André Béteille’s death in early February 2026 closed a career that embodied a rare conjunction: cultural cosmopolitanism married to unflinching scholarly method. Born in Chandannagar in 1934 to a French father and a Bengali mother, Béteille lived a life that outlasted the present Republic of India and spanned the country’s most consequential decades. His work—anchored in careful fieldwork, comparative method and moral sobriety—made him at once a public scholar and a professional restrained from the theatrics of public life. The thesis guiding this account is simple and emphatic: Béteille represented the rarest of specimens in modern Indian intellectual life—an authentic cultural cosmopolitan who remained rooted in Indian grassroots archives, who chose clarity over charisma and method over manifesto. He was, as some have put it, “more Indian than any of us.”
Béteille’s early biography already contained the tensions he later reconciled. Chandannagar, a French settlement in Bengal, produced in him an instinct for multiple worlds; languages and traditions were a lived fact of his upbringing. Educated in Calcutta and later in Delhi, he joined the Delhi School of Economics, where the institutional ambience—where sociology met economics, political science and law—shaped his comparative rigor. He carried that formation into a career whose signature was close empirical work: village studies, archival reading, institutional observation and an attention to how social categories recombined under new pressures. His longevity gave him a unique vantage on India’s postcolonial trajectory: he witnessed the Republic’s institutions, struggles and transformations from a personal standpoint that few scholars have enjoyed.
Caste, Class and Power (1965), Béteille’s early and enduring study of a Tamil village, announced the central habits of his mind. The book refused the flattened treatment of caste as a timeless cultural system and instead traced how caste interfaced with land, economic class and political authority. Its method was exemplary: sustained fieldwork, close attention to local records and elections, and an unwillingness to transmute observation into facile judgment. Across later works—on inequality, agrarian structures and theoretical method—Béteille pressed the same point: social hierarchies are produced and reproduced through institutions, distribution of resources and political access; they cannot be explained away by romantic culturalism or ideological certainties.
Two features of Béteille’s temperament deserve emphasis because they shaped the range and durability of his influence. First, his method was exacting and comparative. He insisted that sociological explanation must combine description with comparative analysis; the comparative frame prevented parochialism and placed Indian phenomena within a wider social logic. Second, his public style was one of restraint. He avoided intellectual grandstanding and preferred exposition to invective. When he wrote for public audiences—on secularism, equality or academic freedom—his tone remained disciplined, evidence-driven and modestly argumentative rather than partisan. This restraint was not lack of moral clarity; rather it was the conviction that moral seriousness must be accompanied by empirical humility.
Béteille’s life in institutions deepened his commitment to cultivated public reason. The Delhi School of Economics, where he taught for decades, was a school of habits: punctuality, rigorous seminar discussion and insistence on clear prose and argument. Colleagues and students remember a teacher who treated the classroom as a democratic forum rather than a pulpit; those seminars produced generations of sociologists schooled in both the craft of fieldwork and the ethic of civil discourse. His later institutional roles—chancellor and mentor at universities and research councils—were an extension of the same ethic: institutions must protect free inquiry and cultivate the patient habits of thinking that undergird democratic public life.
That Béteille had French roots is a detail churlishly pointed to sometimes as if it might disqualify his Indianness. The opposite is closer to the truth. Béteille’s cosmopolitan formation sharpened, rather than compromised, his attention to the particularities of India’s social world. He read comparative social theory alongside local records; fluent in French, Bengali and English, he could move between intellectual traditions and local testimony without losing fidelity to either. In this sense he was “more Indian than any of us” who claim to learn from his life: his loyalty was to the empirical archive of Indian social life and to the intellectual habits necessary to apprehend it—languages, method, close listening—rather than to inherited identity claims or empty ceremonials.
