70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST and Malini Bhattacharya's, was Mihir Bhattacharya's "Lenin and the Free Theatre". He sought to provide a Leninist model of the concept of the freedom of the theatre or of any art form for that matter, based on theoretical inferences from texts like Party Organisation and Party Literature. This started from a major premise where an art-form is seen from the point of view of the "specific modes of appropriation of reality" that it has and where reality is described as a "complex structure in a particular and knowable course of change both as an object of knowledge and as a determinant of aesthetic experience". The Leninist formulation about the conditions of unfreedom that are basic to the aesthetic situation in a society where capitalist relations of production obtain, is next related to a global decay in the cultural sphere that we find in recent times. The penetration of capitalism into the sphere of popular entertainment in our country makes it vulnerable to the same threats; and it is the manipulative force of capital that was pointed out as creating 'acceptability' and as operating the mechanism of public demand "through the enormously sophisticated tools of advertisement and marketing" both in the advanced capitalist countries and to a certain extent in India. This manipulative role was linked up with the content of the public demand that is being created—a subtle and complex diversion of popular discontent, unease and tension at a critical historical juncture towards decadence and the destruction of reason. This becomes the cultural counterpart of an ideological decay manifesting itself in fascism, racism and chauvinism of all kinds. The producers of this culture are in the bondage firstly of the capitalist market in entertainment and secondly of the objective laws of the development and death of capitalism. It is pointed out with reference to the Hindi commercial film and the commercialised "jatra" in Bengal how the active communality of aesthetic experience is destroyed and a slave-audience brought into existence. Their 'appropriation' of reality consists in ttie distortion, even negation, of reality, but even as such reflects a prevailing mood in Indian society today. The paper next tries to relate the possibilities of a technical revolution in the theatre at this historical juncture with a "realisation of the Marxist understanding of society in the terrain of drama". Lenin's demand for a literature "openly linked to the proletariat" is seen as the irreducible condition of the freedom of the artist and in deciding what this demand in effect means, the concept of 'overdeter-mination' is introduced and taking the examples of a number of well-known plays with a radical content, the paper analyses how they fall short of making a breakthrough. In finding the reason for failure the political cannot be separated from the aesthetic. What one discovers is failure to work out a political vision in the terrain of drama. On the other hand, as an example of 'overdetermination' in the