2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST contributes a progenitor of the Hindutva ideology that is wreaking havoc upon the Indian polity today. The Quit India movement of 1942 constitutes in many ways an enigma. Though the movement was triggered off by the August 9 resolution of the Congress and Gandhi's 'do or die* call, it brought forth mass involvement on an unprecedented scale, and the Congress did not have the sort of ideological grip over it as it had over the 1919-22 Non-Cooperation movement or the 1930-32 Civil Disobedience movement. The upsurge in many places transcended the limits of nonviolence imposed upon it by Gandhi, and continued for periods well beyond what the Congress leadership had anticipated. Bidyut Chakrabarty's paper examines the development of this movement in Midnapore district in West Behgal. Chakrabarty attributes the mass participation in this movement to the general anticipation, engendered by the initial Japanese victory over British troops in Burma, that colonial rule in India was on the verge of collapse. The fact that the movement took on a dynamics of its own, not bounded by the limits imposed upon it in the perception of the top leadership, underscores an important theoretical point, namely, that political mobilisation is a totality in which different levels follow different trajectories hinged to one another only in a rather complex fashion. Finally, we carry a paper by Anita Rampal which uses the perspective acquired from the experience of the Science Teaching Programme in Madhya Pradesh, the Vigyan Shikshan Karyakram, or Vishika as it is locally known, to show how the curriculum in school science can itself be a device for perpetrating pedagogic hegemony and be vulnerable to dominant pressures from without.