rather than a desire to escape from it, whether into fairy tales or other universals is sharply illustrated by a comparison which I have derived from Bhalla's excellent bibliographical guide to the riches of Latin American writing. Bhalla argues that Donoso's A House in the Country, written after the overthrow of Allende in Chile, although it bears a superficial resemblance to Golding's Lord of the Flies, is not really a Hobbessian meditation on the innate depravity of human nature, Donoso's "children are not inventing, as if for the first time, the rules of the game, they are imitating them. The novel is not a meditation on the nature of man, but an anguished witness to Pinochet's Chile and the enormity of suffering in it!' There is an area of difficulty, both growing out of and linking up with the rejection of bourgeois realism and the cultivation of mythic structures, and I am grateful that Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Latin American Cinema: Political Cinema, both touches upon and illustrates the difficulty to which I refer. Let me confess at once that 1 am not equipped to discuss Latin American cinema, and I am merely lifting Rajadhyaksha's own descriptive/analytical categories in order to advance a larger argument that, I suspect, also has some relevance to the contemporary Indian scene. It appears, then, that radical filmmakers