From the Editor BUR HISTORY, our traditions, the anti-imperialist movement, our contact with the West, define, so to speak, our relationship with reality. We feel it necessary to encourage a debate aimed at exploring this relationship, to see its limitations and possibilities, to interpret history and to try and look into the future. This journal wishes to emphasize that there is no (magic' or mystique in art which would require new Brahmins to set it down in words. The ancient conflict between the Vaidik (Brahmanical) and Avaidik (non-Brahmanical) has to and is bound to come to the fore. We hope this journal serves as a major forum for it. In this third issue Gulam Sheikh marks the beginning with a fascinating article on painting. He takes three artists of vastly different periods and cultures and makes a contrasting analysis of their actual viewpoint : he discusses each artist's life-perspective as it is reflected in his handling of pictorial space. To borrow Terry Eagleton's phrase, he explores the 'auctorial ideology5 in painting, but in a greater historical sweep than Eagleton had postulated. Sheikh thus introduces into art historical writing in India an original, almost heretical, approach of great value. This sense of history also permeates Rajika Puri's article on dance. Here the question is one of a perspective on art born out of the needs of the anti-imperialist movement. How does one look at the categories of analysis now that we have been a free nation for over thirty-five