Women Writing in India KSh: We are not restricted but there are very few such sources. GK: Do you think there are very few resources for all image-making, or are you saying that there are very few resources by which one can construct a woman's subjectivity? KSh: No, not only woman's subjectivity, but any form of protest literature. Ifs a real 66 problem for all protest literature, making a protest and yet not wanting to make an object of protest that can get assimilated and aestheticized. Those resources are few, compared to the resources the establishment has at its disposal. ST: That means then that the imperative for us surely is to expand these resources, in one way or another, and to chart the process through which we are expanding. There are a whole set of things to be broadened out. VS: Aren't we making the dominant very monolithic? ST: How did the resources of domination establish and elaborate themselves? KKS: Precisely, I think that is the answer, that the resources of domination themselves were embedded in some material practice, and they were then assimilated by the dominant discourses. This is what I think would be a fair way of approaching the thing: given the assimilations that have taken place by establishmentarian discourses over a long period, we have to go to the resource in the material practice that went in before and during the process of its distortion into domination. ST: So one would obviously have to work both with a tcndentiousness and a contesting of the abstracted forms and work with a renewed charge with the material again. But the dimensions of the contesting are not something that are aesthetically privileged. We haven't given it the same status as we have given to the aesthetic of creation or of statement. AK: Wouldn't that be the problem of the aesthetic today in order to be relevant? ST: That was what I was trying to say, that it must. But it will require fairly radical reconstruction until its commitments have been analyzed. Journal of Arts 6' Ideas