Prohibited Speech: Colonialism, Blasphemy Laws, and Communal Violence

Arvind-Pal S. Mandair

Part of our forum Slandering the Sacred

J. Barton Scott’s Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India is an important and sophisticated study of a colonial-era law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code) offering compelling historical insights into the co-imbricated categories of law and religion in colonial India. Utilizing affect theory, the book makes inroads into contemporary discussions about “free speech” and deftly engages the secular infrastructure of colonial governance.

The main theoretical intervention is to show that law (then and now) never operated through the operations of secular discursive reason alone. Rather, law exerts its force through the agency of affect, and in the case of the so-called “blasphemy laws,” specifically through the transmission of religious affect. To do this kind of intellectual work Scott harnesses a methodology that simultaneously thinks through the actuality of concrete historical events while allowing the potentiality of affect to be extracted from narration of emotional intimacies lodged in “historically situated human bodies.” By doing this Scott is able to negotiate the ingrained dualities perpetuated by the modern knowledge system and its a priori assumption of epistemic sovereignty.

This is a bold and innovative way to read history, enabling Scott to traverse the normally opposed domains of public/private, law/religion, reason/affect, thus making it possible to track how law shapes the bodies it governs by regulating the production of speech acts corresponding to particular affective states. In this way, “law” in Scott’s analysis is not merely a dead material artifact but an assemblage of various affective catalysts that trigger specific states of affairs like racism, patriarchy, obscenity, and incest. Because blasphemy laws were so intimately intertwined with the matrix of power and governmental structures in both colony and metropole, this made it exceedingly difficult to avoid tracing them to a single historical cause, such as a “religion,” or “religious feeling,” as has been the case in much of the extant legal, journalistic, and scholarly practice. 

It is precisely this uncritical causal connection to religious feeling that helped colonial administrations justify the need for blasphemy laws to regulate Indian peoples who would otherwise, in their estimation, descend into communal violence. At the same time, though, the connection helped the British disavow the colonial state’s racist distinction between colonizing cultures (which governed through discursive reason) and colonized peoples whose cultures lacked mechanisms for rational deliberations, and therefore needed education, civilization and protection from the imperial state. As Scott puts it, the ascription of deliberative reason to Europeans and equally its disavowal in the cultures of the colonized, became the “ideological norm around which Britain constructed a narrative of global hegemony” and “exerted force on the colonized.” Consequently, although laws like 295A were designed to prevent passions from forming, in fact they served only to repress emotions, causing regular outbursts of prohibited speech.

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

While the book’s multi-layered investigations of law, religious affect and the colonial history of India are likely to be of major interest to students and scholars alike, I’d like to focus the main part of my discussion around a theme, which may seem tangential to the book’s main thesis, namely, decolonization. I say tangential because the term decolonization (including variants of it) is not present in the index or anywhere else in the book. This absence notwithstanding, Scott’s unusual historical treatment of affect theory/law/religion-secular in Slandering the Sacred does more than simply identify the forces that shaped the subjectivities of colonial elites. By correlating these forces with subject enunciation (speech acts), it is possible, under the right circumstances, to fashion alternative subjectivities capable of resisting the forces that give rise to fear, hate and ultimately violence. Is this not precisely the task of the decolonial project, and insofar, is it not crucial to what is happening in public spheres all over the world, but especially in contemporary South Asia where hate speech and blasphemy allegations have become weaponized in the service of majoritarian regimes?

To put this differently, given that the work investigates how affect/law/religion operate to manufacture what is variously referred to as the reformed/educated/civilized subject, as well as the repetition-reincarnation of this subject-forming mechanism in the contemporary era, how can a deeper understanding of this operative mechanism be leveraged in service of decolonization?

Let me elaborate by citing a couple of examples of communal violence in post-independence Punjab which continues to be relevant as recent events have shown. The first, and more recent example is that of Punjabi gangster music, and specifically, of its most vexed proponent, the rap artist Siddu Moose Wala, who rapidly rose to fame, courted the ire of media and political establishments in both India and Canada, and met sudden death by assassination in 2022. Through his blending of 1990s hip-hop and Punjabi folk music, Moose Wala mounted searing political critiques of the Indian state and the capitalist classes. One of his most successful songs was “295” whose refrain directly references the anti-blasphemy section in the Indian Penal Code:

Though trouble will keep coming your way, Don’t feel oppressed, by this world In which there is nothing but excessive slander. Everyday you’ll get controversy They conduct debates here, dressing it up as religious morality. If you speak truth, they’ll impose Section 295 on you. If you work hard and succeed, you’ll only get hate here. 

