Prof. Andre Beteille delivering the 9th M.N. Srinivas Memorial Lecture on Sociology and Ideology at National Institute of Advanced Studies, in Bangalore on November 14, 2008.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
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.
It is as a teacher, however, that his legions of students remember him. Speaking to The Hindu, his former colleague Prof. Virginius Xaxa said he too acknowledges Prof. Beteille as an “undeclared mentor” to him, in guiding him, through affable nudges (the two had offices next to each other on the DSE campus) towards the study of tribal societies in India, for which Prof. Xaxa is known for.
“He was a teacher par excellence, not just in terms of style and canvass of his knowledge, but also as an ethical person in terms of his responsibility to his students,” he said.
Students who studied under him recall that regardless of strikes or other disruptions, he would, as was his wont, turn up at the DSE whether classes were being held or not.
Prof. Janaki Abraham, who had been a student of Prof. Beteille and is now teaching at the DSE, said teaching schedules during the semesters remained inviolate for him. “He would always say, please attend conferences during holidays, not during semester. As a teacher, he would interact a lot with students and was accessible to us,” she said.
His scholarly work is still part of academic curricula in courses on Indian Sociology. While he was accorded the Padma Bhushan in 2005 for his contributions to literature and education, his legions of students give a more lasting account of his career.
Published – February 05, 2026 12:20 am IST
