50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST resistance as we know very well from Gandhi. The power to transform routinely transmitted materials from the past into discursive forms that merit in consequence to be called contemporary even radical. If the savants of this century, among them Coomaraswamy, have excavated v the past to provide the present (in their opinion errant and impoverished century) with perennial life-symbols, the exercise has rather special significance when this is contextualised within an anti-imperialist struggle. Coomaraswamy (in the context provided by Gandhi), even when he addresses national cultural issues from a conservative position, produces an interventionist discourse opening up new and numerous other issues besides Tndianness*—issues about the function of art in society and about the advanced role of artists in the formation of a more universal world culture. These are the issues Rabindranath Tagore takes up in virtual opposition to the more severe injunctions of swadeshi. Let us look at this a little further. With Coomaraswamy tradition, besides its metaphysical status, is the code derived from and applied to actual/ideal iconographic forms. Being also a set of working canons it can include, in an intricately worked hierarchy, high art with everyday objects. For canonical rigour, despite the transcendent meanings to which it refers, is based on the form and function of idols and objects. But it is precisely Coomaraswamy's contemporary, Rabindranath Tagore, who handles tradition in a way so as to dismantle the code. Tradition with him is a notional category allowing an infinite extension of its own nurturing body through poetic allusion and metaphor. The Tagorean way is as we know the romantic way and it deals with immanent energies that are inexhaustible in the mythical fashion and encourage continual transfigurement of material resources within and beyond a given culture. This includes the anthropological evidence and spiritual experience of extant forms. It includes the emotional resonance of the rasa theory for example; or an encounter with the numen which irradiates from the heart of iconic forms. It includes the linguistic particularities of folk objects that are seen to provide the infrastructure of the civilizational process. Rather than the canonical it is the romantic designation of culture that gains ground in India. It is in a sense the more projective, Utopian dimension. It is the line with the modern—the romantic tradition is direct antecedent of the modem in Europe. And it allows non-systematic or intuitive interpretation of traditions with two quite opposite options. The option of finding elective affinities at the level of feeling and also more anarchic disjunctions, of loosening and then upturning the forms of tradition. The two film makers, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, both heirs of Tagore, reflect the one and the other option within the broadly romantic view of tradition. But even the very act of handling the tradition is in a sense political; it involves personification/mediation/representation of material that is seen to have been hitherto buried. Received like a patrimony