To understand a type of law, you need to understand law. To understand the history of a country, you need to know something about it.
J Barton Scott- an academic- has written a book titled 'Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and the shaping of Indian Secularism' which fails spectacularly in these two respects.
British India had no State religion. It had no blasphemy law. It had case law or, where the Judicial function was not separate from the Executive function, it had a more or less predictable code of practice with respect to Public Order offenses in connection with utterances or actions with a Religious dimension. Lord Macaulay wasn't a fucking ideologue as far as India was concerned. The poor chap had lost money and needed a lucrative appointment in India to repair his finances. The big thing he did in India was write 'Lays of Ancient Rome'. Codification was being done by various anonymous civil servants all over the place. There was nothing special about Macaulay's Code. We may pretend that the fellow was determined to turn us darkies into Victorian gentlemen. He wasn't. He merely supported those Indians who wanted John Company to fund English language instruction rather than Sanskrit or Arabic, for the excellent reason that English peeps actually know English. The local Pundit or Mullah could teach Sanskrit or Arabic better. But, by the age of about 12, kids had learnt as much of either or both as it was useful for them to know. They needed to learn English so as to set up as lawyers and swindle the great mass of the people or else enter the administration and grow rich through corruption.
Scott takes a different view.
The Indian Penal Code was originally written by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the colonial ideologue now better known for his 1835 “Minute on Education,” which proposed teaching Shakespeare and Milton in India to create a class of ersatz Englishman – a charter text for colonial mimicry.
Fuck off! This is a stupid academic availability cascade based on the work of shitheads like Gauri Vishvanathan.
Bentinck, as a centralizing Governor General, did want 'homonoia' rather than a variety of ad hoc legal codes and Macaulay was enthused by that project. England & Wales were slowly undergoing legal reforms at this period and the British bar was aware that money was to be made in India- though it was a horrible place to live- and that improving and extending the provision of British Law would boost revenue even back home as more and more cases came before the Privy Council.
What nobody gave a shit about was Blasphemy. Public order mattered. Crazy jihadis mattered. Hindu Mahants raping everybody in sight too might matter. But what really mattered most was Revenue Collection which in turn meant Public Order had to be maintained.
Written immediately after the “Minute,” the Code expressed a parallel pedagogic project.
No. The 'Minute' merely said that everybody fucking hated the Madrasas and Sankrit Tols supported by the Company. English peeps know English. Let them create an Inspectorate for English medium schools so that the native had some quality assurance. There were good English educators like David Hare in places like Calcutta. What about mofussil towns? Some swindling Rooski might set up a skool and your kids end up learning some useless language rather than that of the Queen across the Black Water.
It would turn Indians into “manly” British subjects (Macaulay’s adjective),
Macaulay wasn't stupid. He knew that changing the law code could have no magical effect. Americans would remain rebellious curs even if the Indian Penal Code were imposed on them.
including by training them to moderate their excitable feelings.
What is this racist shite? The fact is people like Macaulay were terrified by the 'excitable feelings' of the gin-soaked 'white niggers' (Doestoevsky's phrase) of Notting Hill. Britain was exporting 'invisibles' to India. Its compradors- one was the 'ambassador' of the 'Mughal Emperor' (actually a pensioner of the Brits)- spent their own money lobbying Westminster to lift all restrictions on White immigration into Bengal etc. These were Hindus- like the Tagores- who wanted Whitey to defend them from Islam. Also Roy & Tagore wanted to blackguard their orthodox cousins to their heart's content. Indeed, everybody of every sect was keen on indulging in self-glorifying 'shathiyat' while holding more learned Mullahs or Pundits in contempt.
Here, law serves more than a strictly juridico-legal function.
It is an excuse for paranoid Foucaldian raving.
It does pedagogic work, becoming part of the apparatus of colonial governmentality.
Fuck off! If the law can do 'pedagogic work' why not change it such that everybody spends all their time proving the Reimann hypothesis? On the other hand, we now understand why cretins oppose things like the legalization of homosexual marriage. The obvious result would be a pedagogy which indoctrinated senior citizens in the practice of sodomy.
