LANGUAGE AS IDEOLOGY 57 many countries of the; world with the establishment of socialist society, giving even»ideological production a new role free from the distortions necessitated by exploitative societies that preceded it. What then are the insights that Westem-oriented anthropology offers us ? Being ahistorical, the conclusions are necessarily partial. But still, it is interesting to see which avenues of research are developed and which are ignored. Let us start with Pocock^s : Art and Theology in the Bhagavata Purana. Ftist, in the creation of a mythology, time the irreversible and constantly moving on, must be done away with : in other words, an ahistorical perspective is called for, a perspective that is achieved by "an elaborate mathematics which, through its speciously precise conversion tables, presents the ancestors, gods, Bramha and finally the Supreme Being as existing in incalculable and increasingly greater units of time. Human time, therefoft, although proceed-' ing at a rate faster than the divine time (s) is not qualitatively different... However, it is less real than divine time and we have seen how the conversion of one into the other underlines the relative realities."4 And this relativism too, is negated through the doctrine of rebirth (samsara), which dissolves various sequential identities into one, so that each appears to be no more than a mask of a reality belonging to a sequence of time other than that of the perceived world. Then, "at the end of 1000 caturyuga, one day of Brahma for a Kalpa elapses. "Then the flames from the mouth of Shesha destroy all the worlds and Brahma sleeps on Shesha for another Kalpa until the work of creation is renewed."5 At the same time, while the progression of time is from good to evil, in general, the Bhagavata overcomes this contradiction by allowing individual release from the coils ofKaliyuga through bRakti, not so rare a ploy, as all religions place faith above perception and the logical conclusions derived front it. What is striking here is the closeness of this ahistorical ideological perspective of early medieval Hindu thought to that of our anthropologists, whereas the Hindu theologians see the destruction of old worlds and creation of new ones through the concept ofpralaya, our anthropologists see worlds made and remade after periods of social breakdbwn that Durkhjeim called anomie. And we shall see later what purpose this serves. We see also in Pocock's analysis how this timelessness allows the fusion and radical alteration of realities. These are assured by metaphoric inclusion of twin personalities like Krishna-Balarama, and then, by a series ofmetonymic introductions to Krishna-Rama, and finally, Krishna-Arjuna, with Balarama having lost his superior status and becoming secondary to Krishna.6 Moreover, in some ways Pocock fits the facts into the schema, for Arjuna, after Krishna's death, becomes the protector of the Yadus who survive, and appoints Parikshit, his great-grandson to rule over them, in a sense, redressing the balance between Balarama and Krishna. But all this still does not answer the question why these gods have to be integrated in this fashion. Pocock sees this exercise purely as a philosophic one : "what is destroyed in