Introduction
ditional' and new technology, each characterizing the other in its image. If on the one side it has led to one kind of reified notion of the 'new', then on the other it has also provided the key hegemonies of the popular in conjuncture with which modern 4 India defined its modernism. Indeed her essay, continuing her own earlier work on the Ramlila, and Ravi Vasudevan's shifting codes and dissolving identities, can consistently be read off as paralleling and even at times influencing the more political of India's many iconographic condensations along with the narratives that ensue. Anuradha Kapur herself, in tracing the history of the Parsi theatre, an influential popular art representing an influential brand of nineteenth-century capital, includes in her ambit the Kathakali, indigenous adaptations of Shakespeare, Raja Ravi Varma, the filmic mythological and Ramanand Sagar to show how 'technology becomes a means of translation: a mode of putting old and already known narratives and deeds into new forms'. While Ravi Vasudevan, arguing for the correction of 'too simple a correlation between popular culture and modes of resistance to dominant culture', brings to the frontal tableau shot of a Mehboob Khan film the amalgamation of Hollywood with the larger commentaries of the iconography of social identity to mobilize 'an image of modernity for the Indian audience'.
The shifting and generally — till recently — undefined cultural aspect of India's modernist enterprise that accompanied the early years of our post-war nation-building project are addressed in more directly theoretical terms in the papers by Ravi Vasudevan and Geeta Kapur. If religious iconography and modern technology provides one axis of colonial popular culture into the nationalist period, then the more industrial/social aspect of cultural manufacture and the manufacture of spectator-attitudes provides one of its historical counterparts, investigated by Ravi Vasudevan in the context of the Hindi cinema of the 1950s. And in doing so, he takes up the other foundational genre for the popular to Kapur's mythological: the filmic melodrama. Melodrama, in the cinema (and in television), the subject of a great deal of recent literary and film theory, appears increasingly to posit the nuclear social unit as a paradigm for the national; and therefore its hierarchies of taste, its uninter-rogated divides have had a major impact in the making of a 'culture of social distinction' in modern India. Film traditionally prides itself in its ability to provide technological-narrative paradigms for social formation in its sheer ability to replay — with every screening of a film — the hegemonies of such formation.
It was in the 1960s that Satyajit Ray started getting equated with a particular filmic and then broadly cultural programme in the hegemonies that Vasudevan investigates: a$ much in his own work as in the ways its self-conscious positioning of its programme got uncritically elaborated in, for example, the writings of Kobita Sarkar and Chidananda Das Gupta. Ray figureheads the two other papers as well, as Geeta Kapur — continuing on her earlier work on modernism in India (The Place
Journal of Arts 6' Ideas