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.