In an era when it was necessary to delve into our ancient past to justify our claims to a high civilization, when the notions of 'literary' and "artistic5 were concommitant with 'intellectually developed', such beliefs were crucial. We were addressing a political power whose culture looked askance at the 'erotic' and the 'folk', and whose representatives believed that they had a right to rule based on a three-thousand year old literate and philosophical tradition inherited from Greece and Rome. We needed to prove that we were just as good. Today, however, we may reassess the above mentioned kinds of'truths' since our interests in who or what we are, our national identity, should no longer be in need of justification to outsiders. It can become a question internal to our country and be made in terms of an independent people. If we must look to our ancient texts, or our over two thousand-year-old literate tradition, we should do so in the context of regional diversity as well as in terms of underlying unities. We need no longer be disturbed that the overturning of some myths or the discovery of inconsistencies will in any way produce a crisis of identity. We should by now be secure in the knowledge that we are; it would, therefore, be of interest to understand 'what' or 'who' we are in terms that make sense to us. TO begin with, we need to reevaluate some of the categories that we have borrowed from outside, but which are poor translations of our indigenous concepts. I refer to terms such as 'art'> 'folk', 'religion', 'erotic', 'classical' and even the word 'dance'. To some extent, when we use these terms we do mean what they convey in English, but there are subtle differences in the Indian understanding of these words which we tend to ignore. Moreover, they are not always applicable in the same way to each of the different cultures that we subsume under the general rubric of'Indian'. Yet we continue to define these categories .according to Western criteria and then impose them on our expressive forms, thereby distorting the meaning that they have in our own societies. When we call the Muria or other tribal figurines 'folk art' we pay little attention to what these figures stand for in Muria society and instead, „ think of them as objets d'art We do not attribute to them a sophisticated symbolism as we would to our more 'civilized' iconography. We quibble over whether Manipuri is a 'folk' or 'classical' dance, forgetting that the distinction folk/classical (as applied to dance in Western European languages) was mainly used to differentiate forms like the ballet associated with the aristocracy, from peasant dances. By that Journal of Arts and Ideas 23