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Andrea Rota: Hello everyone and welcome to the IKOS – Religion & Politics podcast. My name is Andrea Rota and joining me today is Kathinka Frøystad. Kathinka is a professor of modern South Asian studies at the University of Oslo, where she teaches the study of religion at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages. Kathinka’s work covers a range of topics mainly related to the Indian subcontinent. Today we will focus on some of her most recent research on the much-debated issue of religion offence in India. Kathinka, thank you for taking the time to talk with us on the podcast.
Kathinka Frøystad: Thank you for inviting me.
Andrea Rota: So, the idea of religious offence points toward the capacity of religious discourse to harm people’s feelings or conversely to the possibility of hurting someone’s religious sensibilities through words or actions. However, many scholars use this term in a more technical sense, one that presents some similarities with the concept of blasphemy and touches on the legal protection of religious freedom. Could you please walk us through the use of this term in the study of religion and politics?
Kathinka Frøystad: Well, religious offence is quite a large bag of different statements and expressions and actions that includes, but it’s not limited to, what we would talk about as blasphemy here. And the reason for that is that India, where I happen to work, used to be a colony under the British for a long time, as everybody knows. And under the British, then the question was how to keep peace in a society. So, they established this Indian penal code where they proscribed a lot of actions that British colonialists believed could lead to social unrest. And the term religious offence comes from that legislation. There’s a whole chapter in the old Indian penal code, which is still retained by the way, which has religious offences in the title. So, religious offence is the technical term which comes through that sort of legal, historical, post-colonial consciousness of dealing with blasphemy accusations.
Andrea Rota: Now you have emphasized the historical dimension of this concept of religious offence, dating back to the British colonial rule. However, in your publication, you note that its social role has evolved significantly in the last decade or so, in particular in the wake of the political success of Hindu nationalist movements. Could you please elaborate on this evolution?
Kathinka Frøystad: Well, there are two things that have happened. The first thing, as you rightly point out, yes, there’s been a rise of Hindu nationalism in India, which has made a lot of people who adhere to this ideology super conscious about not accepting any kind of offences or perceived offences against their religion. They want to correct historical wrongs. They have cultivated a new sense of historical pride in being Hindus. And so, whatever can come across to them as offensive, they try to strike down on that and they try to stop it, and stop it, block it, and punish those who they consider as responsible for that. So that’s the first thing, there’s the enhanced vigilantism, if you will, that comes with Hindu nationalism and its rise. So that’s the one thing.
The second thing is that in the same period, and this is accidental, there’s been a rise of the use of social media. Now, the smartphone revolution, as a lot of people talk about it as, which has happened with an explosive speed throughout India. Since at least 2010, I started to observe the enhanced use of social media in 2012, 2013, 2014, where a lot of people who had never used computers started to get access through their smartphones to internet, and mobile internet was really very inexpensive and is costing still today almost next to nothing. Now, in that period, there were a lot of things that were spread by use of social media, and which involuntarily, quite often, made recipients of the other community angry, because, you know, social messaging doesn’t just happen intra-community, it happens also across communities, because people have friends, they have relations, they have contacts, they have work colleagues, and so on. So, they can never quite control what kind of messages that they spread out once they put something on Facebook, and so on.
Andrea Rota: This is something that I find very fascinating about your methodology when reading your work, is that as an anthropologist, you focus on the local context, and not so much on the national debate. And you show how this local context has the capacity, the potential, to escalate social controversy, religious offense controversies, but also to calm down these processes. Now you have mentioned social media and the smartphone revolution. How did this contribute to the spreading of social unrest? Do you have some practical examples from your field work?
Kathinka Frøystad: I do. The case that I have studied most elaborately is a case which came into my attention at least in 2014, and which pertained to some visual images of Lord Shiva, who is the supreme being in many strands of Hinduism and Shaivism especially. Now he’s like the most powerful of them all, and to demonstrate and visually illustrate Shiva’s power over not just the Hindu universe, not just India, but over the entire world, is something that, you know, our devotees do. And so there is this old myth that has circulated for a long time, and that is, you know, you can easily find it in texts, that also the Kaaba in Mecca was once a temple dedicated to Lord Shiva. And this is an old myth that, of course, most Muslims, they just laugh at it, and they, you know, some people get angry, but nobody believes this. But then the images started to appear, visual images that were digital and that kept spreading because a lot of Indian Shaivites really liked them and thought they were interesting and demonstrated the power of Lord Shiva. And also because of the technical properties of certain social media, and especially the technical properties of Facebook, which for early users in that time was used without really too much consideration about data security and, you know, controlling who could see your images or not. So they could share an image of Shiva presiding over the Kaaba on their wall and tag all their friends, which made them frenzy and so on. And those images would open so that everyone could see it. And that, of course, caused a lot of controversies. And so it ignited several spates of riots in India, in Bangladesh and several other places. And so to witness how that happens from a grassroots local perspective has been quite interesting for me as an anthropologist working on everyday aspects of religious plurality.
