Imperial Systems and Settler Secularism in India and the United States

Tisa Wenger

Part of our forum on J. Barton Scott's   Slandering the Sacred

J. Barton Scott’s book Slandering the Sacred is deftly organized around a 1927 addition to the Indian Penal Code, Section 295A, which criminalized “acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class, by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” The immediate impetus for the new law, he tells us, was a controversy around the Rangila Rasul (Merry Prophet), a book that offended many Muslims by mocking the Prophet Muhammad in graphically sexual and scatological terms.

The controversy featured multiple public meetings, a call for moderation from M.K. Gandhi, and ultimately the murder of the book’s author. Scott explains that although Section 295A was popularly known as the “blasphemy bill,” its proponents insisted that it was not about blasphemy at all. It was in fact a deliberately secularizing version of blasphemy law, displacing all questions about the truth of religion or whether religion itself could be harmed. It aimed instead to guard against the threat that any “class of people” might have their “religious feelings” so “outraged” that violence would be the predictable outcome. The threats of violence that this law tried to guard against—at a time when simmering resentments and the threat of resistance against the British Empire were always at hand—hint at the anxieties of late colonial rule. As Scott notes, the new law obscured imperial violence by redirecting attention (and blame) to the alleged fanaticism of certain colonized populations. To his credit, Scott never allows the specter of the fanatical Muslim to hover unchallenged. He shows instead how that specter is produced, and how the recurring conflicts that are too often invoked to substantiate it, are themselves overdetermined and even produced by the structures of secular-colonial law.  

Scott offers a layered and always illuminating set of contexts for Section 295A. We learn in this book about the history of British blasphemy law and the colonial codes that aimed to protect religion; about the contradictory notions of Indian society as a generalized liberal “public” of free individuals, on the one hand; or as distinct groups or “populations” with competing interests, on the other; and about the religious polemics of the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement that produced the offending text in the 1920s as a part of its own ethical praxis. Along the way, Scott leads us on an entertaining and always illuminating tour through the transnational emergence of comparative prophetology, imperial and anti-imperial comparative religions, and the intersecting conventions of hagiography and literary biographies of “great men.” Importantly, he shows how the intimate lives and transgressive desires of lawmakers themselves—especially the British colonial bureaucrat Thomas Macauley, who drafted an early version of the modern Indian Penal Code—were integral to the formation of these laws. In so doing, this book illuminates the layered entanglements of secularist projects and the contradictions embedded in their claims that religion properly belongs and so must remain (alongside women, gender, and sexuality) safely within the private sphere.

From the start, Scott points to the importance of comparative work in secularism studies. He notes that few if any previous studies have tried to understand blasphemy law as part of the broader histories of secularism and empire. In that spirit, my comments here focus on what I take to be one of Scott’s most significant interventions: the tension he identifies in India between “a liberal-constitutional or high secularism and a governmental or low secularism.” In short, this response tests the comparative utility of this framework for my own efforts to map imperial configurations of secularism and religion in the United States. Paralleling the forms of secularism that Scott calls “high” and “low,” but organized for settler-colonial ends, I would suggest that a stratified system of secularism emerged in the nineteenth-century United States that disciplined the religious worlds of white settlers and racialized/colonized peoples in ways quite different from each other and from the model Scott finds in late colonial India.

Secularism is a difficult concept to pin down. Many scholars, following Saba Mahmood, differentiate the epistemic horizon of secularity, on the one hand, from the governing structures of political secularism on the other. But as Scott’s book also illustrates, the epistemic and the political are everywhere entangled. The field of critical secularism studies has identified multiple secularisms, locally embedded forms that are nonetheless historically entangled as products of global imperial systems. The distinctive model of secularism that began to take shape in late-colonial India took pride in its broad-minded “tolerance” of all the diverse religions of the Indian subcontinent. Whatever its virtues, as Scott points out, this form of secularism ultimately held up Hinduism as the default model for a tolerant religion, thus privileging the Hindu majority. In much the same way, secularism in the United States prioritizes “religious freedom” while favoring Protestant Christianity as the default model for free religion and the assumed norm for what counts as “religion” under the law, as I’ve argued in my book, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal. These national distinctions notwithstanding, as Scott also explains, India and the United States are siblings in a family tree of imperial Anglophone secularisms. Across this imperial world, then and now, the people charged with blasphemy have very often understood themselves as modernizers, champions of liberty, and reformers for truth and reason. This was certainly true of the Arya Samaj, a group widely known for its biting caricatures of the prophets, founders, or deities held sacred by others. It was equally true of the freethinkers and assorted radicals, primarily white men, who were most likely to be prosecuted for blasphemy and related offenses in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century United States.

