much of the place tradition took in aesthetic debates; the degree of false consciousness in traditional values is now sought to be revealed. (What should be added quickly is that the terminology is not drawn from Marxism as from literary existentialism though of course in the work of Sartre, for example, that has already involved Marxism.) What is interrogated in contemporary Indian film, as also literature with its longer history, is bad faith in inter-personal relationship; bad faith of a man to a woman; bad faith among the progressives; bad faith of political parties. The ruling class and its ideology and the existential problem are put at par, which is to say class analysis is not the basis but one element among others in the social critique. What is certain is that while in an earlier phase of nationalist consciousness there was an ebullience of self-discovery through mythic archetype, folk and popular forms (as for example in the Indian Peoples' Theatre movement), there is now the travail of the middle class worked out in phycho-social terms. Solutions are no longer at hand. Whether it is portrayed sentimentally or with dignity and rigour, reality is now constantly handled by realisms of various persuasion. Only in the hands of a few novelists, playwrights and film-makers does the critique go far enough to show how myth, which derives from the notion of the collective unconscious in the Jungian schema, may by rational inversion be seen as part of the superstructure of a society. And that either way it has, like all cultural creations, the degree of autonomy to develop its own secular/aesthetic dynamic. Only a few artists are able to achieve the reconstruction of an archetype as a device to speak about the 'type' of a class or, rather, to present the problematic of a class-constructed psyche which so quickly appropriates mythic elements. Certainly in cinema only one man dares to put his stakes so high and that is Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976). The cinematic means he uses for the purpose are many and bold and hybrid — not realism proper. But this paper does not deal with him. It deals with his more famous, internationally celebrated compatriot from Bengal, Satyajit Ray (1921- ), who does develop the finest most discreet version of a realist form. And I take the one film in which he most conscientiously exposes the underside ofmythologized reality, Devi, to contrast it with the popular iconographic mode ofSant Tukaram. Ill Although in filmic classification Sant Tukaram^ may be placed along with the entire set of saint films as a mythological,5 it belongs m'ore correctly to a sub-genre of special significance. The saints'lives are, as legends, quasi-biographical material; and with their message of spiritual equality these lives are expressly adaptable to historical ends. We know of course that in the nationalist ethos the saints' lives were made to light the way to social justice. The need to publish new editions of Marathi bhakti-poets was emphasized as early as in the mid-nineteenth century by M.G. Ranade who, like the middle-class nationalists of the period, would see the seventeeth century movement as a kind ofprotestant movement where caste differences were sought to be transgressed by the saints.6 Other eminently historical figures, not least Gandhi,were at this historical junc- Joumal of Arts & Ideas 81