16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST of washed-up and dried grey wooden flotsam, and seashells; and net-mending, in a sunny silence. The fine dark fingers other left hand are pursed; her open right palm and soles a sea-shell yellow; lying asleep with her feet a little open; the green sari's fringe round her shoulders unstirring. Her delicate face is dark, tired and thinning, with fine cheekbones glossed and faintly paling, caught thus in the sunlight; mouth a little open, and teeth protruding; feet facing seawards. In the Upanishads it is written, ^When passions have passed away, you will be tranquil." ^From abandonment, comes tranquillity", says the Bhagdvad Gitd. The gentle breeze ruffles the hem of her sari; broken silvers of mother-of-pearl are iridescent in pink sand; drying to a stiffness in the sunshine, the fishermen's small-fry glitter. In such a place, it is bliss to be alive on such a morning. But the sleeping figure's eyes were open; dead, and staring. Now whether the procedure of recording and communicating knowledge which I have both insisted upon and adopted in this essay (to say nothing of its substance) can or cannot lay claim, in the minds of those who are expert in defining their terms and analyzing their concepts, to the dignified title of political or social science, I do not know. Whether it also excludes, in an 'impressionistic9 and "anti-intellectual' fashion, a sense of causation derived from a knowledge of the (real) processes of political economy, is not for me to determine. What I am certain of, however, is that a true epistemological development, that is, one which raises the level of understanding of the phenomena of existence in this or that society and is capable of communicating this understanding, is now far beyond the reach of most of the dominant modes of ^Marxist' social, cultural, political, and economic analysis. It is, in general, both obscurantist and impractical, that is, useless. It has, above all, disarmed the capacity to understand, in order to change, the ^real-life activity of real human beings'; it stands, thus, upon a terrain where left and right join hands, in unholy alliance.