D Introduction of the Modem in Contemporary Cultural Practice', Economic and Political V/eekly, 7 December 1992; 'When Was Modernism in Indian/Third World Art?', forthcoming) — places Ray's work within India's Nehruite project of seeing and institutionalizing culture 'precisely in order to carry out an overall mandate of modernization'. The 5 nationalist ideal then not only developed selective formal overlaps with European modernism (including in this the hierarchies and differentiations Vasudevan cites), it actually saw itself as a 'third world' counterpart of modernism. This seminal repositioning of our historical relations with the economy of post-world war II Europe, which my own essay on Ray also refers to, allows us a new means of internationalizing many of our hegemonic practices in our effort to critique them. But even more crucially it gives us a double inside-outside axis, to simultaneously periodize in historical terms while making contemporary Ray's 'juncture where romantic reverie meets with a realist conscience to find formal solutions (by) allowing an ironic retake on its inescapable symbologies' (Geeta Kapur) — and all that this may mean today to the idea of a secular identity. The loss of the ironic in the later Ray is located, in my paper, with those phases in his career where he first pursued his initial programme through conditions that celebrated the symbologies of realism, but was later perforce to deny them as the Ray idiom — or at least a version of it — was adopted by the Indian state to define an official policy on Indian film. The current issue celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Journal. In this decade we have been through difficult times in which we have consistently attempted to formulate our critical responsibilities to changing political realities and to the writing of cultural histories in their context. The project has grown over the years into an ambitious one, and we hope to continue with providing historical (and historiciz-ing) material on the speech and the record of 'expressing our condition'. Whatever the flaws in the recording, that which is so recorded and shall continue to be recorded is, at least, no longer merely a matter of opinion. JAI hopes to continue with its project of tracing the history of Indian modernism into future issues, with the next issue being edited by Tejaswini Niranjana. ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA Numbers 23-24