BOOK REVIEW 69 wings from imperialist ideologists, but set its own ideologues to work within the broader context of imperialist ideology. It is only from this perspective that we can understand the total reliance of Indian anthropologists and sociologists of the official variety on the imperialist models (first British, then American) on the one hand, alongside the recognition of the danger of "academic colonialism" of the Project Camelot variety (p 289). This has already been thoroughly exposed by Gough, Berreman and Frank, and by itself constitutes no more than the pious strictures of the Indian Government against the CIA without the slightest effort at curbing its activities in India. Moreover as L K Mahapatra puts it, theories, insights and institutions developed in the West have supplied, broadly speaking not only the guidelines but also the motive force in undertaking research. Stimulus diffusion from the West how^-ever, will aid the process of creativity in research only when the foreign ready made products are not accepted as models for mass-production here (p 17). (Italics mine). What then, are the theories that this class vulgarizes as science? In the field of culture, instead of stressing change and development and transformation of the frontiers of peoples' experience, Milton Singer, one of the chief American mentors of Indian anthropology, provides a static perspective by concentrating on "a generic structure of persisting relations among media, texts, themes and cultural centres95 in imitation of the Radcliffe-Brownian abstraction of a homcostatic society described in terms of a "generic social structure of persisting relations among roles and statuses" (p 3). This conservatism finds more obvious expression in the identification of the culture of a pre-existing ruling class as the 'Great tradition5, which with revivalist overtones, becomes M N Srinivas5 'Sanskritization5. However, given the multi-national nature of the Indian ruling class, such a narrow identification could clearly not last for long and a host of other 'great5 elements appear in the guise of'Islamization5, 'Tribalization5 etc. Change, clearly is seen as emerging only through the agency and in the idiom of the ruling class, with its twin avenues of revivalism and Westernization which is unscientifically equated with 'modernization5,, as in the following quote of Prof Mahapatra: Sanskritization is of the same order as Brahmanisation or Kulinisation and is mainly conceived of as one phase of the cyclical process of change, the other correlated phase being de-Sanskritization. However Modernization (or Westernization) may be conceived of as a linear change from a traditional phase of culture to a new irreversible form (p 9). Obviously the possibility of developing the democratic elements of indigenous culture into a genuine socialist culture of the masses is completely ruled out. This is not inconsistent with the passive role ascribed to the masses by another American mentor of'official' anthropologists, McKim Marriott,