and of the regressive place women, along with the tribals, occupy in historical mappings of popular male fiction. And I speak about the necessity of disjunctive forms for a contemporary narration of the self in history. The men, interestingly, speak abou t a containing, constructing, transforming of institutions, traditions and discourse. In other words, they can be seen to be speaking of a need for the nurturing function of the social body, and of a cumulative growth of meaning in art. Kumar, for example, insists on the naming of the source in order to fulfil the promise of plenitude that art always holds forth. A sovereign consciousness will turn source into resource and command the processes of cultural transmission — using for example the symbol of the womb, and of the mother and child. Women, ironically, retract and examine their own dismantled selves. This intentional undoing or more precisely the undoing of the functional designation of their body-self, leads to a series of denials: not this, not this. But then the very contrariness, as it works the ground of familiar assumptions, can provide the measure of transcendent schemas which men construct more elegantly perhaps. Utopian ethic and subjective reflex here and now — both are and should be historical enterprises that are continually exchanged and interposed in the male/female consciousness and placed in a dialectical form of discourse. But all the speakers, each one in his or her own way, talks here of inventing traditions, interpreting this to mean, despite historical qualifications, a constructive task. Indeed the spirit in which one talks about inventing traditions was nurtured as we know by the nationalist ethos such as to make it an ideological but still affirmative task. Traditions are invented from some kind of a communitarian basis in regional/national culture; the tradition of the modern itself is elicited from the historical process of modernization and carries with it the logic of national aspirations if not always regional resource. The task of a contemporary critique is precisely to discover ways in which regional resources have fashioned themselves, in their own immanent fulfilment, into progressive cultural formations and to thus give body to that transcendent purpose which the nation at its best may represent for its differentiated polity. All this can sound falsely Utopian: the days of the nation-state are done, it will be argued; communitarian energies are at the fore; and culture must be defined once again in terms of regions, ethnic identities, tribes. The invention of traditions, then, has a local, not national significance. And yet because we live in a globally compact world run on exchange