DISPLAYING THE MODERN WOMAN 59 the paper henceforth, with details in footnotes. There is by now a large body of work in this area, so I shall mention only those that directly address the situation in Bengal, as part of the survey was located there. See, for example, Partha Chatterji, The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question5 in Sangari & Vaid (eds) 1991, p.251-270; Sumit Sarkar, "The Women's Question in 19th Century Bengal" in Sangari & Vaid (1985), 152-72. Partha Chatterji, The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton Univ. Press, 1993; Indira Choudhury, Frail Hero, Virile History OUP 1998, S. Bandyopadhyay, Gopal Rakhal Dwanda Samas Papyrus, Calcutta 1992. See for instance Uma Narayanan, Dislocating Cultures Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminisms, New York, Routledge 1997. I use both terms in the sense popularised by Roland Barthes, Mythologies trans., A Cavers, New York, Pabdin 1973, p. 129 and p. 164 respectively. In an earlier set of reflections on this area, (Chanda, "Brithing Terrible Beauties: Feminisms and the Women's Magazines" EPW vol xxvi, No.43, October 26, 1991 (NS 67-70) the movement of feminism into the "popular' arena had seemed to me to be an unmixed curse - in the eight years that have seen developments that are results of this media popularity as well as ambiguously positioned on the feminist agenda proper, it now seems to be more of a mixed blessing. So in this paper I have tried to explore the possibilities of this blessing while not forgetting that it is truly mixed in nature. I use the word "articulation" after Barthes (1973) who describes articulated language as that which "contains in itself ... the outline of a sign-structure meant to manifest the intention which led to its being used" (p.143), thus "mythology harmonizes with the world, not as it is, but as it wants to create itself" (p. 171). Again, this is an area that has received much scholarly attention, and I refer only to those texts that directly deal with Bengal, for the reason cited in 3 above. See for example, Himani Bannerji, "Fashioning a Self", EPW Vol xxvi, No.43 October 26,1991, NS 50-62. Jasodhara Bagchi, "Representing Motherhood" EPW October 20,1990,65-71, Sumanta Bannerji, The Parlour and the Streets, Calcutta, Seagull Bks, 1989, S. Bandyopadhyay (1992), p. 19-1-241. Chilla Bulbeck, Living Feminism, Cambridge, University Press, 1997, p.212-213. See Barthes 1973, p. 142. "...any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system" Some of the resource persons, students themselves, conducted the survey in different colleges and reported that if students from these colleges had asked similar questions to their collegemates, they may not have been taken seriously, while the resource persons who went from Jadavpur University were. One of the first decisions I had made about the nature in which the responses would be elicited was to keep myself as much in the background as possible in order to allow those involved in circulating response sheets to structure their own environment and interact with their own milieux while eliciting responses. In that sense it could also become a learning experience for all of us who asked questions, as we were often counter-questioned about terms like "feminist" and "modern" used in the questionnaire - this may not have been