Rest in Peace, Professor

In Memory of Andre Beteille

I did not know Andre Beteille in the ordinary way one knows a teacher. I never took walks with him, shared coffee on a porch, or spoke to him across a desk, as many who are writing memoirs now have. I came to Ashoka University after his years here had passed. By then, he existed for me only as an inheritance of a name I had encountered in texts, and then found on a board in the administrative block at Ashoka.

But I think that distance is fitting for Beteille’s person. He, it seems, was not a scholar who demanded attention. Of the many tributes written in recent days, a consistent portrait has been drawn of someone averse to intellectual showmanship and uninterested in cultivating a personality cult. 

For much of his life, Beteille took teaching seriously. That now feels almost anachronistic in an accelerated academy of a hundred annual conferences and a thousand publications. His colleagues and students recollect his insistence that conferences belong in holidays and teaching in the semester. It is said that he would report to D-School daily, even on the most tumultuous days of strikes. Those who were taught by him tell a story of brilliance, not for its own sake, but for a steadiness of lectures that were clear and demanding at once. 

Beteille's sense of commitment to the practice of his discipline and profession also saw ripple effects in the trajectory of the social sciences in India. Here, sociology and anthropology have traditionally been housed in separate departments. Under Beteille, however, Indian sociology moved closer to anthropology by insisting that theory remain answerable to social life as it is lived. Far beyond data collection in a narrow sense, he saw empirical work as a disciplined attention to the world — patient and resistant to unbridled abstraction. He showed that social phenomena and institutions could be studied empirically without being reduced to variables or treated as ahistorical motifs. Today, what is taught in Sociology departments across the country is a strong inheritance of that tradition; an Indian affair of sociology–anthropology which is empirical but not quite positivist, and analytical but not an exercise of recluse theory. 

The result is that institutions like Ashoka—still uncommon in India—can place sociology and anthropology in the same departmental space without requiring either to defend its legitimacy. I am, of course, a product of that inheritance. Older anxieties about disciplinary purity have been overtaken by an increased concern with method. Newer questions are rightly more concerned with how long one is willing to stay with a social context and people not necessarily familiar to them, and how resistant one can remain to premature conclusions. This turn matters for all of us in the social sciences; at its best, the Indian socio-anthropological tradition does not rush in with conclusions already formed. It has insisted on staying long enough for neat explanations to wear thin. Beteille’s scholarship and, by all accounts, his person, mirrored this ethic. 

If this sounds unfashionable, that is the tragedy of our times. Recalling his supervisor and eminent sociologist M.N. Srinivas, Beteille once noted in an interview that Srinivas’ legacy is that he saw the social world as an “untidy” place. The worst way to deal with it, Beteille said, is to tidy it up. Much like his mentor, he was wary of intellectual shortcuts to the extent that even his prose reflects this lucidity. Pick up any of his works, and it is as though he knew exactly when a sentence should stop. No matter what the title, his work very effectively convinces students and teachers alike that restraint is not necessarily timidity.

Despite international recognition and visiting appointments across the world, Beteille did not build a life around the prestige of the West. He chose instead to work largely within India, teaching generation after generation of students, writing without positioning himself cleanly with either the right or the left. Academically, politically, and intellectually, his positions were seldom strident. When he agreed to help shape Ashoka University in its early years, this too was done without rhetoric. Those who worked closely with him talk of gentle guidance and an emphasis on procedural integrity. 

Sadly, in public life and academic life alike, there is little reward for this kind of modesty today. Yet, the Beteille of an old D-School and a young, bristling Ashoka offers an inviting alternative. To many young aspiring academics—my friends and fellows among them—he remains a reminder that one can matter deeply without being ubiquitous, and influence many without insisting on being seen. After all, he could shape a discipline and steer one, if not many, institutions, all without becoming a spectacle. 

Of course, it is no surprise that his passing closes an important chapter of Indian intellectual life. The hard questions and precarious realities he spent his life with remain unresolved. What remains, however, is the model of the virtues he practised so consistently: patience and the strength of character to refuse to lie to oneself for the sake of public applause.

I did not know Andre Beteille personally. But I study a discipline he helped shape, within an institution he helped steady and among people to whom he meant a great deal as a mentor and teacher. They recall with affection his trust in the power of serious, non-spectacular scholarship. That trust may be his last gift to many of us who enter the increasingly impatient world of accelerated academia. 

Rest in peace, Professor.