Introduction the enlightenment logic of modernity, there is inevitably, according to Nandakumar, a 'conceptual vacuousness in this vision of modernity'. The entire colonial encounter is thus heavily disadvantaged, and the very quest for cultural sovereignty something of a farce. With the Indian middle class elites 4 caught in the double bind of a classicizing/modernizing rhetoric, the gentleman artist. Raja Ravi Varma, appears as nothing more than a case in point. On his account Nandakumar signals the derivative phenomenon that is modem Indian art; more specifically, he critiques institutionalized modernity that does not know how to deconstruct itself to any sort of radical practice. Kajri Jain takes off from where Nandakumar stops. She critiques not the deriva-tiveness of Indian modernity but the grand narrative of western modernity as it unfolds out of the enlightenment. Following a line now well established by postcolo-nial studies, she reiterates a position which sees the colonial interlude as the fatal flaw in the humanist assumption of the west and takes everyday life, everywhere but especially in the peripheries, that is in the colonies, as the lever whereby the assumed rationality of modern life can be deconstructed to show what lies in the interstices: the points of micro-resistance to the very conditions of modernity's space-time logic and within that of state, capital, science and technology. This, rather large, framework looms over her actual object of consideration which is popular culture and especially the calendar pictures of urban India whose wider propagation dates from the setting up of Ravi Varma's lithography press at Lonavala in 1892. She too discusses the representational project of Ravi Varma but her focus is on the vast visual production of 'kitsch' images from Sivakasi in the postcolonial ambience of the now sanctified nation. Among many other aspects of ideology she considers how the sacred survives in the space of the modern, and the way it both resists the latter's hegemonic status and aids its adjunct, the nation, by way of imparting an ever new iconography that has the binding effect of mass circulation. This helps the '. . . national ritualization of modernity and communal politici-zation of myth. . . /, as Kajri Jain puts it. Except that she adds time and again the proviso whereby the postcolonial subject monoeuvres a way out, building on the pragmatics of the everyday which escapes in the oddest possible ways the totalizing effect of the categories of nation and the people. In a relatively straight art historical exercise Kavita Singh makes an exposition of the Bengal pata. and the stylistic features of three 'schools' (compounds of indi-viduals/gharanas/regions) of pata painting. She offers a detailed analysis of delineation and colour, gesture and posture of the figural elements as these compose themselves into a representational schema. It is the Ramayana text that she considers in different styles; and style she understands to be at once imaginative universe, expres-sional means and visual structure. The scriptural/textual origins are cirumvented in order better to understand the visual rendering and its own generic stress, leading towards a secular understanding of pictorial representation. 'The visual imagination reshapes the intentional standpoint of the text', she says, emphasizing something so material as the exigency Journal of Arts 6f Ideas