Cultural Creativity in the First Decade overall mandate of modernization. In fact this institutionalizing process was conceived of as a way of disentangling the modern from the nationalist polemic which must, so often, speak in the name of tradition though it covertly strengthens the -g assumptions of modernization. While the national struggle attempts to simulate a civilizational quest, the national state privileges culture as a means of cohering contemporaneity. It privileges it above art as well, the intrepid claims of which will always exceed, or subvert, even the more progressive rhetoric of institutionalized culture. In India, as in other post-colonial countries ( in Mexico, for example), artists have taken this institutional support for granted, nurtured as they have been through the anti-imperialist struggle on the idea of a benign national state. The nation's artists are provided with a sanctioned space to struggle with, and to resolve, the riddles of language and sovereignty. They for their part seem to assume, even unconsciously perhaps, their responsibility to decode these terms and to reconstitute them in what would be a national but modern art. Indeed, while testing the existential implications of the modem in the context of the nation Indian artists have been eased by state patronage into a metropolitan identity. If we extend the argument about the consequence of what has been called after Gramsci the 'passive revolution'6 to the realm of Indian contemporary arts, we will find that here modernism develops without an avant garde; a modernism without a history of interrogation and change; a conservative or at best a reformist modernism. The very liberalism of the state absolves the left initiative on the cultural front. Just as the very capacity of newly independent India to resist, up to a point, the cultural pressures of the cold war makes it redundant for artists to devise the kind of formal challenge that for example the Latin American artists have posed. We know that cinema, literature and the visual arts in Latin America have revolutionized in combat the very forms of the modem they inherited from the old and new colonialisms. Whether it is from a particular kind of a civilizational legacy, or from the politics of liberalism adopted by the Indian state, or from peculiar accommodations by the Indian middle-class intelligentsia when it moved from a colonial to an independent status, it is true that Indian artists have tended to avoid direct encounters with history. All the same there is nothing to be gained from the kind of cynicism that Gellner, for example, uses to designate culture in the post-colonial countries — not even if art practice is ostensibly harnessed to the operations of ideology in the cultural policy of the new national state. In the core of creative practice there is inevitably a good bit of political naivete, often a kind of dissembling radicalism. But complemented with an episodic intransigence, it is enough to confound generalized theses on politics and culture. There may be concealed Utopian formulations moreover, or on the other hand subversive symbols that have direct political import. It is worth recalling that in Tagore's Santiniketan the romantic section of the nationalist elite led by the poet himself had encouraged, within an idealized aristo- Journal of Arts 6' Ideas