Of the Everyday and the ^National Pencil' multaneity entails, on the one hand, a somehow 'flawed', 'failed' modernity (elaborated, for example, in the context of everyday life not only by Lefebvre but also by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School and in the context of postcoloniality by, say, Gayatri Spivak Chakravarty and Homi Bhabha), and on the other, a critique 58 riddled with 'contradictions'. These contradictions cut both ways: if the imbrication of the everyday and the postcolonial within the discourse of modernity makes their critique contingent, their excessiveness and alterity are elusive to representation in/ by that discourse. It is in the context of such a formulation — and the limitations that it entails — that I would like to begin thinking about the pictorial calendars that form such a ubiquitous part of the visual everyday in urban India. Before doing so, however, I think it may help to expand a little on the specific understanding of the concepts of modernity, the everyday and the postcolonial on which this formulation is based. It is not my intention here to slip into an essentializing conception of modernity -as-villain: as John Tomlinson points out,7 it is easy to ignore the many benefits and attractions of modernity (enjoyed, incidentally, by some of its most articulate critics) when confronted by its excesses and failures. (Indeed, this 'either/or' of representation is part of my concern in examining some of the spaces of modernity's critique.) Modernity is characterized here as a cultural-philosophical category, a set of organizing principles and practices which have tended to accompany the systemic social-economic processes of modernization. Among the many ramifications of its logic are a particular concept of the state (as an abstract, rational/bureaucratic centre of political and economic control), the ordering of time and space into quantifiable units, an imperative of productivity based on science and technology, and a certain articulation of individual identity. Modernity does not necessarily refer itself to a context of state capitalism, but it is nevertheless inflected by the instrumental rationality which characterizes the logic of capital. Similarly, modernity does not necessarily refer itself to Europe, but it has its roots in the European enlightenment and its humanist 'grand narratives' of progress and freedom. Where it is the discourse of dominance, modernity generates its own critique by its failure to live up to, or cope with the implications of, its own legitimating narratives; where it is one among other discourses, it is also challenged by their difference. One of the processes of modernization is the 'rational' differentiation of life (both time and space) into relatively autonomous spheres: work/leisure (and specialization within the two), private/public, secular/spiritual, consumption/production, and so on. However, as Michel de Certeau points out, this splitting, this demarcation of limits, this designation of 'proper places' does not simply differentiate one specialized sphere from another, it also 'constitute(s) the whole as its remainder'. This whole/remainder is culture, the realm of everyday life. It is this 'cleavage', he continues, which '. . . organizes modernity. It cuts it up into scientific and dominant islands set off against the background of practical resistances and symbolizations that cannot be reduced to thought.'8 This is prefigured in Lefebvre: 'Everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by "what is left over" after all distinct, Journal of Arts 6* Ideas