Kushal Mehra’s Blasphemy: Let Me Speak confronts the idea of blasphemy head-on, arguing that it is fundamentally alien to India’s indigenous intellectual traditions and that its persistence in law and culture stifles free speech, inquiry, and social progress.
Mehra, host of the popular Cārvāka Podcast and a self-described dharmic sceptic, opens by tracing the etymology and historical evolution of blasphemy. He locates its emergence as a punishable offence primarily within Abrahamic frameworks, where truth is often treated as singular, revealed, and exclusive.
In contrast, Kushal Mehra presents dharmic traditions as rooted in pluralism, debate, and epistemic humility.
Concepts such as anekantavada and the practice of purvapaksha encouraged rigorous argument rather than protecting sacred boundaries through force or law.
Festivals that ritually ‘abuse’ deities and classical texts that celebrate open stages free from prohibition illustrate a culture in which questioning was not merely tolerated but valued.
The book then turns to how this foreign concept entered Indian law.
Kushal Mehra details the colonial-era Rangeela Rasool controversy of the 1920s, which led to the introduction of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code. He argues that the British institutionalised ‘hurt sentiments’ as a legal category and that independent India’s First Amendment further constitutionalised restrictions on speech that the original framers had not intended.
The result, in Kushal Mehra’s view, is a legal and social environment in which subjective offence can shut down discussion, careers, and even lives.
Critique of Censorship
Particularly striking is Mehra’s critique of what Kushal Mehra terms the ‘Abrahamisation of the Hindu mind’. He warns against Hindus adopting the same dogmatic intolerance they criticise in others, thereby turning a pluralistic tradition into something rigid and exclusivist.
Kushal Mehra dismantles utilitarian justifications for censorship by citing empirical data suggesting that communal violence has declined even as online religious criticism has increased, attributing social peace more to state capacity than to silence. He proposes more speech, not less, as the remedy. He argues that people should expose bad ideas in the open marketplace of argument rather than drive them underground, where they fester.
The final sections highlight the inconsistency of selective outrage.
Kushal Mehra juxtaposes inflammatory passages from various scriptures with the unpunished statements of politicians, contrasting them with the swift consequences ordinary citizens often face for similar expression. He contends that a civilisation that stops questioning eventually stops thinking, and that genuine social reform, from Raja Rammohan Roy to BR Ambedkar, has always required the freedom to challenge orthodoxy.
For anyone concerned with the health of Indian public discourse, this is essential reading.
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