Raghav Verma

Counter-Decadence: Scarcity, Imperial Residue, and the Sensory Politics of Colonial Refusal in Indian Aesthetic Modernism, 1905–1942

European aesthetic decadence, from Baudelaire's saturated sensorium to Moreau's ornate Salomé, revels in an abundance of glutted perception. What becomes of decadence, however, when a concomitant aesthetics of sensation arises from the deprivations of colonial extraction rather than the surfeit of metropolitan accumulation?

This paper argues that Indian aesthetic modernism produced a phenomenologically distinct "counter-decadence," heightened in uncanny intensities and sharpened through scarcity. Situated within the long fin de siècle of the subcontinent, I contend it was built on the fragmented materialities of "imperial residue"—the sensory traces left behind after material loot and epistemic violence had hollowed the colony from within.

I read these texts against the grain of the Progressive Writers' Association's 1936 manifesto, which sought to rescue literature from "reactionary" aestheticism in favor of social realism. I argue that this rejection overlooked the biopolitical dimensions of colonial rule, where empire operated not only through economic extraction but also through a psychosocial sensory regime that shaped colonial subjectivities. Counter-decadent artists recognized that dismantling this regime required working with the very traumatic affect and aesthetic ambiguities the manifesto discarded. Embracing exhausted bodies and fetid atmospheres of disillusionment, they faced censorship and incarceration amid rising proto-nationalisms—conditions that catalyzed new hybrid forms. This aesthetic alterity constituted anti-colonial knowledge, forming a rhizomatic counter-aesthetics concomitant with European decadence yet refracted through the parallax of colonial deprivation.

Reading intermedially across painting, poetry, and prose, I trace three formal operations. Amrita Sher-Gil's Three Girls(1935) collapses the figure-ground distinction. Jibanananda Das's "Banalata Sen"(1942) compresses "thousands of years" into an erotic stillness. Ismat Chughtai's Lihaaf (1942) transmits queer desire through sensory indirection, while Saadat Hasan Manto's Bu (1944) renders smell as an epistemology beyond colonial documentation. Collectively, I canvas a decolonizing aesthetic counter-decadence against the colonial sensory discipline, recovering alternative epistemologies of the postcolonial human condition that refuse nationalistic and casteist purisms, while reclaiming damaged sensation.

Bibliography

Anand, Mulk Raj, and Sajjad Zaheer. "Progressive Writers' Association Manifesto." In Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), edited by Sudhi Pradhan, 1–5. Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1979. First published 1936

Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Translated by James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. First published 1857

Chughtai, Ismat. "The Quilt [Lihaaf]." In The Quilt and Other Stories, translated by Tahira Naqvi and Syeda S. Hameed, 7–19. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990. First published 1942

Das, Jibanananda. "Banalata Sen." In Selected Poems, translated by Chidananda Dasgupta. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006. First published 1934

Manto, Saadat Hasan. "Odour [Bu]." In Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, edited and translated by Khalid Hasan, 265–70. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008. First published 1944

Moreau, Gustave. Salomé Dancing before Herod. 1876. Oil on canvas. The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (formerly Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center)

Sher-Gil, Amrita. Three Girls. 1935. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Raghav Verma is an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen, specializing in Early Modern literatures and postcolonial studies. He serves as the Project Coordinator for the Doctoral Certificate Program in Global South Studies at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies (ICGSS). His publications include: An Examined Life (HarperCollins, 2019)

Maria Al-Raes

“Shut up in Self”: Birthing Allegory in The Story of an African Farm

Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), a novel written by a teenage colonial governess, presents a strange and fragmented tale of nihilistic solitude and struggle for meaning. Although her later writing would engage with the political challenges of turn-of-the-century South Africa more closely, this novel remains mostly abstracted from historical or geographic specificity as it delivers its story of three isolated children—Lyndall, Waldo, and Em—struggling to survive in a seemingly vacant and insulated environment. Instead, Schreiner’s stylistically experimental work layers several kinds of allegory throughout its narrative of aborted Bildung. In particular, Schreiner returns to images of the child, maternity, and birth to invert progressive analogies of national formation. This paper re-examines the novel’s failed developmental plot through Schreiner’s complex treatment of allegorical form in figures of childhood and maternity to argue that her novel exposes the allegory of progress as a forceful compression that mirrors the violence of colonial appropriation. At the same time, Schreiner’s revised maternal allegory imagines new and nonteleological modes of expression. Reading African Farm in this vein reveals the novel’s investment in interrogating the tension between experience and genre, and the question of a fitting aesthetic form for representing individual and collective life. Returning attention to the minor and the marginal, Schreiner’s gestational figures disclose the inadequacy of universalising models of development and transform the linear temporality of conventional narratives of growth.

Maria Al-Raes is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, where she works on British literature of the long nineteenth century with a focus on the Bildungsroman and nonprogressive narratives of development. Her research draws on narrative poetics and queer theory to explore how figures of childhood in Bildungsromane by Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and Schreiner generate friction between minor forms within the novel (the sentence, the phrase, the analeptic moment) and larger structures of plot to reveal the (de)formative role of attenuated agency, alternative temporalities, and inassimilable experiences. She completed her BA and MA in English literature at the University of Toronto, where her research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Laura Schmitz-Justen

A New Dawn? Female Citizenship in E. M. Delafield’s Some Everyday Folks and Dawn (1909) and Allan Reeth’s Legions of the Dawn (1908)

This talk is part of my larger research project which explores novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that engage with the debate on introducing women’s suffrage. Particular attention is paid to how the construct ‘woman’ is negotiated against the backdrop of the simultaneously disintegrating empire. Which group of women should be emancipated, and (possibly) at whose expense? Do different forms of inclusion and exclusion based on nationality, race, disability, or class transform our understanding of the category ‘woman’? The goal is to examine how popular literature of the movement produced both inclusions and exclusions, as well as attempts at community-building in novels, not least through their circulation.

In the proposed talk I want to contextualize the nationalist constitution of the ‘female citizen,’ which was a key concept of the women’s suffrage movement, in relation to the movement’s internationalist efforts and views on women’s suffrage in (former) parts of the British Empire. The two novels under consideration in this paper exemplify these tensions. E. M. Delafield’s Australian novel Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909) already references both the British and Australian women’s suffrage movements in its dedication and Allan Reeth’s Legions of the Dawn (1908) imagines a utopian community founded by American and British women in Africa.

Laura Schmitz-Justen is a postdoctoral research and teaching associate at the Chair of British Studies, University of Münster. She is also a member of the postdoc Network “Das junge ZiF” run by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University. She is currently preparing her PhD, which was entitled The Poet as Lawgiver in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1820, for publication. Her postdoctoral project focuses on women’s suffrage in literature. Her broader theoretical interests include law and literature, feminism, queer studies, and disability studies. Her work has been published in English Studies, Journal of Lesbian Studies and she is co-editor of Feminist Perspectives on Law and Literature (De Gruyter, 2025).