Outrage i Outrage The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia Edited by Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad and Arild Engelsen Ruud First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Contributors, 2019 Images © Contributors, 2019 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Rollier, P., Frøystad, K., and Ruud. A.E. (eds,). 2019. Outrage: The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.14324/111.9781787355279 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons license, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978–1–78735–529–3 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978–1–78735–528–6 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978–1–78735–527–9 (PDF) ISBN: 978–1–78735–530–9 (epub) ISBN: 978–1–78735–531–6 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787355279 Contents List of figures vii List of abbreviations viii List of contributors ix Note on diacritics xi Acknowledgements xii 1. Introduction: Researching the rise of religious offence in South Asia 1 Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad and Arild Engelsen Ruud 2. ‘We’re all blasphemers’: The life of religious offence in Pakistan 48 Paul Rollier 3. The rise of religious offence in transitional Myanmar 77 Iselin Frydenlund 4. Religious outrage as spectacle: The successful protests against a ‘blasphemous’ minister 103 Arild Engelsen Ruud 5. Affective digital images: Shiva in the Kaaba and the ­smartphone revolution 123 Kathinka Frøystad 6. ‘Durga did not kill Mahishasur’: Hindus, Adivasis and Hindutva 149 Moumita Sen 7. The languages of truth: Saints, judges and the fraudulent in a Pakistani court 178 Asad Ali Ahmed v 8. Blasphemy and the appropriation of vigilante justice in ‘hagiohistoric’ writing in Pakistan 208 Jürgen Schaflechner 9. Afterword: On the efficacy of ‘blasphemy’ 236 Ute Hüsken Index 249 vi CONTENTS List of figures Figure 6.1 Bhabatosh Sutar’s work in Chetla Agrani Club, Kolkata, 2012. Source: author 158 Figure 6.2 Representations of Asur village, FE Block, Kolkata, 2016. Source: author 160 Figure 6.3 Families taking selfies against the back- drop of the Asur village, FE Block, Kolkata, 2016. Source: author 160 Figure 6.4 Durga murti in the pandal, FE Block, Kolkata, 2016. Source: author 162 Figure 7.1a-c Representations of the photographs of Yousaf Ali, as they appeared in the Khabrain newspaper. Stock image 200 vii List of abbreviations BJP Bharatiya Janata Party (India) BNP Bangladesh Nationalist Party ECHR European Court of Human Rights FIR First Information Report ICT Information and Communication Technology IPC Indian Penal Code JNU Jawaharlal Nehru University MaBaTha Ah-myo Batha Thathana Saun Shaung Ye a-Pwe, or the Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion (Myanmar) MaHaNa State Sangha Mahanayaka Committee (Myanmar) NLD National League for Democracy (Myanmar) OIC Organisation of Islamic Cooperation PPC Pakistan Penal Code SLORC The State Law and Order Restoration Council (Myanmar) SPDC State Peace and Development Council (Myanmar) ST Sunni Tehreek (Pakistan) TLP Tehreek-i Labbaik Pakistan (Pakistan) UNHCR United Nations Human Rights Council USDP Union Solidarity and Development Party (Myanmar) ICJ International Commission of Jurists HRCP Human Rights Commission of Pakistan NCJP National Commission for Justice and Peace OHCHR Office of the Unitedations N High Commissioner for Human Rights UNHRC United Nations Human Rights Council viii List of contributors Asad Ali Ahmed is a sociocultural anthropologist who has taught at the Pratt Institute and at Rutgers and Harvard universities. His princi- pal work examines the relationship of the political and the religious, as mediated by language and law, in colonial and postcolonial Pakistan. He is also the co-editor of Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan (OUP, 2019). Kathinka Frøystad is a social anthropologist and Professor of Mod- ern South Asian Studies at the University of Oslo working on religious offence, ritual crossings and other aspects of religious complexity. Her works include Blended Boundaries: Caste, Class and Shifting Faces of ‘Hinduness’ in a North Indian City (OUP, 2005), as well as a number of articles and book chapters. Iselin Frydenlund is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, and Director of the MF Centre for the Advanced Study of Religion. Her research area is Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and she specialises in questions concerning the relationship between Buddhism, nationalism, politics and violence. Ute Hüsken is Professor and Head of the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia at Heidelberg University. Her main fields are Buddhist and Hindu studies, ritual, festival studies and gender stud- ies. Her major books include When Rituals Go Wrong (Brill, 2007) and Viṣṇu’s Children (Harrassowitz, 2009). Paul Rollier is a social anthropologist and Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of St Gallen. His research interests lie in the anthropology of religion, politics and the everyday in South Asia. He ix recently co-authored Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2018). Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo. He writes on issues of democracy and politics in South Asia, spe- cifically West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is author of Poetics of Village Politics: The Making of West Bengal’s Rural Politics (OUP, 2003), co-ed- itor of Power and Influence in India (Routledge, 2010) and South Asian Sovereignty: The Conundrum of Worldly Power (Routledge, forthcoming) and co-author of Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2018). Jürgen Schaflechner is Assistant Professor at Heidelberg University and holds a PhD in South Asian Literary Studies and Anthropology (2014). His research and teaching focuses on cultural and postcolonial theory, the politics of religious and ethnic minorities in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the role of documentary film in anthropological research. Moumita Sen is a visual studies scholar and currently a Postdoctoral Fel- low at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. Sen is the co-editor of Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia (SUNY Press, 2018) and is working on a book from her award-winning doctoral dissertation on aesthetics, religi- osity and political patronage among clay-modellers of West Bengal. x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Note on diacritics The contributors to this volume draw on a variety of South Asian lan- guages. Foreign words have been romanised without diacritics, with the exception of chapter 8, which is primarily based on the translation of Urdu texts. xi Acknowledgements Early versions of many of the essays in this volume were presented at a workshop entitled ‘Reassessing the rise of offence politics in South Asia’, held in Oslo in December 2016 and funded by the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo. We would like to thank the workshop participants, the South Asia Symposium and the IKOS Religion and Politics network, as well as the anonymous reviewer recruited by UCL Press for useful comments to earlier drafts. xii 1 Introduction: Researching the rise of religious offence in South Asia Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad and Arild Engelsen Ruud In 2011 a dinner party conversation in New Delhi ended with the fol- lowing joke. An Indian dog and a Pakistani dog happened to meet at the Indo-Pak border. Fatigued but determined, the Indian dog trudged across to Pakistan. Surprised, the Pakistani dog asked: ‘Why did you do that? Didn’t they treat you well in India?’ The Indian dog explained: ‘All I ever got to eat was rice and lentils, lentils and rice, never any meat. I cannot take this any more, so now I am moving to Pakistan.’ To its sur- prise, however, the Pakistani dog then crossed the border in the opposite direction. When asked why he had decided to move to a meatless diet, the Pakistani dog explained: ‘Back home I am not even allowed to bark!’ With this joke, the host of the dinner get-together put a sardonic end to a conversation that had revolved around a growing sensitiv- ity to expressions that offend religious sentiments across South Asia. In Pakistan the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, had recently been assassinated for criticising the draconic blasphemy legislation that made it possible to issue death sentences even for unwitting disrespect of the Prophet. In Bangladesh, over a hundred Jamaat-e-Islami activists had been arrested for defending their leader’s comparison of his struggles with the suffering of the Prophet. Some years earlier, both countries had seen large-scale protests and violence in connection with the so-called Danish cartoon controversy. Meanwhile in India, hardly a week now went by without a news report about an artist, scholar or politician criti- cised, charged or assaulted for hurting religious sentiments, particularly Hindu ones.