34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the people are the poorest. And these comprise the overwhelming population of India. Traditional Culture vs. Economic Growth The paradox assumes complexity when you consider India's urgent need for economic development and social transformation. At present it must galvanise its process of industrialisation and accelerate economic progress, in order that the great poverty of a great number of its people is quickly diminished, if not effaced. The paradox is whether economic and industrial growth will not also remove, along with the overwhelming poverty of the people, the richest cultural traditions of the country. In the past, community life of the people in the countryside and, with it, its cultural expression, has suffered a setback in many parts of the vast sub-continent due to rude incursions from the mass-media, the camp followers of industrialisation. Everyone is aware that 1 with change in the social fabric, the cultural fabric of peoples' life will ^ change too. But the question is whether the past must be crushed before the future is ushered in. This does not seem necessary. The old can perhaps be absorbed and transformed into the new. This need for continuity in change in the living traditions of Indian culture ought to be of utmost concern to us at the present moment for it is related also to a cultural identity which became some what diluted in the past by the long British rule. The adverse effects of 200 years of British rule are most evident in the urban-elitist oriented culture of India, whose expressions often represent the worst forms of aping of the West. 'It is necessary, therefore, not only to preserve and develop the folk traditions of Indian art and culture but also to expose the city youth to their influence. Our educational system in the past, borrowed of necessity again from the British, hardly ensured an identification of the young with their cultural roots. On the contrary, it tended to expand the cultural gulf that already existed between the city and the village, resulting in a partial loss of cultural identity among the city youth on the one hand and a certain alienation and stagnation of a primitive culture among the rural people on the other. This cleavage must now be closed as far as possible by a culturally-o^nentedLjeducational jprogramme, covering the entire country. Re-orientation and expansion of education, however, may by itself not deliver the goods. It needs to be complemented by a stupendous effort in the direction of fully rehabilitating the dwindling folk arts and crafts of India. Revival of Folk Drama JThe rural scene has undergone a great deal of change in the past, to the detriment of culture, but thanks to its size and the vitality of its traditions, India is still India. It remains poor and agrarian still to a considerable degree, and its classical and folk traditions of art and culture still