Insulting Religion: Penal Secularism and the Government of Feeling
This article revisits the Indian Penal Code's restrictions on religious offense, especially Section 295A, with particular attention to nineteenth-century debates about secularizing the English common law of blasphemy. Building on scholarship that takes the histories of British and Indian secula...
| Subtitles: | "Roundtable on Religion as Polity Formation:Revisiting Modern Religion in Imperial India" |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2023
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2023, Volume: 91, Issue: 1, Pages: 35-50 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article revisits the Indian Penal Code's restrictions on religious offense, especially Section 295A, with particular attention to nineteenth-century debates about secularizing the English common law of blasphemy. Building on scholarship that takes the histories of British and Indian secularisms as constitutively intertwined, I suggest that these entangled legal secularisms are best studied within a single analytic frame. I further suggest that this colonial secularism was, among other things, an affective apparatus. It linked the modern state to questions of sentiment or feeling, implicitly defining "religious feeling" as a species of affect with an intrinsic link to populational violence. Although colonial law ostensibly sought to reduce such violence, it instead had a more complex and perverse set of effects. Section 295A and its cousins turned law into a relay point for the circulation of affect, a mechanism for the transmission of populational pain. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfad036 |