(from “295”: translation mine)

Moose Wala’s lyrics refer to legal action threatened by the representatives of the Akali Dal who approached the Punjab government to censor the “objectionable language of singers” such as Moose Wala on the grounds that it hurt the religious feelings of orthodox Sikhs. In other songs such as “SYL” Moose Wala directly criticized the Indian government for diverting much needed river-water from Punjab to Haryana. “SYL” was banned by the BJP government within two days of its release. Though seemingly innocuous, the issue of irrigation water for Punjabi farmers brought back memories of the political violence of the 1980s which the Indian state, its think-tanks, judiciary and the media successfully framed as a “Hindu-Sikh conflict.” What Moose Wala seems to have done with “SYL” was to decolonize the official state narrative of “religious conflict,” reframing it as a secular issue, not through “rational debates” but through the affective medium of song heard by millions of young people around the world, across language and cultural divides. This kind of narrative reversal would of course be deeply problematic for a BJP government trying to label the post-2019 farmers movement as “Sikh” issues, much as Indira Gandhi’s “liberal” government had done in the 1970s and 80s.

If there is a link between STS and Moose Wala’s lyrics, it is that they both offer ways of inverting dominant narratives of violence by tracking religious and secular affect to the point where speech emerges. It is here, at the point where words and affects bubble up and incite certain types of action (prohibition or blasphemy), that it becomes possible to rethink and unravel top-down political narratives about communal violence. Scott does this particularly well in the third section of his book which foregrounds the role of Arya Samaj and its penmanship in stigmatizing minorities, beginning with Dayananda Saraswati’s Satyarath Prakash in the late nineteenth century, through Mahashe Rajpal’s Rangila Rasul in 1924, all the way to Lala Jagat Narain newspaper articles and pamphlets published between the 1960s and 70s until his assassination by Sikhs in 1981. It was Lala Jagat Narain’s Hind Samachar group of newspapers that led the charge against Punjabi Hindus’ identification with Punjabi language in favor of the national language Hindi, his diatribes against Sikh demands for cultural and religious autonomy in their home state, and in particular his slanderous comments against Guru Gobind Singh depicting him in terms reminiscent of Rajpal’s description of the Prophet Muhammad, that effectively signed his death warrant and lit the fires of communalism which consumed Punjab through the 1980s. My point is that STS might not only be useful in helping expose the affective sources of the violence, but also for understanding how the Aryas’ deprecation of Punjabi language and an ostensibly sacred figure, was motivated by an affective constellation revolving around a colonially induced shame reincarnated as the “aspirational fascism” of the broader Hindutva movement, to which the movements such as Sikh nationalism in the 1980s and Moose Wala’s lyrics in the 2020s, were essentially reactions.

Going back to my second question above, the middle and last sections of the book provide useful tools for examining the mechanism of (neo)colonial subject formation. Drawing on some fascinating case studies Scott shows how law and religion comprised parallel technologies for governing/educating the affective state of colonial subjects. Irrespective of whether this was the colonizing subjectivity of Macaulay, who wrote the IPC, or the colonized subjectivity of someone like Mahashe Rajpal, who wrote the Rangila Rasul, in both cases the mechanism of subject formation operated through the “quasi-physical force” of affect implicit in the law (IPC) or religio-legal language of polemics like the Rangila Rasul. Moreover, neither the IPC nor texts like the Rangila Rasul operated at the level of the individual colonial subject or remain localized to the interstices that connected India and Britain. Scott’s argument is that these polemical secular-religio-legal texts were massively amplified as they were transplanted around the world through the infrastructure of “world religions” discourse (“comparative prophetology” to use Scott’s term). And they did so by surfing the waves of affect generated by this comparative imaginary, which in turn served as a kind of “global fiduciary,” an ur-code as it were, that served to implement law through religion and vice-versa.

