D Introduction of the hand. What is important here is that the decoding is not at the level of the iconography alone, and this more formal understanding makes folk art available — through methodological inversion — for modernist purposes. My essay follows. It precipitates the question of modernism and in the process it does a series of retakes on the assumed history of the modem movement in India: 5 by presenting art practice as a reflexive act; as a way of marking out the historical disjunctures with a radical inscription of subjectivity therein. This then serves to critique the symbolic formation of the real — such as you get for example in the norm of the nation. 'When Was Modernism' attempts to provide an uneven history to trip the modem itself from its steady move into a presumed globalism. Or, shall we say, asking the question from the presumed viewpoint of postmodernism, it offers an elegiac note to save the modem with its revolutionary injuctions for another utopia.... There is an entire section devoted to one of contemporary India's most celebrated artist personalities, J. Swaminathan, who died suddenly in April 1994. We are including reprints which date from 1975 of K.B. Goel's exemplary writings on his friend Swaminathan. They telescope a life for its contradictory moves and single passion that would be called Utopian were it not for his (S^minathan's) distrust of a term belonging to twentieth-century revolutionary rhetoric. Yet he had not only used it himself in his youth as a communist, aspects of Swaminathan reflected a radical temperament and his vision, as Goel elicits it with hermeneutic doubletake, is pitched ardently into the unknown. No actual tradition from the past engaged him, and the adivasi presence to which he harked was the space of the present, the only possible space of beginning for the artist then and now. Goel's tour de force on Swaminathan, drawn from the inside of the subject, is matched by Gulam Sheikh's open letter which is a view of Swaminathan from the outside in that the trajectories these two friends followed after the 1960s were so different. An articulation of that very difference develops into the vexed and exciting journey of contemporary Indian art. This journey is objectified by Vivan Sundaram into a short history of the formal/anarchic options invented in the 1960s by Swaminathan and the Group 1890 to which Sundaram apprenticed himself as an art student. The next two articles, one by Madan Gopal Singh and the other by myself, look at the person that was Swaminathan. Madan Gopal Singh works back from his death to the becoming of this complex man. My brief piece ends this homage on the quality of the masquerade that his persona offered, with a trick always of retracting to some elusive state of being. GEETA KAPUR Numbers 27-28