It operates via the education of “affect”.
Paideia can turn affect into affectation in a limited number of cases. But affect, genuinely so called, is immune to education.
These cretins want us to believe that some Colonial law caused women to lack dicks and men to become disapproving of old lechers sodomizing their infant sons.
Macaulay’s 1837 draft Code responded directly to early 19th century British blasphemy trials. In 1833, Macaulay proposed to Parliament a means of reconceptualising blasphemy as an affective crime.
This is wholly false. All that Macaulay said in 1833 is that Jews should be allowed to hold political offices. It was an arbitrary action to make a restriction in this respect. Macaulay said nothing about Blasphemy which was a Common Law offense and remains so in Northern Ireland. England & Wales only got rid of the thing in 2008 around the same time that the Supreme Court was created.
Briefly, the position was that though ' the law forbade all denial of the being and providence of God or the Christian religion,' it was only when 'irreligion assumes the form of an insult to God and man that the interference of the criminal law took place.' The dictum was "if the decencies of controversy are observed, even the fundamentals of religion may be attacked without the writer being guilty of blasphemy".
Neither Parliament nor the Commissioners of Criminal Law nor anybody else spoke or wrote of 'affective offenses'.
It was a different matter that in relation to Public Order offenses certain practices- e.g. a Protestant wearing Orange so as to provoke a reaction from Catholics in a disturbed Irish district- the wounded feelings of a particular community might implicitly be pandered to. But the ratio was provocation not wounded feelings.
Scott and other such worthless academics are telling stupid lies. India has plenty of lawyers. It was those lawyers who, entering the Legislative Assemblies, created an offense- unknown to Anglo Saxon law- which might be called 'affective'. That was almost a hundred years ago and there is plenty of case law in India on this subject. There is no question of blasphemy being an offence. The opinions of an atheist can, de jure, offend no theist. On the other hand, an attack on a particular sect can attract a penalty.
In India, he implemented that proposal.
No he didn't. He was given the task of Codifying what already existed. Since John Company had been forced to let in Missionaries, it wanted a provision to arrest and deport ranters of various stripes who might turn up on Ind's coral strand. But the Code wasn't promulgated till much later.
His Code did not include a blasphemy law. Instead, it criminalised “wounding the religious feelings of any person.”
Nope. 'Deliberate intention' is criminalized but only in the context of threat or provocation. But Courts already did this. Codification doesn't mean the invention of new laws. It just means writing down and arranging and revising and updating what exists. Also there is the matter of 'harmonious construction'. Codification makes the job of judges and advocates easier. It does not involve any type of innovation- for which separate Legislation would be required. Even so, any item in a Code may be struck down or held in abeyance if it conflicts with decisions of a higher Judicial or Legislative body.
That language became law in 1860 as Section 298. In 1927, it was supplemented by 295A.
based on Legislation pushed through by Indian lawyers who wanted the Brits to just, very kindly, fuck off already. This had nothing to do with Macaulay.
These colonial statutes
This cretin does not get that people like Jinnah who pushed through 295A after the publication of 'Rangila Rasul' were anti-Imperialist.
were part of the same entangled history as the 1883 Ramsay ruling,
NO! They were completely separate. Lord Coleridge in 1883 reaffirmed the principle that there had to be a' wilfull intention to pervert, insult and mislead others by means of licentious and contumelious abuse applied to sacred subjects' for the Common Law offense of Blasphemy to apply. But there was no such offence in India which was never a settler colony. Canada, where this fellow teaches, was a settler colony and only got rid of Blasphemy a few years back. Australia was a little more advanced in this matter. But Northern Ireland still has the offense.
which similarly redefined blasphemy as an affective crime.
No. It said there is no crime unless there is a deliberate intention of a type which would be 'provocation' to a breach of the peace even if no such breach was possible.
In both Britain and India, “religious feelings” were a proxy for violence.
