Living the Tradition sized ornamentation rather than the decorative;16 the ornamental actually suppresses metaphor. If this is so, I suggest then that such an investigation which would emerge from Geeta's book and her own stylistic resolutions, would actually help us get the first real leverage into the flowing continuities of the living tradition. To go beyond the symptomatic state, one that Umberto Eco likes to see in the comic-book image of the cannibal chief who wore an alarm clock round his neck like a bead necklace. To re-86 introduce the interruptions of time into the received pictorial sign. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. A brief note on my use of psychoanalytic references: I am very dose to both the voices represented here and I cannot but feel personally involved—feel included, responsible, threatened, guilty; such proximity is for me part of our condition today where many of the problems we are facing are ours, which have not been imported, which do not lie "out there". As a colleague recently pointed out, whereas so much of earlier mass-communications came in with the allure of "better things', of late it is increasingly concentrated on a purging of guilt and responsibility for what is around us. Given the responsibilities we have to admit to, it becomes particularly difficult to state our dependence on anything, which is why we sometimes settle for reactive "language-systems". I can only hope that these references, in their use, will finally fit into a possible tradition for us. This reference is to Melanie Kidn: 'When the objects are reintrojected, they become the ideal and persecutory roots of the super-ego. In the depressive position the objects are persons: mother, father and eventually the parental couple. They are seen as whole objects, both in the sense of being persons arid in the sense of not being split into totally good and totally bad figures. The relation of the object is ambivalent, and when it is introjected it becomes the depressive super-ego. This super-ego is a loved object and attacks on it give rise to a sense of guilt/ Hanna Segal, Klein, Fontana/Collins, 1979, p. 124. 2. Kumar Shahani, 'Invocations', Framework, 30/31, London, 1976. 3. Jacques Lacan, Ecrifs, tr. Alan Sheridan, Tavistock, London, 1977, p. 47. 4. Ibid., p. 217. 5. Ibid., p. 218. 6. Ibid., p. 218. 7. Ibid., p. 67. 8. Ibid., p. 55. 9. Kumar Shahani, 'Interview' with author in Framework, 30/31, London. 10. Nandalal Bose, 'The Paintings of Rabindranath', inVishwabharati Quarterly, Nandalal Number, Vol. 34, Janl971, pp. 110-113. 11. Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas, New Delhi, 1977, p. 17. 12. Ibid., p. xx. 13. The events that took place at Faizpur (1936) and Haripura (1938) have of course been extensively documented Gandhi himself writes about folk art in 1936 (see the Tendulkar biography, Vol VI). For a com^ ient overview see Frandne Frankel, India's Political Economy, OUP, 1978, Chapter II. 14.1 refer to the major revaluation of Binode Behari that took place in the late 1970s when Geeta Kapur herself and other artists of her generation discovered afresh the Medieval Hindu Saints mural. Or the efforts to re-think Ram Kinker by practising sculptors today. 15. Kumar Shahani, The Self As an Objective Entity', Rita Ray Memorial Lecture, Calcutta, 1987. 16. Nandalal Bose, in his 'Notes On Ornamental Art', emphasizes the importance of the pause thus: Tause includes spacing, light and shade, and modulation of movement. Without pause the ornamental work 'ppears clumsy and monotonous. Sometimes the pause is replaced by space or it is made more distinct by modulation, i.e., making the movement either slow or rapid; and sometimes the pause itself is brought about by different variations of depth in light and shade". SeeVishwabharati Quarterly, Nandalal Number, Vol. 34,1971, p. 95. Note how the entire argument, elaborating Abanindranath's 'Some Notes On Indian Artistic Anatomy' (1914), works towards the notation of pure space. Journal of Arts 6' Ideas