D Ravi S. Vasudevan dead). This lacuna could be attributed to weak and hurried scripting but it is consistent with an obsessive narrative logic, in that the protagonists have already introjected their parents in their children. Not only are the children two, they are twins, so that Shekhar and Shailabano have in effect recreated, in their children, their parents without difference, without conflict. This is therefore an ideal image generated by modernity, one which seeks to incorporate a past unburdened of anxiety. The full logic of this substitution emerges when the iconic family space which has seen the dispersal of the family, the death of the grandparents, the desperate search of parents for children, finally sees the reunion of the twins. In a classical Hollywood shot-reverse-shot arrangement, Kamal Bashir looks, and sees Kabir Narayan, who returns the look (or is it the other way around?); there is no difference between their images. Where the grandparents were pitted Hindu against Muslim, here the children are drained not only of the signs of religious difference but of any marks of difference at all. We can say that the film is a reflection on the transformation from one structure of authority (a traditional patriarchy) into another which denies that it is authority. It claims instead that it is an identity and a point of view predicated on mutuality with the beloved and freedom of choice. However, if we penetrate below the structure of sentiments we find that Shekhar generates Shailabano through an anticipatory (and therefore markedly fantasy) point of view.1 As he is walking along the jetty, he comes to a halt, distracted, it would appear, by something off-screen. The next shot shows the woman in a burqa, but the burqa only lifts in the wind now, suggesting that Shekhar's look exposes Shailabano to his, and our gaze. It is also Shekhar, largely, who generates the momentum for the romance, in terms of meetings, ultimata to parents, the blood bonding with Shailabano, the mastery over movement by his sending of rail tickets to his beloved, the priviliged view of Shailabano at Victoria Terminus, the setting up of the registered marriage.... Perhaps most significant of all: it is his non-religiosity which defines the non-identity of the children. Whatever we may imagine of the practical problems posed by the marriage of the communally differentiated couple for the identity of the children, in effect the children follow the father in not practising religion. CULTURAL DIFFERENCE Apparently contrary to the orientation of the narrative to the modern, in its basic understanding of cultural difference the film lies squarely within the dominant representations of communal relations in Indian cinema and popular narrative. While the traditional society of both communities is caught within a conservative outlook, the Muslim is lower in the social hierarchy. More sparse in its dwelling, associated with fishing and brick-making, Bashir Ahmed's family stands in contrast to Narayan Mishra's. In Mishra's upper-caste dwelling, clearly based on landed wealth and community standing, labour is not mentioned or seen at all. That the Muslim is also affected by Number 29