In 1927, the Legislative Assembly of the Government of India hastily passed a law—Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)—that prohibited spoken or written acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class. This intervention stemmed from the publication of the Rangila Rasul (1924), a satirical exposé on the life of the Prophet Muhammad written by M. A. Chamupati and published by Mahashe Rajpal. Charged with violating Section 153A of the IPC, which forbade fostering “feelings of enmity or hated between different classes” (Walter Russell Donogh, The History and Law of Sedition and Cognate Offences, 3rd ed. [1917], 165), Rajpal was controversially acquitted. While the judge determined that the text had impugned Muhammad’s character, he did not find that Rajpal had besmirched Islam as a religion or Muslims as a community. Often mischaracterized as a “blasphemy law,” Section 295A was concocted to fill this apparent loophole as a pseudo-emergency measure.

In Slandering the Sacred, J. Barton Scott not only contextualizes Section 295A’s genesis, but also speaks to grander projects of secularization that brought doctrinal disputes under the purview of the state. Expanding upon Partha Chatterjee’s “rule of colonial difference” paradigm, Scott speaks to the existence of two dueling rationalities: a liberal-constitutional/high secularism that recognized individual rights and a governmental/low/penal secularism that was predicated on the biopolitical management of potentially volatile groups. Scott’s analysis of these contending secularisms is largely an exercise in breaking down binaries. Throughout, he insists that speech acts do not simply occur in a rarified atmosphere of depersonalized debate typically associated with the liberal “aesthetics of persuasion” (58). Rather, they produce affect and influence individuals on a corporeal level. An associational meeting, for instance, may generate a feeling of “procedural effervescence,” culminating in a “totemic” resolution that further binds attendees together (45). Moreover, acts of reading and writing serve to discipline bodies and create ethical selves. Whereas Thomas Macaulay, the drafter of the precursor to the IPC, cultivated a “print asceticism” and supposedly channeled his lust for his sisters into his “graphomaniacal” pursuits (113–116), reformist groups like the Arya Samaj deployed provocative polemic and exploited new forms of mass media to facilitate their own identity formation.

In keeping with the praxis of New Imperial History, Scott clarifies how racialized fears of seemingly fanatical groups in India dovetailed with metropolitan class-based anxieties. Macaulay aimed to criminalize verbal acts that wounded religious feelings while excluding printed materials from this proscription. Such a distinction was arguably born out of a desire to limit inter-class contact; his ideal legislation would ensure that “commodified print objects are safe. Rough orality and crude visuality are not” (93). Enacted in 1860, Section 298 of the IPC fulfilled this objective. The wording of 295A, with its emphasis on the “religious feelings” of the unenumerated multitude, also reflected colonial concerns that print media would rile up “populational publics” (47). To dispel these fears, the government invested in a rhetoric of toleration and elevated itself above the communal fray as a harmonizer of majority and minority interests. Atop this perch, it sought to police the problematic production of affect on the ground.

To understand the dynamics of secularization, Scott holds, we must dissolve the conceptual boundaries between the state and society, the public and the private. In the third act of Slandering the Sacred, he theorizes that the “legal governmentality” of the colonial regime intersected with the “religious governmentality” of the Arya Samaj, an organization with a semi-bureaucratic structure that also aimed to regulate the conduct of Indians (168). Scott thus interprets the Samaj’s “paper insults,” which often arose from personal grievances, as moralistic tools that generated affect amongst the movement’s adherents and detractors alike (183). Texts such as the Rangila Rasul juxtaposed the life of the Arya Samaj’s ascetic founder, Dayananda Saraswati, with that of Muhammad, who supposedly failed to live up to the ethical standards he had set for his followers. Participating in a type of literary globalization, Dayananda’s eulogizers slotted him into a pantheon of the world’s worthies in apparent emulation of Thomas Carlyle’s biographical anthologizing (199–202).

Scott’s willingness to expand and contract his frame of inquiry between the local, the colonial, and the global is certainly commendable. Yet the organization of the book can at times leave the reader searching for a stable narrative through-line. Part of the issue is structural. After covering the period between the publication of the Rangila Rasul and the passage of 295A in 1927, Scott journeys back to the 1830s to probe Macaulay’s public and private personas. Following a cursory overview of English libel law from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, he then offers a penetrating account of the Arya Samaj’s promotional techniques to account for the festering communalism of the 1920s. While grappling with this non-chronological approach, the reader is also compelled to parse some rather dense prose throughout. At one point, Gayatri Spivak’s concepts of “Vertretung” and “Darstellung” are referenced in passing without sufficient explanation (41). Elsewhere, Scott posits that the taxidermized corpse of codifier Jeremy Bentham—a so-called Auto-Icon—pulls a “divine likeness back into the ipseity of the self-representing body—but not therefore the sensuous plenitude of life” (98). Later, he proposes “using the frotteuristic tactility of paper to read [a] heteroerotic scene against the grain” (176). For legal historians less accustomed to the stylistics of religious studies, these theoretical asides and ponderous turns of phrase may obscure rather than elucidate.

Curiously, minimal attention is devoted to the slew of press acts that curbed speech in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which often operated parallel to—or overlapped with—the sections of the IPC covered in this text. Did these emergency measures also contribute to the emergence of penal secularism? Does it matter that some of these acts specifically targeted Indian presses while others applied to European publishers as well? A broader probe of this veritable Ordinance Raj, which became increasingly paranoid in the 1930s, would certainly complement Scott’s more surgical analysis of Section 295A and its predecessors. These minor suggestions aside, Scott offers a productive provocation to reconsider secularization as a colonial project of affect management that itself generated novel forms of affect in unexpected ways.