BOOK REVIEW 77 studies. This review will confine itself to Part One. Joshi sharply brings out, at the beginning of his study, "the limitations of any narrow specialization for an understanding of the total agrarian problem^ and lays stress on "the interdependence of specialization and integration of knowledge."l He is opposed to any approach to the problem which makes "technical sophistication an end in itself", as "it distorts the very development of social science research."2 Furthermore, attention is drawn to the "conflicts of interests which assume both naked and disguised forms. These conflicts are fought out not only on the economic and political plane but also on the intellectual or the scientific plane. Conflicts of interests are thus transformed into conflicts of ideologies and of scientific approaches and interpretations."8 Theory-practice Interaction It is from this point of view that the author brings out a point which may pardonably be described as the negation of the derisive terms in which he referred to the so called "pamphlet Marxism". For, according to him, the colonial phase of Indian history offers an excellent field for an exercise in the sociology of knowledge. The influences of interests on the process of formation of ideas is much more transparent during the colonial than during the subsequent phases. This is because the political articulation of 'interests' and the study of the agrarian question were undertaken during this period by the same persons. The political 'activist9 or the 'agitator5 was also the first scientific 'researcher9 into the agrarian question. Later the professional social scientist appeared on the scene. But it is noteworthy that the social scientist failed successively in presenting a meaningful analysis of the agrarian question in the same measure as he avoided to take full cognizance of the conflicts of interests in the field of the agrarian social structure. A survey of agrarian studies thus helps to demolish certain myths about the growth of social science propagated by vested interests. There is no greater falsehood than the view that the 'end of ideology3 constitutes the the starting point of social science.4 The present reviewer is in hearty agreement with the view implied above,according to which the political 'agitators3 (or rather those including the Marxists who carry on day-to-day agitation against the regime and were earlier described in derisive terms as 'pamphlet Marxists^) and the professional social scientists have to play complementary roles, with the added proviso that the modern administrator is the other side of the 'politcal agitator9. P G Joshi himself explains the role played by early British administrator-scholars like Baden Powell, Henry Maine, the authors of the Settlement Reports and Gazetcers on the one hand and generations of political activists from Ranade down to Gandhi and his disciples, the radical nationalists, and finally the Marxists. None of these were professional socia}