D Anuradha Kapur there is a certain homogeneity of response among those who watch must be made clear as well. Laughter, tears, boos, in one part of the audience stimulates a similar response in another part of the audience; equally spectators find their responses confirmed by other spectators and as a result surrender their singularities and feel integrated with the rest. Among such an audience is the one who describes; and therefore can with some certainty talk about the reactions of her or his fellow spectators; so long as such an enterprise is understood to be neither neutral nor universal. 31 But what shall the organising principle of such description be? If we must parry the mystique of authenticity and not ask, 'is it the real thing?', so must we also resist being absorbed into a postmodern map and not say, 'does it matter?' Postmodernism in mounting an attack on mimesis claims as its territory nonmimetic forms from all over the world. Thus theatre from the Third World comes to be defined by the needs and uses of postmodernism; forms from different cultural contexts become evacuated of subject matter and are seen as a series of formal options. When acknowledging the elusiveness of meaning becomes the same as acknowledging that the essential unknowableness of reality is the condition of our very existence, then anxiety about the meaning of forms can appear to be misplaced. Forms can then be performed, reperformed, transplanted, it does not really matter, since meaning, it is believed, is always received with serious defaults. And thus to the problem of equivalence, one interpretation can be seen to be as good as another, equivalent. But when forms exist not merely as artistic alternatives, when they connect to a sensibility they h^lp in producing, when they are for better or for worse, contemporary, then what they mean to the people who perform them, on the ground on which they are performed, becomes crucial. So must we place ourselves, and write a narrative that gives access to the history of the form as well as its contemporaneity. The placement, it seems to me, has to do with the materiality of the present, its tangibility, and the fact that it matters. Thus Ramnagar's spaces, actors, shops, are not to be presented to the reader like a ready object, but by hypotyposis, with radiant outlines, the radiance that comes through desire which is so much a part of the event. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Tulsidas, Ramacharitamanasa, edited by Hanuman Prasad Poddar, Gorakhpur, 1942. All further references are to this text. 2. See Cyan Pandey, 'The Bigoted Julaha', Review of Political Economy, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 18, No. 5, January 1983. 3. Edward Said, Orientalism, London, 1978; reprinted, 1980; pp. 86-87. 4. Geeta Kapur, Tiace for People", essay in the catalogue of an exhibition of paintings by Jogen Choudhury, Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram (Bombay, 1981), eight unnumbered pages. 5. Paul Ricoeur, 'Ideology and Ideology Critique", in Berhard Waldenfels, Jan M. Broekman and Ante Pazanin (eds.)/ Phenomenology and Marxism, London, 1984,134-64 (p. 163). Number 16