Remembering Andre Béteille (1934-2026)

"My maternal grandmother lived a life of a Brahmin widow, she would not wear shoes, took a bath every morning in the river (of Chandernagor) ... I have forgotten all these, put all these behind me, but twenty years afterwards, I see these widows coming back from their morning baths in the river Kaveri... It immediately brought back my childhood, so I was certainly discovering myself while I was doing my fieldwork." 

Andre Beteille, the legendary sociologist, discussed his personal and professional life in an interview in 1986. He stated how he discovered himself in the midst of rigorous fieldwork in Tamil Nadu and how a structural similarity between the lives of widows in South India and East India led him to believe in a comparative study. The interview illuminates that factual data, fieldnotes, or statistics are undoubtedly essential to sociological research. Still, one cannot separate an individual's lived experience from the way it eventually shapes one as a scholar. Beteille was an example of such scholarly pursuit; he passed away on 3rd February, at the age of 91. The legacy lives on, and it is perhaps an appropriate time to look at some of his greatest works, his contributions to social science, and above all, Beteille’s role as a public intellectual. 

Born into an interracial family, to a French father and a Bengali mother, Andre was accustomed to seeing the confluence of many cultural traditions. It gave him a broader perspective in observing little details of different languages, food, attire, or customs. The methods of comparative sociology that Beteille applied to understand Indian society were also a logical extension of his own household experiences. 

In 2012, his memoir Sunlight on the Garden was published. It had an opening chapter, “My Two Grandmothers”, which describes the two opposite worldviews of his parental homes. The paternal grandma, Madame Beteille, lived and taught in a Chandernagar French school.  She baked delicious cakes, sent them to little Andre, who preferred bread over rice, and also served soups, custard, and roast beef in her house. On the contrary, his dida or maternal grandma, Shibani Mukherjee, was a kulin Brahmin, who survived on a vegetarian diet after the demise of her husband and only ever wore a white saree—sans blouse or petticoat, all her life. Beteille explained that his 'peculiar childhood' made him ‘unusually sensitive’ and had an influence on his career. He was accustomed to observing so many cultural spheres not always existing in harmony but sometimes in conflict; it gave him a greater insight into societal relations, kinship, religion, caste, or race. This, however, does not expose a bias towards any particular culture, but only indicates how scholarly endeavours depend not only on books, lectures, or college degrees, but also on how one observes, adapts and lives life outside academia as well. Beteille wrote: 

"Sociology must view every type of human society with the same critical detachment. This must in the end bring the sociologist into conflict with those who have a jealous attachment to some particular society, whether their own or another. Sociology insists on treating all societies alike; it recognizes no privileged exceptions." 

Beteille's encounter with several cultural heritages from his infancy, helped him develop a keen eye for observation. He felt that sociology should be comparative, or it should not exist at all. This view was influenced by his family history, the multiculturalism he witnessed, and a strict aversion towards cultural insularity. Ramchandra Guha, one of the greatest admirers of Andre Beteille, remarked on how the legendary scholar was never insular in his approach. Beteille's long career always sought to include multiple, diverse communities under the purview of sociological scrutiny. His first fieldwork was on the clerks of Calcutta. The half-French, half-Bengali boy came to Calcutta University and took up middle-class men as empirical subjects of research, but soon he would shift to distant places, remote areas, far away from his familiar domains. Imagine a man, born and brought up in Chandernagore, Calcutta, and Delhi, decides to go to a remote village in Tamil Nadu for his first book. He had to learn a new language, obscure customs, religious vocabulary, and other cultural markers that Delhi or Calcutta did not offer. This tendency to move out of a comfort zone in order to improve and enrich a hypothesis is rare and almost absent among most of the scholars in India. This is what Ramchandra Guha called insularity, where a Bengali scholar working on Bishnupur temples is not willing to pay heed to the temple architecture of Tanjore or Gandhara in the north. A scholar analysing the ecological degradation of Sundarban will not pay attention to a broader environmental history of South Asia or the long durée approach. This stringent regionalism was discarded in Beteille's work. The research works he supervised were also based on these comparative methods and broader sociological scopes, and he appeared especially sympathetic to supervising those with branching lives and interests— among his students were a Tamil boy brought up in Jamshedpur, a Punjabi man who would go to Tamil Nadu for fieldwork, or a Kannada-speaking scholar interested in the Ladakhi community. 