The most notorious blasphemers of India and the United States, however, were situated quite differently from each other in relation to imperial power. In India, those accused of blasphemy—or of the secularized offenses that succeeded it—were mostly upper-class colonial subjects and often anti-imperial agitators, such as the Arya Samaj. They positioned themselves as civilized moderns, offering a reformed version of Hinduism that they saw as rational and universally applicable, and ridiculed all forms of “religion” that they considered irrational or superstitious.

J. Barton Scott. Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemey Law and Religios Affect in Colonial India. University of Chicago Press, 2023. pp. 272. $30 (paperback)

Perhaps to avoid offending the British authorities, their most frequent targets were not Christians but Muslims or rival Hindu sects instead. In contrast, the people charged with blasphemy in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States tended to be white men, often from middle- or working-class families, who aimed to expand the scope of their own freedoms by attacking the Christian status quo. While the religious practices and lifeways of colonized and racialized people in the United States have often been criminalized, with their claims to the status of “religion” frequently contested, they were never (as far as I know) prosecuted under blasphemy law. Most blasphemers were freethinkers who positioned themselves as a vanguard for the “civilized” virtues of reason and freedom, always invoked in contrast to a “savage” or “heathen” other. Their offense, in the eyes of their accusers, was against “religious liberty”—the freedom of the religious or specifically the Christian community not to be disturbed—and against the religiously grounded virtue of society itself. The arguments against blasphemy law were also couched in the language of religious freedom (as well as free speech), and eventually they succeeded. This debate was framed entirely in the register of high secularism, of individual liberties and constitutional ideals. The blasphemers here, in other words, were not colonial subjects but citizens and champions of a settler colonial empire.

This contrast can be explained at least in part by the difference between imperial systems. In India, the British Empire aimed primarily at the extraction of wealth and resources through the careful management of native populations. Starting in the late eighteenth century, British authorities governed through “indirect rule,” empowering local elites and enforcing newly codified versions of indigenous legal systems. They named Hindus and Muslims as distinct populations and recognized their right to their own laws, at least when it came to the marriage and family systems that imperial authorities identified as private and therefore “religious.” Creating this legal demarcation provided a useful mechanism for British rule and minimized the chances of alliances between these now clearly differentiated populations. Framing their differences in religious terms also meant that religious toleration appeared as the solution to conflict between them. Hence the concern in Section 295A with “the religious feelings of any class,” and of an earlier law, Section 153A, which had prohibited the creation of “enmity or hatred” between religious classes in India. In the long run, as Scott notes, the identification of Hinduism as a unified religion, and eventually as a “world religion,” was also useful for Hindu elites and the developing anti-colonial movement as a rallying cry for Indian nationalism.

In Scott’s analysis, the “high secularism” of the late-colonial Indian constitution aimed to protect the freedoms of the individual citizen. British authorities and elite Indian politicians envisioned these constitutional freedoms as part of the tutelary project of colonialism, a way to train Indians into the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a modern state. At the same time, the “low secularism” of the Indian Penal Code helped organize bodies along religio-racial lines into “endemically violent populations.” In the debates around Section 295A, Scott explains, legislators invoked “secular considerations” of “peace and good will” even as they explained that the new law would “[secure] the rights and [enforce] the obligations of good citizenship and of protecting society from the consequences that might otherwise ensue.” The “religious feelings” of this colonized population, colonial leaders believed, had to be protected from the offenses that were bound to outrage them. Neither those with potentially outraged feelings nor those intemperate enough to offend them could yet be trusted to live up to the standards and obligations of “good citizenship.” They were like a powder keg that could too easily explode. This formulation obscured colonial violence by attributing the rage of the colonized to their allegedly irrational and excessive religious feelings. And since the common people of India allegedly still had to be tutored in the liberal virtues of toleration and self-control, it provided yet another convenient rationale for continued colonial rule. Section 295A thus encapsulates what Scott names as low secularism, a biopolitical project in which “religion” or “religious feelings” had to be carefully managed to protect the governing order from the specter of anti-colonial violence. 

