The Ramlila at Ramnagar them down, to make them forcibly coherent. Authenticity then becomes a hospitable category which, while it does say something about the sameness of things, takes little cognizance of the specifics, making disparate forms look deceptively homogenous. From one angle, this sort of category manages culture, tradition, cultural artefacts. I say manage deliberately because such a category provides authorization, an ordering that ultimately produces criteria mapping the acceptable and unacceptable tradition; and forms which have the longest run backward into their 'classical' pasts 6 are more acceptable than others. But the category of the authentic is also reminiscent of colonial classifications that schematize, divide, list historically varied phenomena, people, temperaments, into manageable wholes. The nineteenth-century gazetteers of India manufacture such wholes — the mystical east, the cowardly Hindu, the bigoted julaha2 — these are consistencies that have been arrived at by a process that makes observation into generalization and generalization into law, detached from history about the 'mentality', 'custom' and 'circumstances' of people.3 So far as traditional Indian theatre is concerned, such schematization leads to particular aspects of it being pressed up as eternal, the type marked Indian. It is as if by some sleight of hand these aspects have dodged history and have never been endangered by the contemporary, neither contemporary intervention nor evaluation. With respect to colonialism this effort to schematize reality is an effort, as Edward Said has shown, to master what seemed a stubborn, enigmatic, inarticulate, chaotic 'other' culture. But when we use such organizing principles on ourselves they spell different things. Apart from the question of roots with which the word authenticity is surely connected, there is a defensive reflex here against the misrepresentations that the English usually dealt out to traditional theatre forms. This has led to emphasizing the metaphysical nature of Indian art, its long history, its ritual, mythic and symbolic aspects, what might be called its 'occultist properties'.4 What in fact is manufactured then is a history of tradition basically moulded by the west in so far as it is posited as its exact alterity. But seeking to form an authentic tradition on the basis of alterity leads to similar if not identical schematizations. We too begin to speak in a tongue that creates terminal abstractions, catch-all categories that evacuate forms of their specific histories as also of their possible mutations. (Classical Sanskrit drama is once and for all courtly; traditional theatre is always ritualistic.) I should like to argue that traditional forms must be read and reread, and the details understood not in terms of a unified field marked Tradition, but in terms of what bits and pieces make them work the way they do; that, instead of a single essentially authentic voice, there are several possible voices with which to speak about tradition and traditional forms in order that puzzles of our seeing today are solved. Therefore here I introduce the word complicity, and with it ends the myth of the perfect spectator serenely presenting a seamless overview from a position of superior wisdom. The speaker must define herself or himself according to the position that s/he speaks from. But there is no position worth the name that does not first take into account the integrity of the form: the social ground on which it is performed and what it means to those who perform it. For the partisan must work within the dialectic of distance and belongingness as Paul Ricoeur says,'5 distance Journal of Arts <& Ideas