a Vivan Sundaram colours — pinks and reds, miniature influences — but you also see a sandal, on the ground, and it's not such a small detail, and you can see that despite her repeated statements about the greater importance to her of Mathura sculpture rather than the Renaissance, she was going through this struggle of finding alternative ways of representing the object world. And this is a major task, one somewhat neglected by Indian artists on the whole. We are, nevertheless, carrying this tradition of the modem, and the point is to 35 look at this from a historical distance. The whole basis of cultural production has such an anarchic quality to it, with so little putting together even of the achievement; such an utter absence of any consciousness of what would be a collective language that is being produced. How do we really grow? This is something which is denied to us as a whole, and denied to us by the state as well. Let me try to elaborate on this, this question of art-historical knowledge and an artist's growth to his or her own potential. When I say the state, I mean the way knowledge of what has been put together of the modern is not given the importance it should have, and achievements made, say, in forty years of our independence are not even fully presented, leave alone discussed and critiqued. Two random examples of centenary exhibitions of both Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy — major exhibitions, supposedly — presented only what was in the National Gallery of Modern Art's own collection. No fully researched retrospectives are ever held by the state institutions of art. There is no attempt to put together this experience of the modern either in terms of the general body of work that has come out of it, or in terms of an analysis of the artists. I would like to come to this problem of the lack of any concept of art as an institution. Peter Burger (Theory of the Avant -Garde), talking about the historical concept thrown up by capitalism, of art as an institution with the productive and distributive processes that go into it, suggests this to be an inevitable concomitant of the rationality promised by bourgeois development. The question I would put to us all is, why has this not happened in India? Everything takes place at informal and ad hoc levels, and the complete absence of a cultural policy leads us to the question of what the state's notion of cultural production, that is, in the final analysis, what the state's own definition of itself is, or has come to be, by default. If the modes of instant usage, of mass consumption, have come to stand in for this cultural policy — modem art is anyway not so easily susceptible to such consumption — then what we are witnessing is a so-called and incomplete bourgeois system that is simply letting pass much of what is validly produced by our cultural environment and which is, I believe, an integral need of a society. Despite the national-chauvinist tendencies that still abound, the most interesting of Indian artists from the very beginning have struggled to locate their modem selves, to locate a modern vocabulary, routing it to their experience. Today the problem is that this practice is finally facing its larger crisis, in a sense deferred all these years, of pitching its very survival into its efforts to 'integrate' itself into society. Numbers 20-21