Though not immediately obvious, it is here, within the folds of Slandering the Sacred’s ruminations on affect that one can find clues for deactivating the technology driving contemporary neo-colonial repetitions of the violence noted above. Central to this technology is the operation by which affect becomes governable and educatable. It takes place at the very moment native elites identify with (that is to say, internalize) the categories of “religion” and “law.” Furthermore, I would hasten to speculate that this internalization of “religion” happens within an a priori understanding of “law” with the category of secular reason and the image of thought legitimized by the colonial state. If law = secular reason = image of thought-as-discursive reason specified by the state, then this law is equally the force (of state violence) internalized by the colonized subject which acts on the Indian subject’s mind to create the kind of the mental groove we call “religious identity.” From a psychological perspective, the making of this mental groove requires the colonial subject to perform a cathexis to law, state, empire. Now, if we understand cathexis as the unconscious transfer of subjective loyalty (aka passionate attachment) from the inner sphere of one’s “own culture” to an external authority manifest as the empire of secularity/law/reason, then what is transferred in this cathexis is none other than an affect crystallizable in enunciation as attachment to “one’s religion.” This is how the “global fiduciary” operates. The colonial subject now starts to speak “religion” and in speaking “religion” she or he is embodying not only law, but a globalized belief system.

If this is the case, might it also be possible to de-cathect? That is, to break the circuit of affective attachment to the law? Historically, attempts to break this attachment have occurred either through revolutionary violence (militant anti-colonial movements inspired by Marxism, etc) or through reformist movements (Aryas, Dharam Sabhas, Singh Sabhas, Muslim Anjuman’s, etc). It is now well established, however, that writers who emerged from these movements internalized the religio-secular-legal categories which catalyzed the production of neocolonial subjectivities and the globalization of racialized-religious nationalisms.

Is there then an alternative to revolution or reformism, both of which keep the subject trapped within the ideological framework of liberalism? What if the recolonizing cycle could be broken by asking a “meta-modern” question, which I believe Scott beckons us to explore? To wit, is there something like a proto-law that not only brings the colonial subjective economy into being but, through this economy, keeps Empire in play long after its formal demise? The question may have some validity because, if I’m reading it correctly, the question of subjectivity links Part 2 and Part 3 of STS. Thus, Part 2 shifts the register of law into the psychic life of the law’s creator, Thomas Macaulay, for whom the shame of incest drove him to self-consciously reform his fallen virtue by subjecting his carnal instincts to the “bibliographic pain” of writing the IPC. In psychoanalytic terminology, one could say that for Macaulay, the act of writing the law constituted a cathexis—the transference of mental energy in the form of shame—from incestuous desire to the IPC through the very art of self-reformation that the law demanded of its Indian subjects. In this way the IPC’s legalistic-secular prose conceals the colonizer’s violent erotic fantasies about India(ns) which, as Part 3 tells us, induced Indians to make war on their own minds, bodies and cultures. Accordingly, in Part 3, we read that the affective economy of shame—qualitatively the same cathexis undergone by Macaulay—reshaped Indian subjectivity to “create a class of little Englishmen” albeit in multiple incarnations—Vedic Aryas, Singh Sabhas, etc.

Likewise, the psychic transference of shame becomes the determinative condition for the appearance of the Rangila Rasul text, its passages between India and Britain, followed by a transnational circulation from British India to the rest of the world vis-à-vis “comparative prophetology” which operates within the intellectual matrix of comparative religions or world religions. The key point is that the comparative imaginary linking colonizer to colonized is as much affective as it is rational, and it is to Scott’s credit that he not only exposes Macaulay’s shame but also uncovers the disavowal of affect that underpins the making of colonial law. Moreover, Macaulay’s “war on nature” cannot simply be reduced to “family desire”—it was also “shaped by his era’s reformist impulses.”

At the risk of making too fine a point, I’d like to suggest that the “era’s reformist impulse” always worked in tandem with the West’s comparative imaginary which was secular, religious and racial all at once, and moreover, had started evolving decades before the Macaulays came on the scene. Indeed, one could say that the comparative imaginary emerges out of modernity’s two key concepts: political and epistemic sovereignty and their offspring which includes, but is not limited to, the institution of the nation state and the dislocation of reason from God embodied by the concept of humanism. To keep this argument to a minimum, if the comparative imaginary is indeed affective as it is rational, then the former is embodied by “national(ized) affect” (Munoz) which is a synthesis of shame and its siblings. Comparativity is therefore simply another word for the structuration of the European self in relation to the positioning of its perceived others. It is not so much the art of self-governance as it is the art of encounter. Conversely, encounter is the art that empire had to master in order to rule as efficiently as it did. It is also what generates affect: shame, pride, etc. If there is a trick for making de-cathexis (decolonization) happen, it would be to target the place in the affective circuit where empire eternally reforms the comparative global imaginary.

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Arvind Pal-Mandair is Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author several books including Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (Columbia University Press, 2009) and Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (2022).