No. In Britain there is no fucking protection for 'religious feelings'- which is why Thatcher could not ban Satanic Verses. India does have a provision of this sort though the punishment would be mild and relate to withdrawing a book and making an apology. The thing is similar to criminal defamation. The Supreme Court may reverse Subramaniyam Swamy 2016. Sedition is already in abeyance. 295(a) too may go. Instead UAPA may be used against mischief makers.
“Blasphemy,” as a Victorian guide to libel law put it, is “an outrage on men’s religious feelings, tending to a breach of the peace.” 40 years later, 295A would use nearly identical language.
Because the guys drafting it were barristers or vakils. But India never had a Common Law offense of Blasphemy.
In this phraseology, the meaning of “religious feelings” is overdetermined.
Fuck off! When lawyers uses phrases only evolving case and statute law determines the meaning. This cretin knows nothing about the law or about India. He thinks it was a settler colony like Australia. Lord Macaulay discovered that many Indians were dark skinned. Also they had names like Janardhan or Jamal rather than James. So he tried to use the Law to turn the inhabitants of India into perfect little Britishers albeit of a dusky hue.
I'm not saying that Indian academics didn't invent this academic availability cascade. But that was by way of a joke. It's like the 'Goodness Gracious Me' sketch where Mr. Kumar pretends his name is Mr. Cooper.
To speak of “outraging religious feelings” is to indicate one feeling in particular: outrage.
No shit Sherlock! Similarly, to speak of something is to say something about something. Wow! What an amazing discovery! You iz totes blowing my mind, dude!
In the lead-up to the passage of 295A, a colonial bureaucrat offhandedly remarked that the “unfortunate state of feeling” between Hindus and Muslim regularly results in “deplorable outbreaks of passion.”
Dyarchy already existed. Colonial bureaucrats were having to suck up to folk with names like Jamshed and Janardhan. The big question was whether the Princes would dominate a Federal Government- in which case the Hindu Congress and Muslim League would take a back seat. In that case Political Agents, who tended to be ex-Army officers, would call the shots while the ICS was reduced to having to be very Civil, not to say slavish, in its service to Jamshed Sahib or Shree Janardhan.
This was not just euphemism – when it came to religion, passion meant violence, and violence, passion.
Very true! Archbishopji was banning Passion Play during Easter due to risk of rioting mobs burning down Canterbury- innit?
Laws like 295A were designed to prevent such passions from forming.
Fuck off! Laws punish crimes. They don't prevent the passions which cause them. Otherwise we would make stupidity illegal and this guy would be behind bars or forced to take up some more useful type of work.
The dark irony is that they probably just intensified them,
Law against beating stupid donkeys have just intensified the desire to beat this stupid donkey. Fuck. Just checked, the guy is young and ripped. Beating him is off the table.
with law’s repressive or censorial function perversely inciting a profusion of forbidden speech.
If murder weren't illegal, nobody would do it.
Polemicists learned to speak law’s language, alleging that their “religious feelings” had been outraged, and thus performatively constituting those feelings in the very act of transmitting them to others.
Similarly, only after rape was criminalized, did girls start alleging that their bodies had been outraged by public spirited sperm donors who roofied them.
“Religious feelings,” then, were not something external to law that the colonial state could step in to manage. They grew along the trellis of law, taking shape around the bureaucratic state apparatus.
India had and has a rather slender legal trellis. Furthermore, its lawyers and judges ensure the thing is useless- or only a source of nuisance. What works is ethnic cleansing and extra-judicial killing and seeing which bunch of gangsters is better at kidnapping and assassination. Otherwise money determines outcomes.
This was education of a kind – just not the kind lawmakers said they intended. Law contained the script for communal violence. It educated its subjects in outrage.
Just as it educated guys who were getting stabbed that it wasn't cool to be stabbed. That shit hurts. Please stop it! Arrest the guy who just slashed my throat. He isn't a nice man at all.
All law carries the implicit threat of physical violence, it being the modern state’s monopoly on legitimate violence – its ability to arrest, imprison, or kill – that lends its words the “force of law.”
