20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST haps best signified as continuing empowering pedagogy, I had to go to Kheda. .... Should my whole life be thus spent in unfinished tasks? (This is a free translation from Gujarati.) On the one hand, wrestling with the snake of politics, even to the extent of axiomatic activism (Gandhiji wrote: '. . . It is better to die helpless and unarmed and as victims rather than as tyrants'; ibid. 44); on the other hand, unmitigated despair at journeying through life without accomplishing transformative possibilities, where life itself begins to be lived as a narrative of how structure of engagement itself transforms itself into structure of postponement. Heroic activism merges with tearful accountability—a syndrome that was articulated in another time, at another place, by Adiai Stevenson: 'It hurts to laugh but I am too old to cry.' Gandhi, of course, articulated the dilemmatic situation of a nationalist activist. He sought to unify theory with practice; he did not struggle with colonial reality to produce a full-fledged theory of human emancipation. Theories may be derived or gleaned from his burgeoning corpus of texts as well as political action read as a series of texts. But the role models accepted by academic, activist labourers is different; their practices of engagement and postponement are, at the end of the day, directed to the production of reflective knowledges, critiques of power structures, and alternate agenda for action for transformation. Very few of us are as actively engaged as Gandhi was in the praxis of total transformative action; but if his tearful self-bewilderment finds a resonance within us it is perhaps because (at least speaking for myself) we have been ourselves unable to perform well the tasks we have set before ourselves, consciously or otherwise. Our critiques of power and our agenda for transformation seem to lack authenticity, outside the charmed circle of cognitive entrepreneurs operating grids of globalized knowledge systems. Painful though this is, I must offer in what follows some rather remarkable illustrations of this crisis. In what does this 'crisis' consist? Perhaps, in the lack of vigilance concerning alienating and alienated modes of production of 'theory*. Perhaps, also, in the precarious and treacherous social and political space theoretical labourers occupy; a space which projects, on the one hand, the appearance of relative autonomy from polity and economy in pursuing (even if ever changing) tasks and agendum of social action as a form of struggle and on the other hand of complicity with power. But the yardstick which conceptualizes repression as a Siamese twin of struggle and defines an activist as that being which the state regard worthy of suppression as a Siamese twin of struggle and defines an activist as that being which the state regards worthy of suppression, much of our social engagement, in retrospect and prospect, appears, sooner or later, as complicitous; this even happened to, and with,