Few cultures declare themselves decadent, as morally and culturally on the decline as a result of sensual indulgence. Perhaps it is a condition of a culture being truly decadent that its members are unable to recognise this fact. But too often, the word is bandied by those whose ideas about morality and culture have little to commend them.

The modern West, indeed modernity itself, is often pronounced decadent by those who think the decay can be stemmed by a revival of a medieval Caliphate that enforces its writ across the world.

The West has often had internal critics whose criticisms were strikingly similar. The fascists of Italy and Germany rode to power in part on the promise that things would be less decadent once they were in charge and the aesthetes, homosexuals and Jews deposed from their positions of cultural prominence.

Decadence has equally been a charge the West levelled against the East, a realm conceived in their fevered puritanical fantasies as populated by despots with harems heaving with catamites.

The disingenuous moral case for imperialism made good use of the idea that the slothful East had to learn the virtues of early rising, bland food and military discipline.

Premchand’s short story from the 1920s Shatranj Ke Khilari ( The Chess Players ) has decadence as its central theme, a fact underlined even more strongly in Satyajit Ray’s fine film adaptation of 1974. The setting is the kingdom of Awadh in 1856, on the verge of being annexed by the British East India Company in the usual devious way. The two chess-players of the title, minor nobles at the court of Awadh, are played by Saeed Jaffrey and Sanjeev Kumar as urbane but apathetic incompetents, content to fiddle while Awadh burns. Ray’s masterstroke was to depict explicitly what was only the background to Premchand’s story, the figure of Awadh’s Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who is forced by the film’s end to abdicate and pave the way for the British domination of northern India.

The film can be read as straightforwardly elegiac. Amjad Khan gives the Nawab a nobility and tragic grandeur to which the British Resident, General Outram, played by Richard Attenborough as a Scottish boor, is oblivious. To Outram, the Nawab — with his outsized libido and fondness for such unmanly things as poetry — is the very model of the Oriental despot. Ray did not entirely disagree with this judgement. Indeed, he had a hard time finding any sympathy for the voluptuary, who seemed to him to deserve every piece of obloquy the colonial historians had flung his way.

Ray found the solution to his artistic problem when his research revealed to him that the Nawab’s achievements as poet, musician and patron of the arts were not mere royalist propaganda. This was, he said in an interview to the writer Andrew Robinson, “one redeeming feature about this king.” His ambivalence about the king and the feudalism that undergirds his authority went with a similar ambivalence about those who were to replace him. The result is a film that refuses to be either an elegy for feudalism or a piece of nationalist propaganda; nor is the film simply neutral on these political questions.

The British armies that march across Awadh as the two chess players sneak away to continue their game are everything the local nobility are not: energetic, organised and efficient. But the world they are about to bring into existence is one of merchants and bankers, backed by soldiers and civil servants, who will gather in the club at weekends to play bridge and guzzle brandy. There will be no place for kings who dance to their own songs or for leisurely games of chess.

A man of taste, Ray had no time for the culture of the cantonment. But he did value the things that the overthrow of feudalism had made possible: not railways or parliamentary democracy but rather the creation of a new, modern, critical consciousness.

The Bengal in which Ray made his career as writer and filmmaker was marked by a consciousness of the fact that the question of culture could not be separated from questions of political economy. With the Nawabs deposed, the new culture needed new patrons. Ray found his patrons not in what was left of the decadent aristocracy but in the salaried middle classes, students at universities and readers of newspapers.

Ray was no Marxist, but his film ultimately presses a Marxist question: how many peasants had to starve so that kings could write poetry and nobles while away long summer afternoons in games of chess? And how many had to die so that the British could be kept in cotton and spices? And what would it be like to have a culture that does not depend on suffering for its flourishing?

(This monthly column discusses questions of morality through pop culture.)

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