ABSTRACT
The idea that civilizations decline and decay, which developed in the nineteenth century in Europe, reaching its apotheosis in Max Nordau's Degeneration, has generally been traced to Benedict Augustin Morel's 1857 treatise Traité des Dégénérescences. This chapter suggests that one of many antecedents of this idea may be found in somewhat earlier writings by British administrators in India. It examines as an example the 1848 to 1854 writings of W. H. Sleeman, British Resident in Lucknow, capital of the north Indian kingdom of Awadh. Before the British applied the language of decadence to their own late nineteenth-century society and literature, they had already honed it in the denunciation of Indian polities, societies and literatures of an earlier Fin De Siècle. In accordance with the then-dominant understanding of effeminacy as caused by womanizing rather than homosexuality, Sleeman traces the King’s and his noblemen’s supposed emasculation to their being overly influenced by women.