Andrea Rota: Now speaking about this religious plurality, the case of Shiva in the Kaaba provides an example of how a religious offense controversy can escalate. But your research also calls attention to cases in which tensions are effectively contained at the local level. In a recent article, you examined the case of a neighborhood dispute that arose from the removal of a deity that adorned a house. Could you describe what happened in that situation?
Kathinka Frøystad: I can. This happened around the same time, which was kind of interesting, I think. So, what happened was that in this dense little neighborhood that you find in any kind of Indian towns and cities across the country, there was a family who had recently converted to Christianity from Hinduism. And one of the things that they did in the connection with their conversion was to get rid of their old idols and religious items which associated them with the religious tradition that they had just left. And so, one thing that quite a few Hindus have on the outside of their houses is a tile which is affixed to their house. And this family happened to have one of these tiles. And so, in order to remove it, you can’t do it quietly, right? You have to kind of smash it down because it’s glued to the house and it’s kind of hard to remove. So, in removing it, they inadvertently alerted all the housewives in the neighborhood which heard this commotion and sound and looked out of the windows to see what was happening. And what they saw was, of course, their neighbors destroying an image dedicated to a Hindu god. And one of them especially became really very upset. And she wanted to know why conversion entails that somebody has to kill god. For her, it was a transgression that was almost unimaginable. And she was really furious and she wanted each and everyone to react against this family, but she didn’t know how to go about it. She didn’t know how to alert someone who could take action. And while scratching her head, she came running to me and she asked, why do Christians have to kill god just because they convert? Is that necessary or what? And so gradually, as nothing happened to her attempt to ignite action against this family, gradually she came to understand that maybe the family’s conversion to Christianity was something that had to, in their case, lead to the removal of these deity images. And so, she came gradually to see the case from their point of view, understanding that their intention wasn’t actually to hurt anyone, but simply to lead a life and adorn their house in a way that would be more expected from neo-Christian family.
Andrea Rota: So, there was a kind of process of learning about the other’s religion in this plural context, if I understand it correctly.
Kathinka Frøystad: There was, there was. And the funny thing is, I mean, even though Christianity has existed in India for the longest of time, and a lot of people are deeply familiar with it, obviously, then there are quite a few people across the country who know next to nothing about Christianity in India, and who have no clue about what goes on in the church, who think that, well, Jesus Christ is just the god of the Christians, just like Krishna is and Shiva is ours. And so they couldn’t understand why it was necessary to remove something just because you added something else, right? So that was the problem. And in order to understand that, I think we really have to study that kind of situations up close, and to understand how quite a few of these local skirmishes that happened about religious images that are destroyed or defiled in various ways are actually solved locally, gradually, gradually, rather than jumping scale, as we talk about it, as where they become visible to scholars who sit in their offices and who can read about them in the newspapers or court papers and so on.
Andrea Rota: So how do these local events contribute to reshaping our understanding of religious offence as a topic, as a category, in the study of religion and politics?
Kathinka Frøystad: Well, I wouldn’t say it would reshape it, but it would widen it and expand it, I think. The processes we see playing out on the ground are sometimes different from those we see from other perspectives, and I think it’s important to understand how local dynamics play out in the long run, and how they sometimes can lead to very unexpected results and make us uncover and detect quite different kind of dynamics than we can through other methods. So, for me, those kinds of grassroots studies, or the frog’s perspective, if you will, can enrich other methods by which we do study religious offence controversies or blasphemy accusations or any other kind of skirmishes that come about as a result of troubled religious plurality.
Andrea Rota: Indeed, they seem to add an important layer of complexity to the whole picture.
Kathinka Frøystad: They do.
Andrea Rota: Thank you very much, Kathinka, for your insight and expertise on this fascinating topic.
Kathinka Frøystad: Thank you for having me.
Andrea Rota: Before we say goodbye, I just want to remind our listeners that our guest today was Kathinka Freystad, professor of modern South Asian studies at the University of Oslo. Her latest book, co-edited with Vera Lazzaretti, is titled Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence. Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment, and is published by Routledge. Goodbye.