This is false. In modern states, there is a right to kill in self-defense. It is not the case that you have to wait for a Government employee to come and kill a guy who is trying to stab you.
On the other hand, in some ancient polities no violence was legitimate save such as was done in a liturgic context. However, the penalty for any other type of killing might be very small. Effectively, there was a tax on murder in return for which ritual purity, or spiritual absolution, was granted.
In colonial situations, law’s implicit force tends to be strongly racialised.
In which case, the US is the most fucking colonial country in existence
In British India, for instance, the force of law undergirded the mundane acts of white violence that were a commonplace feature of social life.
Nonsense! Officials, or persons of consequence, who beat their servants to death were not prosecuted whether White of Black. But, they might be quietly shunted off to some shithole where they were welcome to die of dysentery.
“Disorderly” whites, in their very bodies, quoted the racialised state, thus arrogating its implicit power – and undermining its ability to symbolise the rule of law.
But they'd get knifed- unless Bagha Jatin beat them up. The problem with India was that it had plenty of very disorderly peoples.
Colonial officials found various ways to disavow such violence.
Interpretative dance was one way. Another was shouting 'I fucking disavow violence!' at regular intervals.
One important tactic was displacing “state” violence onto Indian “society” as religious conflict, thus refusing to see the state’s role in constituting Hindu-Muslim communalism.
Worse still, laws against rape refused to acknowledge the State's role in constituting anatomical differences between little boys and little girls. Prior to arrival of British, Indians were like Barbie dolls- i.e. were completely smooth down there. Laws against pissing and shitting in the street caused Indian peeps to start urinating and defecating. This is why Modi is providing toilets to everyone. He understands that it was GoI which caused Indian peeps to require such places. This shows Modi is a neo-Colonialist. The Dynasty alone is anti-British. Under their uninterrupted rule, Indians would once again have been restored to their primeval state of being smooth 'down there'.
In the 18th century, one spoke of passions, sentiments, and affections – philosophical terms that conjoined the mental to the moral, often with theological valence.
No one didn't- unless one was a fucking Scottish Professor paid to do so.
In the early 19th century, this moral lexicon was partly displaced by the word “emotion”, which previously had denoted political or meteorological unrest; now it was redeployed as a scientising term for describing the human mind.
This is a foolish availability cascade. The word was used in different ways depending on whether the speaker was a Latinist or was influenced by French literature. But nobody in England got 'tired and emotional' till the Sixties when Fleet Street coined the term to describe the drunken antics of a Labor Front Bencher. On the other hand, maybe women had emotions at some earlier date. This is because they bleed from their hoo-ha once a month. Seriously, I'm not making this up. The thing is called mensuration and is taught in Math class. Crack a fucking book sometime.
Its popularisers included James and John Stuart Mill
who couldn't popularize shit because they were deeply boring and did clerical work in the India Office.
, key patrons of the Indian Penal Code.
Only in the sense that the thing didn't matter a damn. Anyway, the thing wasn't promulgated till the elder was dead and the younger had retired as the EIC was wound up.
These shifting English-language concepts shaped developments in South Asian vernacular languages.
No it didn't. Every vernacular uses exactly the same word for 'sentiments', 'feelings' and 'emotions' when translating from English.
For example, an Urdu-language treatise on modern psychology like Abdul Majid Daryabadi’s Falsafa-e Jazbat (The philosophy of emotions, 1914)
That was published in 1920- a couple of years after Majid's return to Islam- at Aligarh. But his academic qualifications weren't good enough to get a teaching job. That was a good thing. As a prolific journalist and translator (at Osmania) he developed a good style. Still, he would be considered a light-weight.
separated the emotional from the moral, a sharp departure from older discourses on civility or the “polishing of ethics” (tahzib ul-akhlaq).
This is an Aristotelian distinction, at least for Islam. The difference arises out of the 'insha/khabar' distinction which the West did not emphasize. The akhlaq-e-Nasiri retained importance. Sir Syed did have a periodical called 'tehzib al-akhlaq but the thing was soon discontinued. Why? Everybody made fun of those who sought to suck up to the Brits by eating their biryani with a fork and knife. This was a polishing of the mirror of flattery and an idolatry of the Red Coat.
