30 SOCIAL SCIENTIST over and giving a communal twist to public festivals associated with performative forms like 'Gajan' in West Bengal. To secularize these occasions, to hand them back to the general public, so that the monopoly, Aether of commercial interests or of communal forces, is broken, should be an important cultural project for the Left. This does not mean that religious rituals, just because they are occasions of public gathering, can be used to rouse popular consciousness. This position, held by some radicals, can, in fact, lead us back into the communal trap. But there are community occasions where religion is a relatively unimportant aspect of the totality and where the secular nature of the festival - the element of performance, of cultural enjoyment of recreation may easily be foregrounded. It thus becomes possible for a cultural event to become a locus of struggle. Such occasion exemplify the spaces within the hegemonic order from which the theatre of protest or criticality may grow. This subversion of the 'traditional' is necessary also to counteract the forces of right reaction being fostered in the interstices of the new world order. The rolling back of the state to allow free play of market forces is seen by some as the indication of cultural freedom. One cannot doubt that state patronage of the arts would always be concerned with maintaining the status quo and containing protest. But on the other hand, the hollowness of the claim of cultural freedom in capitalist societies was never more evident than in the era of globalisation when unchecked monopolies thrive only by erasing all dissenting voices. In so far as a democratic nation-state, shaped on the forge of anti-colonial struggle, has some basic mechanisms to keep monopolistic interests in check, it has a contradiction with these interests, in spite of the pressure of the dominant classes on it. To that extent, it provides some space for cultural differences and affords some protection to cultural forms from naked commercialism. There are barriers to people' s creativity under state patronage. But the state can set up subsidised public institutions like theatres, cinema halls, training and research centres, repertories, film development corporations, which allow broad-based participation and counteract the takeover of cultural forms by money power. These are also likely to be dismantled or privatised as the process of globalisation advances. Cultural strategies challenging the global order cannot avoid striving to preserve and expand the small space provided by such national public institutions. These again can become the locus of a struggle to combat the dominant forces in culture.