D Ashish Rajadhyaksha AR: I would say it's really an intensification. GK: You see it as continuous. AR: I would see it like this — I would describe for instance this Amitabh Bachchan film Shahenshah as an intensification of a genre that has been already with us for a decade, but an intensification that has already perhaps been taken too far, so that it is ready for collapse, it is now too hollow to be a genre. 51 If I might return to a point that Sanjaya made, about what I might have meant by culture-surplus. When one is speaking of surplus in the realm of culture one is actually making reference to a particular set of debates, in the United States, the seminal essay among them being Frederic Jameson's The Cultural Logic Of Late Capital', which was published in the New Left Review. There he argues that late capitalism involves such an enormous amount of economic surplus that there is a very large area of sheer throwaway of goods, and that art has increasingly been posited at that point, a point at which it goes beyond the realm of use-value. Jameson himself is critical of such a position, but later post-modernism will actually seek to locate itself into the social excesses going beyond use-value. Other theoreticians have argued that this is not a First-World- Third-World sort of argument, that the Third World would have its own areas of excess that might take it into post-modernism, for instance the failure of a teleology of feudalism-capitalism- socialism, as we see extremely modern forms juxtaposed with extremely primitive forms in Third World countries which might generate their own surplus. What I was pointing to did evoke this debate. Concerning Andhra and Tamil Nadu, I don't think enough work has been done on these very interesting phenomena of the politicization of mass-art through cinema.. SB: What I meant was that both MGR and NTR were built up through the cinema, and obviously if Rajiv Gandhi wanted to build himself up similarly, he can't for obvious reasons do it in cinema, he has to do it through television. AR: That's quite right. GK: I might just add one thing, with regard to this concept of culture-surplus, which comes from this analysis of a post-modern condition and of post-modern art. I think the analogy with our situation is not really in any way symmetrical. Because the fact that we have a several kinds of art-forms co-existing is one kind of phenomenon being used by the state as surplus in the past few years. But for the forms themselves, both for their production and their reception — for those who make and those who see them — their material context cannot be described as post-modern. Now, in the uses to which the state would put these forms, such as the way in which the state is using folk and tribal art today, might finally make the symmetry with post-modernism. Except Number 19