48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST For Amrita Sher-Gil to proceed away from academicist-realism of models as things she inherited from the tradition that evolved together with the commodity, through a realisation of her projected subjectivity in her early Indian work, to the Woman Resting on Charpoy where the living subjectivity of her object reaches us with all its languor, was to set an example to all contemporary artists. In her earlier work, the 'emotion she characterises in her subjects flows from sources in herself rather than from the subjects' (Geeta Kapur). In her later work, these sources themselves get more illuminated; melancholy becomes languor, palpable, because she has now overcome the alienation of people as things, re-discovered them in her imagination, found her stylisation, affirmed both our own suppressed sensuality and awareness simultaneously with hers. 'We are made to feel a shocking intimacy with the woman by her erotically suggestive pose and the titled charpoy which puts us immediately above her. Yet though she seem to lie passively, there is a restless movement in the woman which suggests the painful birth of an awareness. A consciousness of the restraints imposed on by her^social environment' (Vivan Sundaram). The images of dismemberment that Adil Jussawalla has found permeating Indian writing are necessary to the evolution of our language as the re-integrating elan of our new figuration. Our speech and writing evolves the forms and vocabulary of critical realism, which no longer rest in the cradle of mechanical causation—the volatile nature of our language seems to lead a splintering of consciousness. The only way that literature can begin to contain it, is to first acknowledge the process. While darkness sorrounds us, as in Nirmal Verma's world, the di-aphanpus surface of his language makes us see the arched longing of shifting subjectivities. If the intellectual has to split off the good from the bad, the true from the false, to recognise the invariant dualities in nature and culture, so long as it does not turn upon itself and become guilty as in this last century of European art, the body can throw up a flame that will coil in union, as in M. Govindan's serpant( W^). The fragmentation of human subjectivity and its projection into objects of consumption is countered by the celebration of the body in today's Indian narrative painting. Even the mathematical mind (Akbar Padamsee) has found its epiphanous song (as characterised by Geeta Kapur), restoring nature to the imagination. Our music, which has always abhorred the ready-made polished concreteness that makes the individual anonymous, takes us back into direct contact with our self-ness, otherwise atomised in unimprovised relationships. , For, now we have to keep in touch and we must do it with our entire self-ness intact. Let there be commerce between us, with full knowledge of our contract, so that the metaphors expressing our thought and emotions, neither hide nor fully reveal their meaning, allowing us to finally annihilate them in silence, to discover that which fs, our being.