socialist revolution in different parts of peasant India. Sumanta Banerjee's book. The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta and Santo Datta's review of it, take into account the tension beetween the popular culture of Calcutta, and a devised culture of the elite or, rather, a culture that defines the middle class as elite. In the urbanizing context of Calcutta, the popular/plebian (what was until then popular/folk) culture comes face to face with a developing ambition in the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois classes of attaining to a properly elite staus within the ambience of the first Indian metropolis. In effect it is petit-bourgeois hegemony over what is perceived as the residual/resistant and even perhaps potentially insurrectory bits of street culture, that is most securely established. Banerjee, according to Datta, sees the eradication of popular culture as an irreversible if not entirely deliberate repression of the people's voice. Datta, who admires the book, takes issue on its tone of regret, and the implied theory of cultural conspiracy on the part of the Calcutta elite. Dutta suggests that this hegemonic process fits in with a universal history of urbanization whether in nineteenth-century London or in nineteenth-century Edo (Tokyo). There is moreover an implication in Dutta's brief argument, or perhaps I in turn see it as such, that the appropriation is precisely what creates the tension within the modem — the popular pulling into kitsch, even as it could, on the other hand, catapult into the avant garde; the one taking away from the people into commerce and the other transforming itself into the political. That this last step barely takes place in India except for a brief period of the IPTA in the forties is of course another argument. Coincidentally it gets partially addressed in Pranabranjan Ray's review of Somnath Here's Tebhaga Diary. The second book in the cluster on Bengal is Gurusaday Dutt: Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected Papers. Jyotindra Jain's review deals with the problem of researching/collecting and recategorizing folk and tribal art forms. It deals with contex-tualizing archival work, of reinscribing it within what is a civilizational, but more precisely a Bengali, heritage but which either way establishes the necessity of 'inventing' traditions. Jyotindra Jain points out the discrepancy between Gurusaday Dutt's drive and passion, his keen collector's eye, and his confused fudging of categories when