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MATTER AND METHOD IN SOCIOLOGY & IDEOLOGY 53
may be argued that understanding is an end in itself and further that if sociological understanding fails to provide any ideology of action programme, there is nothing wrong in it. My response is we may refuse to see the action of cognition or understanding and abruptly stop our enquiry on the non-existent border line between cognitive sociology and conative sociology, but that does not add to the depth of our understanding of that important area. It also fails to bring out the comprehensive significance of social action and interaction. Understanding and action are two aspects of the same and continuous psycho-sociological process. Consequently any attempt to draw a sharp line of demarcation between sociology and ideology is bound to end up with blindness of the former and the emptiness of the latter.
Ideology is the value-orientation of action. One's action is largely shaped by one's own interest. Man is affiliated in a graded fashion to different groups, primary and secondary, immediate and remote. He is partially free to choose his ideology in terms of his dominant interest-group or/and reference-group. In a static society his action and ideology are mainly shaped by, his immediate reference-groups like family and caste. Per contra when due to the introduction and operation of the dynamic factors like industrialisation and conflict mobility is generated in an inert society, remote reference-groups like class and nation assume live character and start influencing the motivation and action patterns of the people concerned.
The rural India is waking up from its age-old slumber. In some parts of the country, one might say, the peasantry has already woken up. Its causes are mixed. So also are its effects. Some of the causes and effects have already been indicated before. The point now is that these causes and effects have to be regulated in a rational manner and cannot be left to the forces of "spontaneity". Unless this responsibility of regulation is given to (in fact it has to be taken up by) the people of the concerned group who are vitally and economically interested in the matter, it cannot be satisfactorily discharged. The interest of the Indian peasantry particularly of the middle and the poor peasant and of the landless labourer, cannot be defended and promoted by the urban-based upper middle class bureaucracy and political leadership whose education and orientation are aline to the reality of the situation and whose interests are related to the industrial bourgeoisie. Some individual officers or party leaders may be honest and wellmeaning but that has little impact on the sad institutional state of affairs.
The operative part of the ideology consists of several factors. First, the structure of our education pyramid should be inverted, extensively broadening the base of primary education and making our education more concretely relevant to our social and economic conditions. It may sound a bit pompous, but I am absolutely clear that we badly need a cultural revolution drawing our cultural sustenance more from the rural life, its grassroot joys, sufferings and needs and less from the fun, frolic, or the existential agony and anguish of the alienated intellectual and the babu. Secondly, we badly and urgently need induction of peasant and workingclass elements in the political leadership composition enabling it to be more
