Introduction: Containing Religious Offence beyond the Courts

Abstract

In this introduction, we situate the special section, 'Containing Religious Offence beyond the Courts', within and beyond existing scholarship on religious offence in South Asia. Much of this scholarship focuses on the unintended effects of blasphemy laws, showing, for instance, that laws presumably intended to promote religious tolerance end up informing, if not encouraging, disputes around religious sensitivities. But while debates about the effects of law are crucial, we suggest that a more nuanced understanding of religious offence can be gained if we look past full-blown legal proceedings and the spectacular violence performed in the streets during religious offence controversies. This collection, then, directs attention to the friction around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally-either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. Drawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, these essays document existing containment modalities in diverse geographical and socio-religious settings in India and critically scrutinise their functioning and outcomes. They explicitly engage with critical understandings of peace and with scholarship on the micro-mechanism of coexistence and, in so doing, open up new avenues of enquiry about religious offence.

Book and Film Reviews

“…Th e book is simultaneously a 'witnessing' of Ismaili women's deeply personal work of 'emplacement' , and a model for how to study the lived religious ethics cultivated by care work. (Frøystad and Lazzaretti 2021), the collected volume aims to move beyond established debates in the social sciences, which argue that legal proscriptions around religious injury-or blasphemy laws-oft en have the unintended consequence of heightening interreligious tensions. Th e six chapters take an opposite approach and consider alternative, nonlegal practices to manage religious off ense.…”