Further 'Narratives communities replete with symbols, may be placed in the same context. These rich strands make up the course of the invented tradition prefiguring Indian sovereignty. It's quite obvious that the need to exaggerate historical identity, to multiply mythic personae, to inflate subjectivity to cosmological dimensions, is part of the anti-colonial struggle. But the enabling features by which a culture articulates itself during the nationalist struggle becomes a criterion for social validation; at that point the 100 mythic sign can be, on the contrary, enervating, it leads to well-made solutions to vexed problems. With Kumar, for instance, or someone in the tradition to which Kumar belongs, which is Ghatak's tradition, there would be no question of articulating the mythic in any way which would encourage the moral notion of authenticity and its false resolutions. My problem today is, nevertheless, that when you see the mythic as a resource there is an assumed plenitude, a flooding of the symbol, so to speak, which may need to be drained so that we see forms in all their impoverishment and need. A perennial resource assumes a supply of archetypes as also of morphologies which then have to be continually subject to radical transformation — I think there is a problem here. Despite all intentions to the contrary, these transformations can be seen to devolve into stasis. From the point of view of a feminist archaeology which Susie was proposing — a feminist archaeology of the selt — the problem was arising in that very discussion: of closure. The moment you name a resource and it is seen as perennial there is a constant return, it becomes an absolute source. The mother or her part, the womb: you are as if prefiguring a derived destiny. Now on the ideological plane, the concept of myth is mediated by that of community, an imaginary community, so we have an extended equation: myth-community-nation. The moment a cation-state is constitutionally assembled, this equation is in any case questioned. Cultural practice is better seen as a clear critical reflex that disallows an undesired condensation of these terms. I think that the concept of the epic as understood by Ghatak, or rather as Ghatak is interpreted by Kumar, is seminal. The concept of the epic not only prises open the first equation, myth-community-nation; it also questions the further dovetailing of this equation into the modem. The root of these sets of concepts 15 nineteenth-century romanticism; I think we are aware of the extension of the parts of this equation into the modem and the kind of symbolic clutch that it can produce. The nationalism of the nationalist movement and modernism of the national state; political modernization as well as cultural modernism — I think in most cases we have agreed that this relationship is problematical and that we even have to undo it at times. And that in this respect the forms that arise from major art practice can be indicators of where the new conjunctures, between the nation and symbolic narration, between that and a heraldic modem, may lie. Journal of Arts & Ideas