Living the Tradition organised an aggressive polemic that demanded to put on the critical agenda issues like postmodernism, questions of sincerity and authenticity, of colonial influence and the folk; and the only artist they chose to name and to directly attack was Subramanyan. He contained the edifice. It does not seem to be quite that edifice that is now being resurrected; despite the reassurances that both books offer, there has been a shift. Subramanyan himself seems willing to let his persona recede before a question that he suggests could 74 contain his life's work: one he encapsulates as the Living Tradition. But is it merely the old container reinforced in new critical terms, or does it hold living promise? Subramanyan demonstrates a rare courage in putting his ideas down, in submitting them to editing and to being reproduced in a glossy paperback; is he risking the distortions of the very excesses of industrial communication against which he seeks a voice? Even his own earlier writing has restricted itself to exhausting Vishwabharati Quarterly-style pontifications. Does he finally replace the usual we and not-we inclusive-exclusive notions of the Tradition with the real difficulties precisely of living it? Geeta Kapur forges her approach to these and other questions with care. She eschews confrontation and genuinely delights in her participation: Talking of play, it so happens that every year for so many years Subramanyan went to a toy-making project' (GK, p. 5). She thus adheres to the first law of the guru-father-master moshai figure through which Subramanyan has generated his creative energies: of its elusiveness to all debate other than that of its choice. Accepting this is part of her homage to the veteran, but it also permits her retroactively to lay her own distance from some very tense confrontations. It has been almost mandatory in this century in India that the keeper of the tradition, concrete stand-in for the abstract, conflicts with the ego of an adolescent modern, and that the latter bears the guilt of its revolt: to recognize the ideal and persecutory roots of the ego as the object of its search re-introjects upon it.1 In avoiding this conflict, she is able to render other areas around it problematic: to acknowledge, for example, that the tradition itself is less the problem than our complicated relations with it, to allow a space not just for the historical crunch but also and as much for its emotional traumas. Working through dependence and regret, our often frantic search for nourishment and solace, she includes Subramanyan himself and shows how he too has been rent through these divides as indeed he must. Her achievement has to be seen in the way she works it through the one area where we suffer the most acerbic of relations, where the tradition offers its least support: the effort to formalize. At what point are we to imbue our consciousness into so awake an inheritance? To speak of play when just now we feel neither wise nor particularly playful,2 as we place critical distance before our own home. THE VOICE WE HEAR Subramanyan's is a voice from the distance, but its source is elusive. It is trying to tell us something, but more real is what it is refusing to acknowledge; something that has happened, a vaccum it is covering up with its calm placidity. It is a voice whose Journal of Arts 6' Ideas