D Geeta Kapur and how shall we oppose the collectivities forged m the name of the holy by the religious bigots of the day7 Nationalism along with socialism may for the moment be lost causes, but as for the more dangerous forms of totalization — religious fanaticism to be followed no doubt with a racial one — these grow apace and will not be contained by postmodernism's preferred metaphors of schizophrenia, the 125 unassimilable feature of nihilist freedom The terror of religious revival is very real, but when the east is demomzed it should be placed face to face with a rising neo-fascism in the west, and then the terror is all the greater With the politics of emergent ethnicities/ with a noncontextual appropriation of traditions and the obscurantism of religious militancy, we are increasingly held hostage to a fundamentalist or racial consciousness at which point it is good to recall that the modernist project was engaged m an affirmative act of desacralization It was engaged m a decoding and a secularization of the works of the past and the present This is of the greatest importance m evaluating the significance today of that modernism Except that in India it looks as if there is a modernism that almost never was, neither in terms of the secular nor in terms of the avant-garde sublime Where, then, shall we seek our position except in a lived historical experience of an imploding sense of sovereignty7 Positioned as an intrepid form of the human, signified in an ordei of verticality thus John Berger introduced Picasso into the arena of the modern, as a vertical man 17 It may be useful for us to place a stake on an anthropomorphic truth that 21 N N Rimzon/ Man with Swords, 1991, fibreglass and iron Coll Esther Schoo, Amsterdam Numbers 27-28