Violence, Passion, and the Law: A Brief History of Section 295A and Its Antecedents

Adcock, C.S.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfw027

Cited by 26 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…48 One has to feed them and give to them the compilation of substances known of as vīra. Otherwise, 46 47 For further details on this controversy, see for instance Adcock (2016). 48 The Sanskrit in this passage strictly speaking does not specify that a council is the recipient of the japa and offering of the vīradravya but the notion is implied.…”

Section: (Goodall 2015)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge

Schwartz

2018

Religions

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing upon inscriptional, art historical, as well as largely unstudied and unpublished textual evidence, this paper examines the conceptualization of religious diversity in the Medieval Deccan prior to the Islamic invasions. What our archive suggests, somewhat counterintuitively, is that from the perspective of the state and other disciplinary institutions, religious difference was conceived of in primarily juridical as opposed to doxographical terms; it was a matter of law rather than belief. In other words, in practice, the social performance of the religious identities of particular communities proved inseparable from the delineation of the highly specific legal rights and obligations to which those communities were entitled to adhere. Succinctly, medieval India's religious diversity was inextricable from the widespread acceptance of a rather capaciously imagined emic form of legal pluralism. The early medieval Dharmaśāstric commentarial tradition locates the textual foundation of this approach to legal pluralism in a discrete and consistent canon of textual resources. As the present work demonstrates, by the eighth century-from the perspective of the Brahmanical legalists themselves-it is this internally coherent body of dharma knowledge that emerges as the key conceptual resource that makes a place within the wider social ecologies of the medieval Deccan for the Tantric knowledge systems and those who practice them.In the forts and in the (mahā)janapadas, the king must protect the conventions (samaya) of heretics, "Pāśupatas," 1 merchant guilds, councils, military collectives, groups and the like. Whatever their laws, duties, rules for worship, or mode of livelihood, he must permit them. pās . an . d . anaigamaśren .ī pūgavratagan .ā dis . u / sam . raks . et samayam . rājā durge janapade tathā// 1 Here in explaining the gloss of naigama I follow Vijñāneśvara's commentary. The meaning of this lexeme, which by the Gupta period typically referred in a generic fashion to a trade organization, is contested across a range of Dharmaśāstra sources, with explanations ranging from understanding the term as referring to Brahmin communities, to trade guilds, to Pāśupatas and so forth. As our oldest commentary on the Nāradasmr . ti, by Asahāya, is incomplete and does not cover this portion of the text, we have little concrete indications of how this passage was read in the seventh century, though the interpretation offered in Kātyāyana is strongly suggestive of some sort of trade organization. In the context of the surviving commentarial reflection on this passage itself, however, the consensus position in the context of its reception, especially in the sources being referred to repeatedly in the medieval Deccan, is that naigama refers to Pāśupatas and so forth, who recognize the authority of the Veda, but believe it to be divinely authored, as opposed to apaurus . eya. The association of this view with the Pāśupatas is often linked with the writings of the Vaiśes . ika philosopher Praśastapāda, and thus it is not sur...

show abstract

Section: (Goodall 2015)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge

Schwartz

2018

Religions

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the wake of the 1857 rebellion, the Indian Penal Code, drafted decades earlier by Thomas Babington Macaulay, was revised and finally enacted in 1862, enshrining the protection of religious feelings against offence as a means of preserving social stability (Ahmed 2009, 177–82). Those statutes would be augmented and further strengthened in 1927 to stem aggressive proselytizing by the Arya Samaj (Adcock 2016, 340). The Pariah Problem sheds light on how a Hindu elite seized on that framework of hurt religious sentiments and fashioned a certain set of feelings and attitudes on the part of caste Hindus as indelible to Hindu subjectivity.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath'sThe Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern Indiaand the Study of Caste

Pennington¹,

Chandra²,

Ramberg³

et al. 2021

Mod. Asian Stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

show abstract

Rethinking Markets in Modern India

Gandhi

Harriss‐White²,

Haynes³

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Violence, Passion, and the Law: A Brief History of Section 295A and Its Antecedents

Cited by 26 publications

References 8 publications

The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge

The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge

A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath'sThe Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern Indiaand the Study of Caste

Rethinking Markets in Modern India

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About