D Geeta Kapur cratic-folk paradigm for culture, a universalizing urge; and that the modern was treated as a vexed feature of something like a civilizational project to which India, as part of the orient, would contribute its unique dynamic. The Santiniketan ideology in the practice of the arts7 was anti-industrial; with its strong craft orientation it was also -m obviously anti-urban and emphasized environmental, ecological concerns. Its vocational definition of the artist favoured a guru-shishya etiquette where the student idealized the master (for example Rabindranath was Gurudev, Nandalal Bose was the incontrovertible master moshai). They abhorred the professional artist who was seen to demean himself by way of the market. Indeed it was this aristocratic-folk paradigm, combined with the canonical aesthetic of Ananda Coomaraswamy, and the artisanal basis of Gandhian ideology, which gave us the threefold aspect of nationalist cultural discourse in the area of art and craft. With the later products of Santiniketan, for example, Ramkinkar Vaij followed by K.G. Subramanyan, the aristocratic mentality vanished completely in favour of the popular to arrive through a series of modernist mediations at a strategic, or interventionist, notion of the contemporary. By 1947 the course of Indian art was set away from Santiniketan but even while this phase of national culture was left behind in the irreversible process of post-independence modernization, the very abandonment gave rise to a permanent nostalgia for indigenist life-forms. It also led to a project for creative compensation fulfilled by an array of 'invented traditions'. What also got side-stepped with the advent of Independence was the experiment of the cultural front of the communist movement, the most important aspect of which was of course the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA).8 This left another form of nostalgia, even a fierce regret, which led in turn to some major statements in art. It characterized for example the self-reflexive form of Ritwik Ghatak's cinema: the loss of a radical dream is actually thematized in his Komal Gandhar (1961) and Jukti Takko ar Gappo (1974). Ritwik Ghatak, positioning himself to go beyond the so-called intermediate phase of bourgeois democratic culture, claimed modernism to be part of a logic beyond reform; indeed he positioned the logic of twentieth-century revolutionary socialism against reformist modernism. In this voluntarist exercise he provided the impetus, somewhat in the manner of D.D. Kosambi,9 to see the Indian tradition turned inside out; to question the assumptions about myth and reality; to problematize the nurturing potential of perennial symbols by confronting them with a historically shaped subjectivity. Precisely from this point of view Ghatak, a product of IPTA, would reject out of hand an overdetermination of the aesthetic. He would pitch his expressional ambiguities within the westemizing/narodnik paradigm but give the interrogative mode its political edge. The pan-Asian revivalism of Santiniketan, as well as the people's movement of IPTA, turned out to be lost causes in post-independence India. We should therefore have to resume the investigation of an apparently non-ideological or liberal aesthetic. Clearly it is within this discourse that Satyajit Ray's redemptive promise in the realist genre is to be located. And though this will be the basis of the critique as well, his Numbers 23-24