ABSTRACT
Indianness is a comprehensive vision of justice for the Indian people for themselves and for the world. As a cognitive project, Indianness divides between two streams. The first is religious and mythical and the second is scientific and secular. Indianness as a rational category has come to understand its emancipatory content in opposition to colonialism. The effect was to put Indianness as an emancipatory project on the back burner. As social sciences never yielded monological laws of applied value, the co-optation process succeeded only in changing the rules of the game on the campuses. The moral order of this dance form is immanent in the social context and is probably conscious of its location in the political order. The meaning of the item dances need to be understood as a sub-culture of upward mobility and assimilation. Petty corruption, song and dance sequences represent subaltern helplessness and as such should melt hearts and cause catharsis.
