Andre Beteille entered sociology during a turning point in the discipline. With his first major book in 1965, Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village, he catalysed a distinct turn of his own. Indian sociology has multiple lineages. More than a century old, it has a rich and diverse history in which ‘pure’ lineages are mostly of academic relevance. It is the interactions and intersections that better tell us how the discipline wended its way, meandering between indigenous and universalistic categories; caste, class and community; status and power; mainstream, dominance and marginalisation; objectivity and subjectivity; neutrality and committed research and more. Social reality grew more complex and sub-fields developed. But there were some sharp turns. §Beteille was part of two distinct lines, anthropology and sociology, which in India, as in Europe, used to be treated as separate disciplines. He grew up in Bengal and did his MA in the Anthropology Department at Calcutta University, the first in the country, and was mentored by renowned scholars like Nirmal Kumar Bose and K.P. Chattopadhyay. In 1959, he joined as faculty at the Delhi School of Economics in its Department of Sociology, headed by M.N. Srinivas. They worked together as colleagues for many years. Srinivas, who was also Beteille’s PhD guide, had been a student of G.S.Ghurye at the Department of Sociology, Bombay University. It was the first in the country, set up in 1919, closely followed by Lucknow University in 1921. G.S Ghurye. Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._S._GhuryeGhurye, considered to be a founder of the discipline, was influential in steering its early decades. Critical of the knowledge on Indian society generated in the colonial regime, he propagated a nationalist sociology that stressed on the importance of Indological sources for understanding Indian society. Srinivas did both an MA and PhD under Ghurye, but moved away from the latter’s textual emphasis. He advocated ethnographic fieldwork, to capture the dynamic, fluid, changing nature of Indian society. No doubt anthropology departments had already been doing ethnography, as had the colonial scholar-administrators, but Srinivas gave the methodology a new emphasis and direction. Srinivas brought to bear the significance of qualitative insights through intensive, long duration ethnography with participant observation, of a single village or community. He persuasively argued how the Indian village was a part of a wider social system. His ethnographies of the Coorgs and of Rampura village had already left an imprint on the discipline when Beteille did his first field research in 1961-62, in Thanjavur district, in a village in the Kaveri delta, known to us as Sripuram. Beteille’s monograph on Sripuram was an exemplar of this methodology. But its analytical framework was different from conventional ethnographies. Even 60 years after its publication, it is an absorbing read – lucid, systematic, with meticulous observation and analysis. Although the format follows the tradition of (social) scientific analyses of the time, there are glimpses of Beteille’s being conscious of the tentativeness of his observations and the uncertain nature of the knowledge he produced. He notes that for practical reasons, he resided in the Sripuram Agraharam (Brahmin street), but adds that it was bound to have limited his insights. He muses on how his fieldwork was not very planned and organised, his presentation was selective, full objectivity was impossible. His own personal history, he confessed, might have led him to downplay the salience of purity and pollution. Such reflexivity became common in the discipline only decades later. M.N. Srinivas. Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._N._SrinivasEarly on, Beteille moved away from cultural accounts of caste that focused on ritual purity. He rejected the idea of caste as an all-encompassing explanatory category, questioning the tendency among sociologists towards ‘Indian exceptionalism’ that explained India in terms of its uniqueness. Instead he used the lens of stratification and treated caste (status), class (economic), and power (political) as independent dimensions that were interwoven and interacted in varied ways. In the Sripuram of the 1960s, the traditional congruence of the three was not apparent. Instead, Beteille found a complex society in the throes of aspiration, mobility and dynamic change, influenced by education, land reforms and modern democratic politics. This was a major shift in the treatment of caste, within ethnographic methodology. Srinivas trained many students in the craft and methodology of ethnography – in part his inheritance from British social anthropology. He also initiated a significant debate around the issue of sociologists in India studying their own society. He built the Department at Delhi School into a premier national centre for Sociology. Beteille was one of his senior most students, along with A.M.Shah. Ghurye’s strong pitch for a unified sociology and social anthropology in India got powerful support from Srinivas, Beteille, Shah and others from the Delhi School.Interestingly, A.R.Desai, another notable student of Ghurye, who eventually succeeded him as Head, also rejected the Indological approach. But unlike Srinivas and Beteille, Desai’s Marxist approach – influential among faculty and students in Bombay University and elsewhere – did not take on caste centrally. While Beteille examined class seriously, he did not favour economic determinism. After Sripuram, Beteille did not return to