D Ashish Rajadhyaksha wellsprings I can only understand in psychoanalytic terms, the voice of a father figure whose reassurances I simply do not believe, which, indeed, terrify me. The ambiguity of the hysterical revelation of the past is due not so much to the vacillation of its content between the imaginary and the real, for it is situated in both. Nor is it because it is made up of lies. The reason is that it presents us with the birth of truth in speech, and thereby brings us up against the reality of what is neither true nor false. At any rate this is the most disquieting aspect of the 75 problem. For it is present speech that bears witness to the truth of this revealation in present reality, and which grounds it in the name of that reality. Yet, in that reality, only speech bears witness to that portion of the powers of the past that has been thrust aside at each crossroads where the event has made its choice.3 For the entire Bengal School, of which Subramanyan today is the last great adherent, the Industrial Revolutionhas been an event that may notbe discussed. The one event that gave birth to the modem era is covered by an infantile amnesia4 to be discussed only as a before and an after. For Subramanyan, all pre-industrial society saw cohesive islands of people in whose hierarchical milieu little changed despite the great conquests. The impact and dissemination of change mediated through 'sensibility, skill, concept and language spectra', but seldom in a way as to invalidate their functions. The expression of the system was internal to it, there was no surplus and despite the changes wrought over time the skills, like the concepts and sensibility that determined the expression, went on performing those specific functions. These functions were, of course, particular to the community, even to the specific stratum that performed them. And then, the crossroads: the little islands were destroyed, almost all the skills of the artisan rendered economically redundant. Art expression, he says, was itself rendered superfluous; earlier, being merely an expression of skill, art's functions were as materially valid as any other, whereas now, although it may have risen to 'higher utility' it is no longer utilitarian. Except perhaps to augment 'market attractiveness'. He, Subramanyan, is trying to compensate for the lack — lack of the name-of-the-father — in 'that place which, by the hole it opens up in the signified, sets off the cascades of reshapings of the signifier from which the increasing disaster of the imaginary proceeds... /5 He tells us, following his first instinct, that all is well, that '[India] is not fully industrialized and, with the kind of population-resource ratio it has, it will probably never be so. I am not bewailing this as some do. On the other hand, I thank my stars that this is so' (KGS, p. 44). Perpetuating the amnesia he says, '... non-professional forms like those practised by women in their households, or ritual acts practised by priests and medicine men, or such professional forms as answer to the needs of the community, practised by craftsmen of various denominations — potters, metal-smiths, wood-workers, weavers and the like — who work within an in-social communication nexus, with its limited vocabularies and skill demands, but despite this with a remarkable breadth of sensibility and imagery...' (KGS, p. 57). Number 16