These concept histories also inflected colonial jurisprudence.
Nonsense! White judges in India were sticklers for the most conservative possible interpretation of the law. Indian Judges were more liberal and, after retirement, some joined the Independence struggle.
In 1915, a lower court in north India held that because religion is “rooted in the emotions and sentiments,” religious arguments are pointless. They never change minds. They only hurt feelings.
So what? Lower courts don't matter in the least. During litigation over the Madhe Sahaba agitation there were plenty of very learned seeming petitions filed which the Courts rejected in conformity with the Piggot Committee's findings. My point is that the Courts played a passive role. If there was a genuine problem in a District, some sort of Commission of Inquiry would be set up and everybody was welcome to make very erudite or self-serving or plain crazy submissions before the Government came down on the side of the pre-eminent nobleman of the area.
This was the affective structure into which [a Hindu tract titled] Rangila Rasul was launched in 1924. The tract satirises the Prophet Muhammad.
It was filth. The Hindus wanted it banned because it showed a great man indulging in sensuality. Boys reading it would steal money from their parents and run to the nearest brothel.
It also explicitly contrasts Muhammad with paragons of male celibacy: the Buddha, Jesus, and Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the religious society that published the tract, the Arya Samaj.
This is a lie. The publisher was Rajpal who had liberal views on sex. He also published books about contraception which- at that time- was considered a wholly irreligious practice. The fact is, in an earlier age, erotic works had greater currency. But, by the Twenties, people were afraid that their sons and daughters would be led astray by such books.
“Even in a very, very old philosopher like me, feelings are stirred up when my women or religion is insulted,” remarked a member of the 1927 Legislative Assembly when pondering such polemics. His comment neatly distills the cultural logic of late colonial secularism –
Fuck off! It marked the end of Secularism- at least as far as Muslim majority areas were concerned. But Hindus too were heeding the instruction of the celibate Mahatma.
Still, the killing of Rajpal made one thing clear. Don't look to the law. Kill and keep killing if you want people to pay attention to you.
this secularism’s religious feelings were perhaps specifically the feelings of men, whose excitable bodies became sites for the articulation of various ethico-political discourses on self control or self-rule.
Why not mention self-abuse? I imagine the author stroking himself off as he pictures 'excitable' male bodies.
They were also caste-inflected feelings. Not incidentally, Arya Samajists were prominent advocates of caste reform, conducting shuddhi or purification ceremonies that ritually transformed Dalits, Muslims, and others (including, at various points, Europeans and East Africans) into savarna Hindu – thus simultaneously affirming and unsettling the caste order.
The Arya Samajis were at the forefront of the Independence struggle. Good people- but they were slitting their own throats as, first Pakistan, and then a militant Akali state of East Punjab, was formed. Then the disgusting Agnivesh entered their fold to their abiding shame. Seriously, that fellow was utterly reptilian.
Such rhetoric did not disappear after 1927. Stereotyped depictions of hypersexualised, Muslim masculinity remain alarmingly familiar in the 21st century India.
Not to mention the Canadian campus where this dude is stroking himself off fantasizing about Colonial Legal Codes hypersexualizing excitable male bodies all of whom will simultaneously jizz on his face.
Neither did the Indian Penal Code disappear. It remains law across the countries of former British India (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar).
Because the thing doesn't matter in the slightest. The Law is a Service industry- a shitty one, in the sub-continent. It has no magical powers.
If the Code’s religious feelings are simultaneously intimate and official
they aren't. They are boring shit which a few lawyers make a little money out of
– shaping the affective reactions of particular bodies by placing those bodies in a legal frame –
that frame should involve hypersexualized male bodies jizzing on the author in Canada
then they are also simultaneously local and geopolitical, linked to empire as an affective architecture designed to organise bodies and their conduct at a global scale.
such that excitable male bodies globally jizz upon this guy's face while he weeps tears of gratitude that he read Foucault instead of making good money by training as a plumber.
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