Prof. Andre Beteille was born on 30 September 1934. In 1957 he completed his
Masters in Anthropology from Calcutta University. In 1964 he completed his
Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, on Caste, Class
and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. Thus, he
specialized in social stratification, inequality, social change and political sociology. He has been engaged all his life in teaching and research. Later, he
took up a project on agrarian class relations.
He started his studies as a student of physics but halfway switched to
anthropology, inspired in part by N.K. Bose, who later became his first
intellectual mentor.
He did honours in anthropology at University of Calcutta and had also
completed M.Sc. from the same university. After a brief stint at the Indian
Statistical Institute as a research fellow, he started teaching degree courses and
shortly after the Department of Sociology opened in Delhi and was emerging as
a premier department so Beteille moved there as a lecturer in sociology and
began research for Ph.D. under M.N. Srinivas who was then heading the
department.
Beteille began his career as a specialist in social stratification and questions of
equality and universality. From 1990, he has started taking deep interest in
liberal philosophy and issues arising from poverty and social injustice. He is the
first Indian sociologist who saw the relevance of the theories of John Rawls and
creatively applied his thought to sort out the tangle that policies on positive
discrimination.
However, all this is still in the realm of social stratification. Beteille was
influenced by N.K. Bose. He has memories of Srinivas who stressed on the
importance of fieldwork. The important work of Bose on ‘The Structure of
Hindu Society’ foreshadows much of the work of Dumont and Pocock; he was a
great fieldworker and lived with tribal people and showed the value of
ethnographic observation combined with classical texts. Beteille also spotted
differences between Bose and Srinivas.
Among British anthropologists, Beteille was most influenced by EvansPritchard through his writings and his influence on M.N. Srinivas and Max
Gluckman. During the Simon Fellowship at Manchester he had an impact of
Gluckman’s contributions to anthropology and John Barne’s idea of social
networks.
He has also memories of Meyer Fortes and his influence on Srinivas (a
craftsman) and Edmund Leach and his writing on ‘Political Systems of Highland
Burma’ which shook British anthropology out of its complacency but avoided
the role of a guru.
Beteille had natural inclination to compare ways of life because of his own
mixed background and prompted orientation towards anthropology. He had first
intended to work with Tamil speakers in Delhi. Srinivas insisted him to work in
an area very different from the one in which he had grown up and which was
unusual for social studies in India.
Theoretical Perspective:
Beteille’s critical contribution has been contextualizing local concepts and
understandings, such as caste and class, hierarchy and equality, and in more universal and generalized theories of inequality, stratification and justice. His
works draw upon universal categories and concepts. He always places them in
the context of empirical ground realities. Beteille closeness to Weber naturally
also signalled his distance from Marx – a scholar whom he respected but from
afar.
He is the best-known scholar in India on liberal theory and its application in
social policy. Aware as he is, of the difficulties and limitations of the
comparative method, he still manages to use it effectively. Beteille uses
Weberian categories and mode of analysis.
Thus, he refines the conceptualization of ‘ideas and interests’, and
analyses the similarities and interdependence of tribe and caste through
intermediary category of the ‘peasant’. He uses gender and its implication for
‘blood’ and hereditary to make an incisive comparison of race and caste.
Writings of Andre Beteille:
Andre Beteille is one of India’s leading sociologists and writers. He is
particularly known for his studies of the caste system in South India. He has
authored many books. In the words of historian Ramchandra Guha, Beteille has
written insightfully about all the major questions of the day: India’s encounters
with the West, the contest between religion and secularism, the relationship
between caste and class, the links between poverty and inequality, the nurturing
of public institutions, the role and responsibilities of the intellectual, etc. He also
worked on backward classes and their position in Indian society based on
Smut’s lectures given in Cambridge in 1985.
His publications include:
Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore
Village (1965)
Castes: Old and New, Essays in Social Structure and Social Stratification
(1969)
Inequality and Social Change (1972)
Studies in Agrarian Social Structure (1974)
Six Essays in Comparative Sociology (1974)
Inequality among Men (1977)
The Idea of Natural Inequality and Other Essays (1983)
Society and Politics in India: Essays in a Comparative Perspective (1991)
The Backward Classes in Contemporary India (1992)
Antinomies of Society: Essays on Ideologies and Institutions (2000)
Sociology: Essays on Approach and Method (2002)
Chronicles of Our Time (2000)
Equality and Universality: Essays in Social and Political Theory (2002)
Ideology and Social Science (2006)
Marxism and Class Analysis (2007)
Besides the above books, Beteille also wrote a number of essays mainly on
Secularism Re-examined, Race and Caste, Teaching and Research, Government
and NGOs, The Indian Middle Class, etc