precisely the transformative process within the descriptive mode. The continuing argument, in the case of Bharucha, is with and against interculturalism; through this Dalmia picks her way very precisely. She points out as she goes, the loopholes of 'eastern' bad faith within a critique of western ideology, but taking the argument further, she points out the necessity to de-essentialize every critique. She implies that we should do away with the infinite relay of other-ing, in fact to not set up the discourse so as to have to choose between competing privileges of seemingly opposed civilizations. Rather, to ground perceptual schemas in so historical a sense that civilizational privileging between 'we' and 'them' is not necessary. She takes Bharucha's three-part argument — itself a methodological processing of performance ethics — towards her own preference for a historically inscribed body-in-performance and supports it by Bharucha's very analysis — whether it is his critique of Peter Brook's multi-ethnic representational schema in Mahabharata, or his detailed elaboration of the polyvalent erotics in Krishnattam, or indeed his small-scale but repeated experiment with Kroetz's Request Concert where there is a kind of pragmatic body-trust in the person/being of the chosen actress performing in regional and localized contexts. Avanthi Meduri's review of Anuradha Kapur's book also stresses the author's, and her own, preference for the phenomenological approach to performance — closely inflected and, by the alertly positioned perceptual presence of the viewer/author in the performance, contempomneized. The reviewer regrets the absence of that ideological disruption whereby the political may be introduced, especially as Kapur herself points out in the Preface how the very sacredness of Ram's story is today a case for political manoeuvre. There are three review articles that deal with books about Bengal from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. They deal with alternative traditions within what is consolidating through the nineteenth century into the first properly middle-class culture in India, a culture of the western, colonially educated, bhadralok drawn from an erstwhile feudal context. The very mimicry, if it is that, begins quite soon to yield a modernizing logic. The change is occurring at several levels: from feudal to bourgeois; from country to city; from traditional to western; and finally from colonial to anti-colonial, with what, for a period in the forties, looks like it could develop into a