Women Writing in India writing in India over the past 150 years or so, but going back in a kind of invocatory way to earlier writing, which I have not systematically collected but looked at to see if they are important or seem important. And I want to share today some of the questions that are at stake in what might be considered a recovery of a tradition. I use the words tentatively, because I am not sure about them myself. I am not sure what the significance and importance of such an activity is, but I do know that it is political 50 activity and has produced certain results which seem important. So it is like saying, something is happening, can we understand what it is and what are the questions that are raised by this? There are, I think, three kinds of areas that come up as soon as you begin to think about recovering women's writing. One is the general social invisibility of women's labour which is transferred onto women's art production. And there is a lot of documentation about this kind of thing which suggests that the way women's work is devalued and placed outside the recognized production processes of society is also ideologically transferred onto any labour women perform, which is then absorbed in the image of the domestic. This might require, if you like, a very simple activity of women writers either physically or symbolically coming together in a kind of trade union that would represent their interests and insist on the value of their productivity. That is a very large area, and many things come up in relation with it, but this is not what I particularly want to go into today. I am interested more in the problem of what is involved in creating, or inventing, or making a tradition. The sense in which this formulation — the Invention of Tradition -— has come down to us is that the invention of a tradition seeks a hegemony, that it seeks to establish itself and perpetuate its power in one way or the other. Now obviously if that is not what you are trying to do, then you need to undermine the quality of the word 'tradition' in order to understand what new meanings may be invested in it. I'll come back to this. Second, I think there is a kind of violence in the way the making of a tradition is imaged. What constitutes the violence is the assumption that you can go to the past and take what you desire out of it in order to make the future you desire. Appearing this way it would look on the face of it as though we were talking about the past, the present, and the future, but what actually happens is that time is collapsed into space. That your concept of what you want today allows you to both appropriate the past and restrict the future, in some sense. It need not be a homogeneous or uniform concept, perhaps it will allow for variations, but it is a relation with the past that I think is violative. Further, it is unrealistic: someone like Foucault talks of selective forgetting; it is possible to do selective forgetting which would be very similar to this notion of taking what you want, you could choose what you want to forget. And by and large, on the left, we have had a tradition of selective forgetting as well as celebrative remembering in our creation of traditions. But there is a sense of unrealism in this, because the past Journal of Arts £/ Ideas