Renowned Indian sociologist and writer Andre Beteille passes away

Renowned Indian sociologist Andre Beteille, a dedicated educator and scholar, passes away at 91, leaving a lasting legacy.

Renowned Indian sociologist and writer Andre Beteille died due to age-related illness at his residence in New Delhi on Tuesday. He was 91.

The passing away of Professor Beteille, one of India’s foremost scholars, brought forth a rush of tributes from colleagues and former students, amid a realisation that it also marks the passing of a particular way of scholarship, and of a practitioner of teaching as a vocation.

Anyone entering the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) for a Master’s degree in Sociology, for which the institution is justly famous, couldn’t help but be aware of the village of Sripuram in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, the site of Prof. Beteille’s fieldwork for his work Caste, Class and Power on agrarian relations and shifting power structures in India.

It was a work that perhaps gave many graduate students, hailing from different strands of social classes and parts of the country, a taste of not just the complexity but also the structural nature of social categories and how they interact, of how to recognise from a study in one corner of India’s deep south processes that were ongoing in our society.

One entered “D’School”, as DSE is referred to, with an awareness of Prof. Beteille’s rigorous scholarship and his emphasis on the importance of fieldwork; once there, his commitment to teaching -- mercifully jargon-free and disciplined -- was our next experience with him.

Born in Chandannagar, West Bengal, in 1934 to a French father and a Bengali mother, he could read three languages fluently -- English, French and Bengali. The books and papers that he wrote, including Inequality and Social Change, Studies in Agrarian Social Structure and Society and Politics in India: Essays in a Comparative Perspective, attest to his rigorous scholarship.