THE national question is also a cultural question. Civilisations are based on the mode of production but after food, it is tahzeeb or culture which humankind seeks to nurture and build upon.

In the same period, however, the bronze age civilisations of Asia and Africa carried different cultural values. In ancient India, various states had their own cultural and political values, ranging from democracy to military autocracy. Even the same ruling class carried different cultural values, as was the case of the aristocracies of the West and the East.

Culture in the Marxist sense is not reducible to the mode of economy or 'ideology'. Though certain epochs are identifiable with certain cultural values related to its economic and ideological environment, the opposite is also true. Thus ancient society, representing the childhood of 'man' with a lower, 'slave' mode of production, produced the kind of art which could not be surpassed even by early bourgeois epochs.

During the course of revolutionary movements, ideological barriers are often transcended by cultural factors and political interests. To cite just one example, Mao Ze Dong enjoyed the respect and support of many orthodox Chinese, who were opposed to him ideologically, as he represented, in their eyes, indigenous Chinese wisdom. The success of Marxist movements has also depended upon their level of integration in the culture of a region. At many places, like Indo-China, religo-cultural symbols and 'fervour' played a vital part in popularising Marxism. At the same time, traditional cultural values were modernised under the influence of Marxism which proved to be the gateway for ancient civilisations to step into the modern era.

Cultural movements, therefore, do not got reduced to class struggles in the political and the social sphere. The creations of writers and artists are seldom the result of their levels of income or nature of occupation. It is also not as if there is a strict demarcation of content, with themes depicting the lower classes coming forth as progressive and those depicting the upper classes as reactionary. The conflict in culture is essentially a conflict of ideas and form — between dialectical and non-dialectical, closed and open, traditional and modern, canonical and subversive, conceptual and gestural interpretations of the same theme. An artistic creation may be very proletarian in its orientation, but if its form is closed, it ends up being metaphysical and conservative in some respects. Many films made under the banner of social realism in Soviet Russia fall under this category.

But political and social processes are fundamental to culture — art is nothing but the record of tensions of social and political styles, gestures and ideas. An artist gets his or her style through conscious or unconscious involvement with the political and social mood of the times. But an artistic work then creates a world of its own which adopts a clear or contradictory posture or attitude towards the real world. Both the subjective independence, and the objective politics, of art is constituted in this dialectical relationship.