The Indian scholar I most admire, Professor André Béteille, celebrates his ninetieth birthday later this month. Born and raised in Bengal, he moved to Delhi after an MA in Calcutta University and has lived there ever since. For four decades, he taught at the Delhi University’s department of sociology, while writing a stream of books and articles alongside. After his retirement, Professor Béteille has served as the first chancellor of Ashoka University, while continuing to publish works of scholarship as well as a charming memoir about his youth and education.
André Béteille is half-French, half-Bengali, and wholly Indian. He loves his country in a way Bengali intellectuals rarely do. Bengalis are not at all insular; except that when they interest themselves in other people, it tends not to be other Indians. I once joked (in this newspaper) that all famous Bengalis have two nationalities. Thus Nirad C Chaudhuri was Bengali and English; Satyajit Ray, Bengali and French; Jyoti Basu, Bengali and Russian; Charu Majumdar (the Naxalite leader), Bengali and Chinese. I added that Rabindranath Tagore might have been the last famous Bengali to have been both Bengali and Indian.
Like Tagore, Professor Béteille is curious about the world and about the rest of India too. He did his doctoral fieldwork in Thanjavur, deep in the Tamil country. His own research students have included a Bengali from Bombay, a Tamil from Jamshedpur, a Kannadiga who worked on Ladakh, and a Punjabi who worked on Karnataka. As for himself, he knows his Marx and his Weber, his Evans-Pritchard and his Levi Strauss, and his Nehru and his Ambedkar as well.
In my book, Democrats and Dissenters, I have written at some length about Professor Béteille’s landmark contributions to scholarship. Here, I’d like to write in a more personal vein, about what our friendship has meant to me. I first met him in 1988; and we have stayed in touch ever since. His writings and our conversations have profoundly shaped how I think about my country and my work.
Reverising a Biblical injunction
I once called André Béteille the “wisest man in India”, a characteristically reckless judgement, even if the wording allows for two caveats; there may have been a wiser woman in India, or a wiser Indian living abroad. Why I was drawn to him seems self-evident. But why did he reciprocate, answering my admiration with affection? It may be that it was because my intellectual trajectory was so different from his. When we first met, he had completed 30 years in the same job; I was into my fourth job in seven years. I was excitable, prone to rash generalisations; he was calm, his judgements offered after examining all sides of the question. I favoured polemical argument with fellow scholars; he was always restrained, whether in conversation or in print.
That I was a young scholar who was so different from him in temperament may have been why André got on so well with me. The contrast appealed to him; and perhaps gave our conversation that added sparkle and zest.
For many years now, I have invoked André Béteille’s published writings in my books and raided our conversations for my columns and talks. It was while Rajiv Gandhi was still alive that André said to me that the posthumous reputation of Jawaharlal Nehru had reversed a famous Biblical injunction.
In this case, instead of the father’s sins being visited on his children and grandchildren, the daughter’s and grandson’s sins had retrospectively been visited on him. That is to say, the remarkable contributions that Nehru had made to the building of the Republic had been obscured and even defiled by the errors of his descendants.
As Sonia Gandhi and then Rahul Gandhi entered politics, the wisdom of André Béteille’s remark became even more apparent. By now I must have used it at least a dozen times in public, always with attribution.
André wrote regularly for the press and gave the odd popular lecture as well. But he saw himself as a scholar, and not as a “public intellectual”. Those who liked to avow that self-description were, he said, usually more “public” and less “intellectual”. He once told me that “Media attention is not only the enemy of scholarship, it is also the enemy of moral integrity.”
His books and research papers, his classroom teaching and his supervision of research students, are what have defined his vocation; not his newspaper articles. His own sociological expertise equipped him to offer criticisms of specific state policies, but never to offer alternative policies of his own. The technical nature of their discipline meant that economists were far more active in policy formulation and policy prescription. Some sociologists and historians wanted to follow them in this regard by canvassing support with politicians in and out of power. But not André. He would, very occasionally, venture into policy analysis, but never into policy prescription.
Though he lives in the nation’s capital, unlike some other Delhi intellectuals, Professor Béteille has never remotely been interested in befriending or influencing important or powerful individuals. His duty has been to research, write, and teach, not to anoint himself as some sort of rajguru, whispering advice in the ear of a minister or a leader of the Opposition. One would never see him at publishing parties, or at diplomatic parties either. This is not to say he has no interests apart from his work. One of his abiding loves is poetry, in all of his three languages; Eliot and MacNeice in English, Mallarmé in French, Tagore and Jibanananda Das in Bengali.
Given his own disposition, André Béteille thought that I was excessively active in the public sphere, giving too many talks, appearing too often on television, and getting into unproductive controversies. In the summer of 2012, I had a road accident, in which I broke many bones and had to rest in bed for several months to recover. On hearing of this, André wrote saying, “I think that your accident has come as a blessing in disguise.”
His mail continued: “I see no reason why it should affect your writing adversely. In fact it should have a beneficial effect on it by forcing you to cut down on your travelling and your lecturing and to concentrate instead on thinking and writing. I think you have been travelling and bullshitting far too much for your own good and the good of your writing. Your much admired cousin [the historian Dharma Kumar] used to say to me that I had far too much discipline and far too little imagination. I really believe that you need a little more discipline in your thinking and writing, and that can come only if you sit down at one place and – think and write.”
Having quoted a letter from André to me, let me now quote one from me to him. Some years ago, I met, in Bangalore, the old India hand, Mark Tully, who has spent a lifetime in the subcontinent, mostly working for the British Broadcasting Corporation. “Tully asked whether I knew you,” I wrote to André, “and said he did a long interview with you for some BBC programme years ago. He remembers you as a real scholar, who – as he put it – seemed to regard radio journalism as inferior to print journalism, and print journalism as inferior to scholarship. You are, of course, right on both counts!”
His critics sometimes complained that André Béteille had only one subject. However, this was a very capacious subject, perhaps the most important subject there is, namely, the production and reproduction of social inequality. He has written books on caste in a Tamil village, on the class structure of agriculture, on the comparative analysis of inequality in East and West, on the rise of the backward classes, on the tension between the claims of social justice and those of institutional integrity. Rather than see stratification as simply based on economic factors, he has studied the dimensions of status and power as well.
André Béteille’s writings remain of enduring relevance. Readers unfamiliar with his work should begin with a collection of his newspaper articles, Chronicles of Our Time. Those of a more scholarly bent might read one or more of the following books: Caste, Class and Power; Society and Politics in India; and The Idea of Natural Inequality and Other Essays. Finally, I would recommend another collection of his newspaper pieces, carrying the telling title, Ideology and Social Science.
Ramachandra Guha’s latest work, The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir, has just been released. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.
This article first appeared on The Telegraph.
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