which Marx explains so succinctly in Capital, Book I, 5 dominates the sphere of cultural activities as well. The IPTA in creating the demand for a professional theatre which would none the less run on non-commercial lines, was initiating a struggle which, of course, could not be complete until the economic base of Indian society itself underwent a structural change, until ownership of products, both material and cultural, came to the people themselves. This would also mean that the people as consumers of culture would no longer be a faceless mass sitting passively in the cosy darkness of the auditorium, but their relationship with the producers of culture would be one of continuous active exchange. This is the implicit objective which caused the idea of a 'people's theatre' to manifest itself in the form of a movement which would involve the large masses of people in their capacity as both producers and consumers of culture. It is this awakening to a new idea of cultural relationship which can only be possible in a new social order which made the IPTA see the theatre movement as a part of the 'people's struggles for freedom, economic justice and democratic culture'. The idea of a people's theatre, then, is of necessity a political idea. But precisely because of this, it cannot wait to be realized in some distant future when the social order will change. It has to start working on the existing basis. The theatre has traditionally provided a thriving form of cultural activity for the urban middle class in Bengal. In fact, when the IPTA talked of the large masses of people as the possible consumers of culture, the category certainly did not exclude the urban middle class in Bengal. The call to resuscitate folk culture was not a purely revivalist slogan, but embodied the strategy of promoting a vigorous exchange between different existing forms of entertainment, and of being the cultural forum where urban and rural sections of the struggling people might communicate. This enabled the IPTA to some extent, to provide the urban middle class with a kind of drama they had not thought possible, and on the other hand, at least in some rural areas, to reach a mass audience whicli had known nothing but traditional forms of folk entertainment before. To wean the urban middle class away, to some extent, from the commercial theatre and to provide the rural masses with entertainment which would have some echoes of contemporary reality, a new drama was immediately required. This would, of course, be an intermediate product, reflecting the contradiction between the existing reality of Bengali theatre and the historical need for change. But the first IPTA bulletin expresses the urgent demand for innovations and experimentations of all kinds which embody the change in the historical situation. Journal of Arts and Ideas