D Kumkum Sangari appears to be at once in successsion to, a displacement of, and in answer to, colonial descriptions of culture and nature. Though Rajput women formally inhabit the realm of high civilization, both their "valour" and wifely fidelity in acts of jauhar or plans of sati is enacted not as culture but as nature — as the untaught emanation of racial essence which inheres in Rajput blood. Race turns all culture into nature. Logically then jauhar is described in the intonations of colonial anthropology as a developed, reiterated, ancient Rajput ritual. 69 Bhil women too are objects of an ethnography which places them at the far end of this social continuum. Rajput women bond and form a collectivity typified through rituals of wifely fidelity and valour. Bhil women, typified through common dress and appearance, are loosely aggregated and form a collectivity through the performance of manual labour. Where Rajput women are ruled by strong behavioural codes emanating from the sanctity of marriage, Bhil women are subject to a more flexible, less confining, less highly 'evolved' patriarchy. The women are a little less dark and they are good-looking: for clothing they have a piece of cloth that covers their loins and a single breast; churn and anklets made of lac decorate their arms and legs. Their marriage ceremony is very simple. On a day fixed the young men and women of a village meet together; the men pick out the girls they like and retire into the woods where they spend a few days; they then return to the village. The more specialized contrast between tamed nature and untamed nature is displayed in the narrative as the struggle between Pushpa, the garden flower (the named, individualized embodiment of the wifely fidelity of the Rajput 'race') and the Bhil girl, the wild flower (the unnamed type of the enigmatic tribal woman) for the love of the hero Tej Singh. Both are child women. Pushpa was about to be affianced at the age of seven to Tej Singh when he disappears and isbelieved dead. In this prototypical 'fair' romantic heroine, both conjugal love and its corollary, the sufferingsof 'voluntary widowhood, are already in place in childhood. She assumes the garb of a widow in order to ward off other suitors; she takes patriarchal values 'innocently' on faith without reasoning, and as such ratifies them more 'naturall/ than an adult figure. Th^ Bhil girl is presented as both the type of the 'dark' romantic heroine and the fey child woman of mystery, wisdom, intuition and gravity. Her sexual attraction is translated into the sportiveness of the child — playing with flowers, watching clouds and lightning, singing in thewoonlight. Her elusive sexuality mystifies and bewilders Tej Singh. The plot of misunderstanding is initiated by Tej Singh's unthinking promise to the Bhil girl which she takes literally. The Bhil girl lies, Tej Singh spurns Pushpa, Pushpa suffers silently, the Bhil girl moved by her suffering reveals her own duplicity, and enables Tej singh to marry Pushpa. But she states in a letter that she has wrongly Numbers 20 -21