Author Meets Critics Roundtable on Barton Scott's Slandering the Sacred

An Author Meets Critics Roundtable Session for discussion on Barton Scott’s new book Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India published this year by the University of Chicago Press as part of the prestigious Class 200 series. Slandering the Sacred takes the specific case study of Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits deliberate harm or injury to religious feelings of a community, to raise and address larger and immensely consequential questions connected to the interaction of law, religion, and secular power in India and beyond. A multifaceted intellectual history cum literary analysis of blasphemy law, Slandering the Sacred moves between nineteenth-century and contemporary Britain and India to show that colonial discourses and conceptions of blasphemy were shaped and indebted to the life of this category as it operated among the colonized religious communities of India. This roundtable panel brings together scholars at different career stages invested in questions of law, religion, and secularism in India and beyond from varied thematic perspectives and specializations in Religious Studies and cognate disciplines.