THE PRE-TEXT be properly unpacked (Williams, 1980, pp. 40 ff) in order to take up political positions vis a vis the gendering of representation. The politics of gendered representation has a distinctive trajectory in the context of South Asia (Jayawardena and Alvis, 1996, pp. xi ff) while the interpretation of colonialism is confronted with what may be called a feminist counter-interpellation, in the early pioneering work of Sangari and Vaid (1989) or of Tharu and Lalitha (1990) the currently trendy epithet 'post-colonial' to my mind, sits uneasily on these two collective endeavours. The term itself is not sufficiently critical of the degradation of the colonial process itself, nor is it sensitive enough to the agency of the multiple strata of the colonised social structures, stratified by class/caste gender ethnicity and religious identity. In this context, it will be salutary to recall Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan's warning against 'cultural determinism' in the analyses of gender in representation What is required here is an alertness to the political process by which such representation becomes naturalized and ultimately coercive in structuring women's self-representation. (Sunder Rajan, 1995, p. 129) State, family and selfhood are captured under the rubric of 'gender and representation' and these constitute different components of the patriarchal domination that is naturalized. Locating gender in cultural representation is, therefore, at least a two-way process, if not more. It helps us to unravel the fissured process of closure of options and opening of choices. It is a checkered story of complicity and resistance. The essays that follow are interventions in this complex terrain. While they are not premised on a note of a triumphal march of modernity, collectively they do run counter to the tendentious anti-modernism currently in vogue. The obsessive note of contemporaneity that has overtaken our studies of cultural representation that we tend to overlook the historical legacies of some of these representations. In the opening piece Ratnabali Chatterji brings out the ways in which folk paintings of Bengal captured the representation of gender. Using the Gramscian notion of morality and 'superstition', Ratnabali Chatterji demonstrates the ideological underpinnings of gender representation in paintings