Biswabrata Goswami
MIDNAPORE, 4 FEB: When André Béteille arrived at Vidyasagar University in April 2004, the moment carried a significance that went far beyond ceremonial protocol. For students and teachers of anthropology and sociology, it marked a rare encounter with a thinker whose work had shaped academic discourse on social inequality across India and beyond. For Dr Abhijit Guha, then a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Vidyasagar University, it was also a deeply personal moment — one that he later recorded in a reflective account of Béte’s visit and conversations.
This article is based on Dr Guha’s contemporaneous narrative written in 2004, when Béteille visited the university to receive an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) degree and to deliver a lecture on social inequality.
Béteille, internationally recognised for his long-standing research on caste, class and power in Indian society, had been a familiar presence in university syllabi for decades. His books and essays were, and continue to be, prescribed reading in postgraduate courses in anthropology and sociology across Indian universities, including Vidyasagar University itself. For many faculty members, teaching Béteille’s theories was routine; meeting him in person was not.
On April 19, a day before the convocation, Béteille delivered a lecture titled “The Dynamics of Social Inequality” at the university’s Bhupesh Mukherjee Hall. The hall quickly overflowed. Students stood along walls and near doorways, determined not to miss the opportunity. When Béteille began speaking in fluent Bengali, surprise rippled through the audience. Born to a French father and a Bengali mother, and educated entirely in Kolkata, Béteille moved comfortably between languages — French as his paternal tongue, Bengali as his emotional one, and English as his academic medium.
Drawing from his experience of teaching at the Central European University in Budapest, Béteille reminded students that English had become unavoidable in higher education. He cited European students from Hungary, Poland and Romania, who had mastered English without abandoning pride in their own languages — a point that resonated strongly with the audience.
He soon shifted to English, explaining that years of teaching outside West Bengal had left him unaccustomed to academic discussions in Bengali. What followed was not a tightly structured theoretical lecture, but a reflective journey through his intellectual life — beginning with his first fieldwork in Sripuram village in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district nearly forty years earlier.
Initially interested in temple-centred social organisation, Béteille soon found himself confronted by something more unsettling: stark inequalities embedded in everyday village life. Differences between Brahmins, non-Brahmins and Adi-Dravida communities were visible in housing, clothing, land ownership and economic security — so sharp, he recalled, that it was hard to believe they shared the same village. Béteille linked these observations to Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous paradox: while equality is a modern ideal, inequality remains deeply entrenched in lived reality.
Rejecting simplistic explanations, Béteille argued that caste alone does not determine social hierarchy in India. Economic class, land ownership and political power, he stressed, often reshape caste relations in unexpected ways. Dalit communities, he noted, may lack land yet improve their social position through political mobilisation — a complexity that purely caste-based or orthodox Marxist frameworks fail to capture.
Yet as the lecture ended, some listeners felt a sense of incompleteness. Béteille had spoken eloquently about his journey, but less about the theoretical “dynamics” promised by the lecture title. Dr Guha, who posed sharp questions during the session, later reflected on whether such a lecture would have taken the same form at institutions like the Indian Statistical Institute or the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
That tension, however, softened during an informal evening interaction at the Circuit House — an episode vividly described in Dr Guha’s original account. There, Béteille emerged not as a distant academic luminary but as an engaging conversationalist, speaking animatedly in colloquial Bengali. Surrounded by teachers, students and administrators, he traced his unlikely journey into anthropology — from studying physics at St Xavier’s College to wandering into Calcutta University’s Darbhanga Building in search of guidance.
Mentored by figures such as Nirmal Kumar Bose and Surajit Sinha, Béteille recounted how he was nudged from prehistoric anthropology to social anthropology, largely because, as Bose observed, he “wrote English clearly and argued logically.” He spoke movingly of translating Bose’s The Structure of Hindu Society into English during Bose’s final illness — a race against time that culminated in a foundational text published in 1972, after Bose’s death.
As the evening progressed, stories flowed — about Surajit Sinha’s brilliance and unpredictability, about the neglected legacy of ethnographer Tarak Chandra Das, and about anthropology’s long silence on Muslim societies in India. Béteille placed these gaps within historical context, arguing that early Indian anthropology was shaped by nationalist priorities focused on tribes, villages and caste.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the encounter, as Dr Guha noted, was Béteille’s lack of academic arrogance. He responded calmly to criticism about the originality of his work and the limited role of history in his writings, acknowledging constraints without defensiveness.
By the time the gathering ended late in the evening, it was clear that Béteille’s visit had offered more than a lecture or an honorary degree. It had revived conversations about inequality, scholarship and intellectual humility — fittingly so, in a university named after Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar.
— Based on a 2004 account by Dr Abhijit Guha, former Professor of Anthropology, Vidyasagar University
