values the local inevitably attracts international attention. Indeed in a post-modem age the international indulges in a valorization of difference as an end in itself. So that we are constantly working with a paradoxical relationship of the local and international where the national is deliberately suppressed. In our own situation the very discussion of inventing traditions along the breathing space of historical perspectives is now turning upon itself. Cultural communities are called upon, or hypothesized, in defensive terms. Tainted with what we call in India communalism, identity is spelt in terms of separation, suspicion, hatred, and now recurring murder. The cavalier populism of the Rajiv Gandhi government in matters of culture, set within the terms of its declared consumerist ideology, has been replaced by the rise of a political movement which is not yet in power but is powerful enough to use that very populism and to fill it with retrograde religious content. A tradition of militant Hinduism — Hindutva — is being invented before our very eyes. Compared to Sikh and Muslim fundamentalisms, Hindutva is all the more terrifying in that it will twist the mind-set of the dominating middle class in this country beyond recognition. And beyond redemption, because unlike other communities there is a demographical pressure and an ancient civilizational rhetoric on their side. There are riots on the streets, the beginning of witchhunts and death threats inside universities, and there is a destruction of institutions of culture that have had a liberal-secular brief. In contrast the fake carnivalesque mentality of the previous government may look benign, except that it would still have to take the blame for evacuating the meaning of the modern from even the legacy of such liberal institutions that were built up in the first decades of independence. Or, to put it another way, of holding little faith in even the elementary logic of bourgeios cultural development which was clearly part of the agenda of the state itself, leave alone appreciate the modernist resistance and progressive potential of that development. The previous government played on communal loyalties in the name of democracy and, in the cultural field, relied on the shot run sophistries of an all-purpose bureaucracy while surrendering in effect to the culture industry — on which indeed it modelled its state-run media systems. It is this regressive logic that is now rearing up. Exploiting the posture of surrender to mount its own image of militancy, right wing communalists are hoping to put all, even the gentlest, liberal norms to rout. In these circumstances all cultural action will have