Of the forms of cultural creation we have at hand, the forms of art which the symbolic and imaginary unconsciousness takes, the narrative is the one that is most closely analogous to, indeed interchangeable with, the order of human action. Quoting Marx in The German Ideology, Paul Ricoeur says : When men produce their existence in the form of praxis they represent it to themselves in terms of fiction, even at the limit in terms of religion (which for Marx is the model of ideology)... .The referent of narration, namely human action, is never raw or immediate reality but an action which has been symbolized and resymbolized over and over again. This narration serves to displace anterior symbolizations on to a new place, integrating them or exploding them as the case may be.2 II Regarding the two films under consideration I would first like to put forward a proposition figuratively. The proposition is that the rising tide of nationalism encourages myths and legends as indeed all aspects of tradition to surface, to literally come up front and take on new or newly adapted forms in the various arts. The tradition thus shows itself (and I am talking primarily of the visual and performing arts), seeking beholders, native and foreign, who have hitherto turned away from it in ignorance or embarrassment. There may be some chauvinist defiance and naivety in the way this visibility is established. But taking the figuratively worded proposition about the surfacing of tradition a little further, I should like to see it in terms of a formal category offrontality : frontality of the word, the image, the design, the performa-tive act. This yields forms of direct address; flat, diagrammatic and simply profiled figures; a figure-ground pattern with only notational perspective; repetition of motifs in terms of ritual 'play'; and a decorative mise-en-scene. A review of these features provides, still further, a schematic rendering of the aesthetic principles of the popular in the Indian art tradition. Although every aspect of the artistic tradition may be pressed in for use in the affirmative urge of nationalism it is often the popular that comes in most handy —and of course the popular will include 'reduced' aspects of the classical as it will the urbanized aspects of the folk and tribal. The popular is in that sense a catch-all term. However it can be reasonably well defined in art history3 as an eclectic impulse accompanying social change, eclecticism itself conveying a kind of artistic nerve and wit to construe a hybrid form that is at least hypothetically iconoclastic. Contrasted with this desire to figure forth the archetype and induct it into a nationalist history, there is in the post-independence phase a need to question and excavate mythic material; even more to exorcise mythologized reality. We are still speaking figuratively. The hermeneutic ofsupsicion thus follows the her-meneutic of affirmation. Thus from the 1950s the problem of ideology takes 80 Numbers 14-15