intensive, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, but continued to maintain a strong commitment to empirically grounded research, producing a phenomenal body of work. Influenced by a Weberian approach with a comparative, analytical framework, he engaged with broad issues of social change, caste and stratification, justice and equality, and relational and distributive inequalities. Specifically, he researched and wrote on backward classes and reservations; rural social structure, land reforms and agrarian conflict; and democratic institutions like the university. He also wrote brief articles on secularism, the changing Indian family, the middle class, responsibilities of intellectuals and other topics of popular interest , but never in a journalistic mode. He wrote in scholarly and popular fora. In both, he was accessible yet rigorous. In both, he was widely read. He intervened and took stands on public policy. In all these ways, Beteille was a public intellectual, although he himself preferred to be known as a scholar. He avoided media attention as being inimical to scholarship. He treated sociology as a vocation. He believed one should not to get too close to ”ideological heat” and was sceptical of academic activism. But sociology was irreversibly expanding to include issues that originated from social movements, like feminism, environment and transgender rights. He had limited academic interest in these. He believed in a detailed and deep investigation of a few core themes – for him it was social stratification and inequalities. Even here, he was critical of the ways in which caste and other identities were used for political mobilisation which, he felt, deepened divides rather than promote true equality.An important turn in sociology is the contemporary emergence of Critical Caste Studies. It argues that caste has not disappeared but mutated into more subtle forms of discrimination in the modern, upper-caste-dominated public sphere. Scholars like Satish Deshpande and Gopal Guru have underlined the ‘hyper-visibility’ of caste for marginalized groups and its ‘invisibility’ for the privileged. Beteille argued that the tenacity of caste in present times is being overstated. He rejected the view that caste is unalterable and inviolable. In fact, he suggested, such perspectives perpetuate the very caste consciousness they try to oppose. The future of caste remains to be seen.§I encountered Beteille’s spirit two years ago on a cool afternoon in early February. I was driving from Srirangam to Thiruvaiyaru, in search of a community of Muslim Nagaswaram musicians who played Carnatic music in temples – my current preoccupation. On this stretch, the road runs along the Kaveri river, the other side is lush with fields and densely dotted with villages and temples – Chola, Vijayanagar and Nayak. I had been asked to meet Dr. Sumitra (name changed), a repository of information and stories on Thanjavur district, who knew a lot about nagaswaram history. She lived in her ancestral home in a village en route. This house has not been altered structurally, she said, only some repairs have been made here and there. You are the second sociologist to visit my home. Andre Beteille came to this village for field research many, many years ago. I was just a school girl. He stayed on for months and returned several times. He lived in this same street, just a few houses away, over there, near the temple. Our family was among the few who spoke English. He would visit our home regularly, spend several hours asking my father questions on matters concerning the village and its people. My mother would serve tiffin and coffee on this table here and he would chat with her and with us children, courteous and affectionate. I learnt a few Bengali words from him. He slowly learnt to understand Tamil. My father and Beteille would walk together to various parts of the village and its outskirts, talking to people. They would often sit on the banks of the Kaveri for hours together, munching on raw cut mangoes sprinkled with salt and chilli powder brought in packets from home. Our ‘mango club’, he would joke. He would also assiduously collect documents for which he often went by bus to the Thanjavur collectorate.Dr. Sumitra, young though she was then, was most impressed that he came all the way from Delhi to a village with hardly any modern facilities and conveniences. The life style was basic, no frills whatsoever. But he was a simple man and adapted without fuss. Looking back, she believes that her own interest in local history and culture was kindled by his dedication to research and his fieldwork methods – thoroughness, hard work, patience and scrupulous adherence to research protocols. All this could be applied to any field, she said. She marvelled at his disciplined ways; his commitment to students. He had written to her father after his marriage that on his wedding day, he went to the University for a while to deliver a scheduled lecture.When I told her about the piece I was writing on him, she earnestly requested that I not identify her or the village. I was puzzled. The book had been published so many years ago. Then it occurred to me that this was also something she had imbibed from Beteille and the demands of the ethnography of his time. Andre Beteille followed both the letter and spirit of his chosen methodologies. He upheld the conclusions they led him to, without bending to pressure and popular sentiment. The outpouring of tributes on his passing tells us about the depth of respect for his integrity. Kamala Ganesh is former Professor and Head of Sociology, University of Mumbai.