In contrast, the United States was a settler-colonial empire premised on the seizure of Indigenous lands and the total displacement of Indigenous nations and peoples. Here, the rule of law was almost exclusively concerned with protecting the property and the freedoms of the dominant white-settler population. Unlike Hinduism and Islam in India, which the British recognized as the religions of colonized peoples, Black and Indigenous traditions in the United States were only belatedly given any recognition or legal protection at all. African Americans were always subject to penal codes—the blunt force of the law—but until the mid-twentieth century were almost entirely excluded from the rights of white citizens, including, of course, religious freedom. Enslaved people in the antebellum South were often forbidden to meet for worship, for example, on the grounds that such gatherings might facilitate slave revolts. Meanwhile, U.S. laws were concerned with Native Americans only as threats to an expanding settler empire. Native nations, maligned in the Declaration of Independence as “savages on our frontiers,” were initially located entirely outside the body politic. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as more and more Native nations were forcibly removed from their homelands and confined to reservations, the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs most often designed colonial policy by executive fiat. Native Americans were designated as “wards” of the government, deemed unready and therefore ineligible for the status (and the protections) of citizenship. Under this settler-colonial regime, U.S. agents entirely prohibited Indigenous “superstitions” on the grounds that they impeded progress towards “civilization.” Even when anthropologists in the late nineteenth century belatedly began to identify these traditions as “religion”—a status that Native people themselves had claimed from the start—they were seen as primitive, evidence of humanity’s past, not as “world religions” that had to be taken seriously in the present.

This system was in no way concerned with protecting anyone’s “religious feelings,” least of all those of Black and Indigenous people. It parallels what Scott calls “low secularism” in its penal quality: the state could so easily criminalize Native or African American practices that authorities deemed savage, fanatical, politically subversive, not real “religion” at all. As in India, racialized and colonized peoples were treated in political discourse and under the law as homogenized “populations,” prefiguring the twentieth-century movement towards biopolitical management that Scott suggests began in the colonial world. This too was a low secularism organized around preventing violence categorized as fanatical, overly political, problematically religious, or not legitimately religious at all. The specter of (especially) Muslim religious violence in India was similar, in some respects, to the specter of the fanatical “Indian prophet” to whom U.S. authorities could easily attribute (and therefore dismiss) almost any episode of anti-colonial resistance. But on closer examination, the solutions—the forms of colonial secularism in India and the United States—were quite distinct. Both the high secularism and the low secularism of colonial India were designed with Indians in mind, not the British. Both applied at least in theory to everyone, and the low secularism of Section 295A, whatever its limitations and manipulations, represented an attempt to protect the “religious feelings” of the colonized. It was not the fanatical Muslims as such, but the provocateur who might offend their feelings, who was criminalized in this revised blasphemy law. In contrast, at least until the late twentieth century, the low secularism of the United States located the practices and traditions of Black and Indigenous people, either implicitly or explicitly, outside the boundaries of any sort of “religion” that could receive legal protection at all. The high secularism of the U.S. Constitution, on the other hand, promised (and most often delivered) religious freedom to those deemed white but was almost never applied to colonized subjects or to those racialized as Black. 

This book has thus given me a new angle of vision into the distinctive model of colonial secularism—call it “settler secularism” —that developed in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the distinction between high and low secularism operated here in far less layered ways than in the Indian colonial history that Scott describes. Rather than applying to all, and assuming a colonized population divided along religious lines, the forms of high and low secularism that Scott has helped me see in the United States were historically directed towards differently racialized populations. While the high secularism of constitutional rights was applied almost exclusively to white Christians, low or penal secularism was mostly aimed at controlling African Americans, Native Americans, or anyone else deemed a “problem” by the white majority. But this is only one of the many possible comparative insights that might be generated by this book.

Scott notes in conclusion that there’s a great deal of resonance between Section 295A and contemporary legal restrictions on the “hate speech” aimed at racial and religious minorities. He points briefly towards a longer genealogy of current tensions between the liberal ideal of free speech and these restrictions, which he glosses as a new episode in the history of an increasingly secularized blasphemy law. It would be illuminating to trace these genealogies across continents in greater detail, using them to map shifting forms of secularism through the transforming imperial systems of the twentieth century and into the neoliberal empires of the twenty-first. It is a credit to Scott that Slandering the Sacred points the way towards many such genealogical and comparative projects. In my view this is the best indicator of a great book, one to which I know that I and others will return in the years to come.

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Tisa Wenger is Professor of American Religious History at Yale University. She is the author of We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and, co-edited with Sylvester Johnson, Religion and U.S. Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022). Wenger’s next book, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, is provisionally titled, How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion.