It is important to understand the polemical urgency of the attempt to transplant English 'realism' on Indian soil. This attempt may well derive from the historical moment described by Mukherjee wherein "the tension between individual and society had acquired a certain intensity". However, it is even more important, in my view, to understand the 'failure' of the attempt This failure is, in the pattern of necessity that we inhabit, as intrinsic to our being as any 'success': our present 'Indianness' is constituted by the accumulating and cumulative distortions which we soften into our 'heritage'. Even so, and despite the awkwardnesses and the promiscuity of the narratives that Mukherjee describes, it is as well to recognise that there aren't available anywhere, in text or archive, pure or innocent states. There is no realm in which one might encounter innocent, pre-colonial, prelapsarian modes of being or indigenous, undistorted, 'natural' narratives : both reality and its modes of representation are indelibly, irreversibly, marked by history. But the specific course of the attempt to graft English realism on Indian realities and Indian narrative forms, can serve as an emblematic instance of the colonial encounter itself. A number of the writers that Mukherjee deals with testify, in one way and another, to the difficulty of creating an Indian 'realist' fiction. Quite simply, Indian reality won't go into the realist mould. Thus, at Mukherjee's privileged historical moment, in which the tension between society and the individual reaches the critical point, it is reality which becomes 'realistic' though, as she demonstrates with skill and sensitivity, it does so only in spots and patches. For the rest, it is quite in order to speak of the native reality as being resistant, even recalcitrant—ready to parry and subvert 'realism' by insinuating its own fictional forms. It is important that we develop a notion of cultural underdevelopment in order to grasp the predicament that Mukherjee describes. This needs to be understood as an active condition, a set of positive distortions, and not merely a series of regrettable or rectifiable absences. Colonial reality is intruded upon at two levels—at the level of experience, and at the level of its aesthetic appropriation as 'plot'. Correspondingly, we have a native reality that resists colonial intrusion at two levels—that of the material of experience itself, as well as in the hand-to-hand combat of its aesthetic appropriations. The alien 'plot'—in this case, 'realist'—is no more adequate than the 'plots' with which the indigenous traditionalist is lumbered. The peculiarly inhibited, other-directed colonial society, incapable of generating its own 'plots', is condemned to a condition of aesthetic 'blindness': it cannot see, it cannot afford to see the significant shapes of its evolving destiny. Mukherjee remarks, the fact that the nineteenth century writers were drawn not so much to the great Victorian realists, but rather to the minor, magical, sensational writers—Wilkie Collins, Reynolds, Marie Corelli. Likewise, she remarks how latter-day Indian writers have been drawn to the Latin Americans, and wonders whether an exposure to a different fictional tradition—whether American or Russian or whatever—might have been more fruitful. Very likely. The crucial point being simply that any Indian realism will have to be adequate to the grotesque realities in which we live—it cannot be grey Journal of Arts and Ideas 47