Prophet Muhammad by depicting him as a libidinous fool unable to restrain his desire for wives. It also explicitly contrasts Muhammad with paragons of male celibacy: the Buddha, Jesus, and Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the religious society that published the tract, the Arya Samaj. “Even in a very, very old philosopher like me, feelings are stirred up when my women or religion is insulted,” remarked a member of the 1927 Legislative Assembly when pondering such polemics. His comment neatly distills the cultural logic of late colonial secu- larism, wherein a reconstituted patriarchy asserted simultaneous control over “woman” and “religion” as twinned inner objects.101 This secularism’s religious feelings were gendered feelings. They were perhaps specifically the feelings of men, whose excitable bodies became sites for the articulation of various ethico-political discourses on self-control or self-rule. They were