Figures for the "Unconscious9 which surface the subliminal 'depth' of individuals and/or cultures or through scientistic 'evidential' modes. Different notions of the unconscious may intersect in any act of ascription, for example, as that which is essentially unavailable to cognition, or as the pyschologized realm of the libidinous and the repressed, or as the deep structure of collectivities/cultures through which traditions and identities are imbibed — as anteriority, interiority or depth. 68 There are three interrelated questions here — first, the nature of the 'unconscious' as the thing-in-itself; second, the relation modes of ascription bear at any given time to the existence or experience of the thing-in-itself; third, the governing histories of specific ascriptive modes which empower the act of designating the 'unconscious'. The provisional answer to all three must be, as perhaps to all questions regarding human consciousness, historically and culturally specific; it would revolve around further questions about ways of defining human agency, about the relations between the 'conscious' and the 'unconscious' and between knowledge and uncertainty, and about the relation of the modes which designate the domain of the unconscious to lived social relations. I propose to sketch some aspects of the histories of ascriptive modes, as most relevant to the discussion here. I thought of taking up two interesting books written a century apart — R.C. Dutt's The Last of the Rajputs and Arun Joshi's The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971). The Last of the Rajputs laments the political defeat of the Rana Pratap by Akbar while celebrating the 'cultural' victory of Rajput codes of honour and fealty. The Bhils and the women characters arc ranged along a triple axis of feudal hierarchy, colonial anthropology and an upper caste/middle class patriarchy, bound by a nascent nationalism seeking modes of unification. Inequality among Indians is presented as consenting, equable, non-destructive. The Bhils, dispossessed by Rajputs, moved about two thousand years ago to the hills and mountains, 'where they continued to enjoy complete liberty and self esteem'. Periodically they raid the Rajputs and Muslims, but are ritually tied to Rajputs: there is a bond between the two, the Bhils call themselves Rajputs, assist them in times of war. The political placement made, the tone shifts to that of an ethnographic, encyclopaedic entry into that vast colonial dossier of beliefs, customs, manners and eating habits. Like 'the primitive tribes of India', the Bhils have borrowed one or two Hindu deities, claim descent from them but have no caste divisions, and live like 'birds of pre/ through plunder. The Bhils mirror Rajputs— in courage/in thatthe 'uncivilized Bhil' never forgets an act of kindness or breaks his word, in that Bhil tribes quarrel constantly but unite in times of trouble or war. The Bhils are shifting subjects of a mixed genre — aromantic, nationalist historiography and a clumsy anthropology. Abroadcontrastisbuiltbetween culture and nature amongthe women characters — its more precise delineation is between tamed nature and untamed nature. This Journal of Arts <& Ideas