Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious affect In Colonial India

Why is blasphemy such a heated issue in today’s world, including Pakistan? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred explores the cultural, intellectual, and legal pre-history of the Pakistan Penal Code, moving between colonial South Asia and imperial Britain to weave a globe-trotting and unexpected narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. By revealing blasphemy’s links to ideas about wounded “religious sentiments,” this book also calls for new histories of blasphemy that dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private. In the words of one reviewer, “J. Barton Scott has written a book as witty as it is scholarly. Slandering the Sacred is an enthralling and colourful history of a law, a page-turner about a penal code.”

” Slandering the Sacred offers a gripping voyeuristic account of the sinuous waves in which law’s religion and religion’s law together conspired in the racist and sentimental effort to regulate speech and affect in colonial India, particularly in the strange career of Thomas Macaulay.” – Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Indiana University .

“Scott has written a book as witty as it is scholarly. Slandering the Sacred is an enthralling and colorful history of a law, a page-turner about a penal code: this is an impressive feat.” – Katherine Lemons, McGill University .