In relation to the discussion of new avenues of methodology, Beteille also commented on the contribution of sociology to human life. It makes us rethink a pertinent question: how does fieldwork, historical analysis, or a plethora of data serve society at large? Is it only the handiwork of intellectual elites residing in ivory towers who gaze at people for writing a thesis, or are there practical solutions to societal problems? This is a pressing issue of today, as funds for research in the social sciences get squeezed dry, job opportunities are diminishing, and short-term research degrees like MPhil are discontinued; we must look back at Beteille's view of social science that encourages critical thinking. He said: "Sociology has very little to contribute in the form of social engineering, but much to contribute by way of critical understanding."

Beyond sociology, this statement is appropriate for studying anthropology, history, linguistics, or archaeology. These disciplines are not meant to create policies and decisions but to observe and understand societal patterns. In an interview, Andre was asked if a sociologist should be a policy maker; he responded—Whose policy is it! Who is in the backdrop planning for these policies, and with what intentions? 

These are policies of the state; the government hires scholars to design policies. We have seen many instances of how Nobel laureate economists are given policymaker ranks in India and abroad (also in our state, in recent times). Beteille believed that the contribution of sociology is much broader than occupying a position of state policymakers; it has a responsibility towards ordinary people, civil society, which does not always include the state and its machineries (bureaucracy, police, military, parliament, etc.). Social science does not directly alter structures, behaviour, or promote development. It only provides a critical discernment, in the words of Beteille, ‘it holds a mirror to the society '. 

Along with discourses of comparative sociology, an important contribution of Andre is to do away with caste determinism. By the time he was entering the domain of social science, a plethora of studies on caste saturated the academic circle (M. N. Srinivasan, Louis Dumont's works). He said that caste is not a natural or fixed hierarchical structure in India. With the arrival of industrialization in urban spaces and land reformation in villages, there are new vantage points of power that were absent erstwhile. He dismissed the Marxist approach that solely prioritizes class to explain all the inequalities of Indian society; he also rejected the caste system as the only reference point to define social stratification in India. This problem, he says, is an outcome of the book view vs field view approach. Flamboyant theory or book-based reading cannot be emphasized more than fieldwork or empirical research to grasp the complex Indian society. One of the popular criticisms against Beteille is whether he supported reservations for backward castes in India. If not, then did he oppose the social upliftment of the poor or underprivileged? The answer to this question should not be sought in simple affirmation or negation. Beteille believed that it is important to define the composition of backward classes, consisting of tribes, castes, and communities, which is never a homogeneous unit. There are so many differentiations, concepts of isolation, exclusion, and suppression, that clubbing all under a single banner may seem faulty. Also, Beteille felt that affirmative actions like land reforms are way more important than numerical quotas in jobs. Tokenism may lead to diminishing enthusiasm for actual development in the rural economy. 

Another controversy regarding Beteille is whether he supported the Hindutva forces, which came into power in India from the late twentieth century. He expressed dissatisfaction with Congress’ corruption and favoured a democratic transformation for the time being. The statement made quite a stir in the public domain, creating confusion about whether he had an allegiance to the BJP. We may look back to one of his interviews (before 2013), where he promptly said how the Hindutva model is dangerous in describing Indian history, polity, and society at large. He cited the works of Iravati Karve, the first female anthropologist in India, to discuss the inherent diversity in this subcontinent and how, from an ancient period, the land benefited from acclimatizing new cultural traditions arriving from the outside world. Beteille was a proficient speaker, a dedicated teacher, and above all, a public intellectual. He wrote editorials, columns, and articles in the Times of India from 1968 onwards. At a time when few academicians were keen to write in daily newspapers, for him, writing for non-academic readers was a way to connect with intellectuals from various disciplines and to reach 'intelligent laymen'. This intense desire to communicate with fellow thinkers is what makes him an exceptional social scientist, with curiosity, cultural quest, and humility, rarely found in high academicians.