Béteille’s public interventions illustrate the conjunction of temper and conviction. He defended liberal-democratic principles—pluralism, rule of law and institutional integrity—yet he never permitted these commitments to blunt his analytic scrutiny of the ways inequality operates in a democracy. He was sceptical of ideological absolutism, and he critiqued both cultural romanticism and doctrinaire partisanship. That posture made his voice rare: he could be morally committed without becoming doctrinaire, humanly engaged without descending into celebrity, and institutionally attentive without managerial hubris.
A telling testimony to his disposition is his own warning about publicity: “media attention is not only the enemy of scholarship, it is also the enemy of moral integrity.” That remark encapsulates a professional ethic in which the scholar’s responsibilities are to evidence and argument, not to spectacle. For Béteille, public writing was legitimate and necessary, but it was a form of responsibility. He would admonish students and colleagues to prize clarity over charisma, to prefer measured public statements rooted in fact rather than theatrical pronouncements. In lectures and essays alike he modelled a voice that sought to clarify rather than inflame.
Béteille’s pedagogical bearings also mattered. He treated teaching as a vocation and regarded the classroom as the crucible of citizenship. His seminars were demanding, yet they were designed to cultivate habits of mind: precision with concepts, rigour with data and generosity in scholarly exchange. Many of India’s leading sociologists and social scientists recall his seminars as formative. Those who learned from him did not only inherit theoretical templates; they imbibed a temper—an approach to evidence, argument and public life—that has shaped departments and debates across generations.
What, then, is Béteille’s legacy for younger scholars and for citizens? Practically, his life models a path for research that begins with sustained fieldwork, proceeds by comparative analysis and culminates in prose accessible to students and citizens alike. Ethically, he showed how public life benefits from intellectual temper: clarity, restraint and fidelity to evidence protect democratic argument from the twin dangers of spectacle and simplification. In an age of accelerated opinion and political polarisation, Béteille’s insistence on method over manifesto is not merely a scholarly preference; it is a civic necessity.
André Béteille died on 3 February 2026 at the age of 91. Tributes from colleagues and institutions recalled him as a teacher, a moral anchor and a patient architect of Indian sociology. His books will remain on syllabi and his students will continue his habits of thought. Yet his deeper inheritance is a disposition: the refusal to substitute charisma for clarity, the choice of method over slogan, and the practice of cosmopolitan learning rooted in local attentiveness. That synthesis—cosmopolitan openness married to grounded rigor and temper—was André Béteille’s singular gift to India’s intellectual life. It is a gift that must now be taken up, practised and defended.
References
Ashoka University. (2026, February 4). Remembering André Béteille, first chancellor of Ashoka University. Ashoka University. https://www.ashoka.edu.in/remembering-andre-beteille-first-chancellor-of-ashoka-university/
Béteille, A. (1965). Caste, class and power: Changing patterns of stratification in a Tanjore village. University of California Press.
Béteille, A. (1972). Inequality and social change. Oxford University Press.
Béteille, A. (2002). Sociology: Essays on approach and method. Oxford University Press.
Guha, R. (2026, February 4). Devastated to hear that the great sociologist André Béteille is no more. He was the Indian scholar I most admired, for me (and many others) a moral and intellectual anchor [Post]. X. https://x.com/Ram_Guha
Indian Express. (2026, February 5). André Béteille | 1934–2026: Teacher, thinker and scholar, a founding father of sociology in India. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/andre-beteille-obituary-teacher-thinker-scholar-founding-father-sociology-india-10514533/
National Herald. (2026, February). André Béteille, 1934–2026: The quiet architect of Indian sociology. https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/national/andre-bteille-19342026-the-quiet-architect-of-indian-sociology
Press Trust of India. (2026, February 4). Sociologist André Béteille passes away at 91. PTI News. https://www.ptinews.com/story/national/sociologist-andre-beteille-passes-away-at-91/3344391
The Wire. (2026, February 4). Renowned sociologist André Béteille passes away at 91. The Wire. https://thewire.in/education/renowned-sociologist-andre-beteille-passes-away-at-91
Arup K. Chatterjee 