Insulting Religion: Penal Secularism and the Government of Feeling

Abstract 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.