D Avanthi Meduri nowness, this ephemerality of performance that she evokes by writing in what she would call a 'complicitous manner'. Yet complicity, as already mentioned, is also a deliberate refusal to put oneself in the shoes of the other, in order that one might see what the others do not see. It is a self-conscious recognition of the unnegotiable dialectic between self and other, language and representation. And it is from such a theoretical position alone, or so it seems to me, 49 that a resistant critique of cultural performances such as the Ramlila can be formulated. Why do we need resistant critiques? Precisely because, as Kapur herself says in her preface, Rama is being put to communalizing practices, and one has to only think about the Babri Masjid issue. Recognizing complicity in the act of writing Kapur says in her preface: This study is not written to preserve the pieties of tradition that are essential to communalizing practices, nor indeed to preserve the deification of Sri Rama to serve that end. It is intended to be a phenomenological study of performance, which then as now delights thousands of spectators with its theatrical splendour. How then do we bring the political awareness of communalizing politics to bear upon the actual writing of the Ramlila kinds of performances? Can there be a kind of performance ethnography that can both evoke the splendour of these celebrations and also point to their negativity? The written word remains whereas the radical Ramlila performance disappears. I am referring to that moment of irrevocable rupture between the actual performance and the act of writing which at once distances and attempts to preserve the already distanced performance. At what level of complicity are we operating when writing celebratory accounts of performances such as the Ramlila? It is this tension, of wanting to be seduced by an event as magnificent as the Ramlila, and having to refuse this seduction for the sake of political complicity, that is missing in Kapur's book. But one cannot find fault with Kapur for things she does not set herself up to do. The ethnography that she has written, it is worth repeating, is path-breaking. It is people, with their hands, minds, bodies and imagination that make meaning of the stuff called life or Ula. And there are few authoritative books which have adopted this point of view self-consciously. The phenomenological perspective is vital to performance because it alone can allow for an explication of the processes that go into the making of performance, the making of social and creative meanings. Number 22