This session examines Indo-Irish transimperial affiliations that displace Britain’s centrality in the Anglophone imperial networks of the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Sukanya Banerjee explains, Victorian Studies often coalesces “Victorian,” “Britain,” and “nation,” creating a “geoethnically bound sense of place and time.” Consequently, Britain dominates the study of its imperial networks as the primary referential point and chief nexus of cultural and intellectual exchanges among its colonies. Banerjee therefore advocates the transimperial as a critical framework that situates Britain in “constant tension and connection” with its coeval “imperial constituencies.”

Employing the transimperial lens, this panel deconstructs Britain’s discursive and disciplinary centrality by bringing into focus anticolonial intimacies between India and Ireland, exposing the imperial network as not fully controlled through the British metropole. We define anticolonial intimacies as lateral, uneven literary, cultural, intellectual, and political affiliations through which India and Ireland formed solidarities and comparisons that exceeded Britain’s imperial authority, fracturing the imagined solidities of Britain as the arbiter of the Anglophone nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The three papers foreground three distinct yet interconnected modes of anticolonial intimacies: postcolonial urbanism, “yogic masculinity,” and queer bodies. Reading James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Kangal Malsat (2003), the Bhagavad Gita, George William Russell’s magazine Irish Theosophist (1892-97), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Pandey Bechan Sharma’s short story “Chocolate” (1927), we argue that postcolonial city-building, Gita-informed “yogic masculinity” in Irish nationalism, and the overlap of queer sexualities and Indo-Irish subaltern identities illustrate anticolonial affinities disavowed by the British imperial discourse.

We have chosen these primary texts as they illuminate the crucial period from the 1880s to the 1940s, when India and Ireland witnessed intensified nation-building, emergent nationalist consciousness, and surging popular resistance to British rule. Kangal Malsat, as a contemporary afterlife, demonstrates these entanglements lingering beyond independence. The panel reveals both Indo-Irish affiliations and colonial logics reproduced within nationalist movements. In doing so, we address the presidential theme of emancipatory narratives by underscoring not only affinities but also contradictions, ambiguity, and non-linearity that structure anticolonial intimacies.

We build on scholarship in long nineteenth-century studies, Irish and Indian nationalisms, theosophy, Hinduism, postcolonialism, queer theory, and Modernism. Our papers extend key frameworks advanced by Walter Mignolo, Emer Nolan, and Aarthi Vadde, which illuminate how gendered, racial, and national identities are negotiated in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. We further draw on Joseph Lennon’s Irish Orientalism, Hans Krämer and Julian Strube’s Theosophy across Boundaries, and Ruth Vanita’s Queering India, which illustrate the religious and erotic cultures that shaped Indian and Irish identities across colonial and postcolonial modernity.

While these critical works offer rich insights, few bring these perspectives into direct dialogue across transimperial contexts. Our panel redresses this gap by centering Indo-Irish anticolonial intimacies as a comparative framework for understanding how literary forms shape political subjectivities, affiliations, and colonial afterlives in India and Ireland.

Shinjini Chattopadhyay analyzes postcolonial city-building in Dublin and Kolkata through a comparative reading of Finnegans Wake and Kangal Malsat. She argues these urban spaces deconstruct Eurocentric epistemologies, resist parochial nationalism, and overthrow the neoliberal hegemony of the postcolonial state, thereby reimagining decolonial futures.

Kristin Mahoney’s paper shifts our focus to Indian gods, Irish men, and the ambivalent place of violence in Indo-Irish anticolonial thought. She examines the influence of the Bhagavad Gita on Irish nationalism developing within Dublin’s occultist community, “the Household” (1880s-90s), and the Irish Theosophist. She shows how Russell develops “yogic masculinity” as a restrained, serene alternative to martial masculinities, while also contemplating violence with thoughtful curiosity.

But what of queer men, often quietly erased from the narratives of Hindu and Irish nationalisms? Preeshita Biswas examines “Chocolate” and Dorian Gray to illustrate Indo-Irish queer eroticism and Wildean decadence in Sharma’s provocative Lord Krishna-Wilde analogy. Biswas argues that decadence exposes a tenuous link between alternative Irish and Indian identities and queer sexualities that rupture the monolithic heteronormativity of British imperialism and Hindu nationalism. The session is presided over by Rachel Teukolsky, scholar of aesthetics, politics, modernity, and nation-building in nineteenth-century literature.

Our papers move recursively among twentieth-century texts, contemporary afterlives, and nineteenth-century archives, disrupting the imperial, masculinized teleology that centers British hegemony in the periodization of the Anglophone nineteenth century. Bringing together scholars across career stages, institutions, subfields, and methodological approaches, this session offers a generative, comparative method for what Ronjaunee Chatterjee calls “undisciplining” the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Each speaker will present for 15-16 minutes, leaving 5-6 minutes for introductions and transitions, and reserving 21-25 minutes for audience discussion within the 75-minute format.