First, the name. Part of learning to become a D School (Delhi School of Economics) sophisticate was to know how to pronounce it – the Ls are silent in French – and later, to write it with the accent marks in the right place. That aura of foreign glamour that distinguished Professor André Béteille when we entered his class as MA students of sociology never quite faded with familiarity. We knew he was Indian and that he broke into Bangla when speaking to fellow-Bengalis, but we also knew that in true bhadralok fashion, he inhabited an Anglo-French intellectual milieu with consummate confidence. His way of being at home in the world was our first lesson in how not to be overawed by or defensively dismissive of the Great White Gods of sociology – the then holy trinity of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim – but to make them our companions in critical thinking. Looking back, I now understand how important this was. In the mid-1980s when I was an MA student at the Department of Sociology, Delhi University, the post-Emergency surge of social movements around civil liberties and environmental issues – state-sponsored violence against Sikhs and the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred within months of each other in 1984 – drew us to Marx and Gandhi, Gramsci and Ivan Illich. Giddy with radical critiques of the state, capitalism, industrialism, and the dominant model of development, we dismissed every other inquiry as boring, irrelevant, or complicit in maintaining the status quo. We read feverishly but narrowly, measuring an author’s merit only by their ideology, discarding those who didn’t meet the mark. This was not education, it was indoctrination, albeit self-inflicted. We would have continued thus, well-versed in radical literature but little else, self-righteous and probably insufferable, if it had not been for professors like André Béteille who gently insisted that we put our political certitudes on hold and open our minds to other approaches and points of view. We should read Alexis de Tocqueville on American democracy and Max Weber’s lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’, and not just Das Kapital and Hind Swaraj. Our ambition of setting the world right would be better served if we learned to think about inequality comparatively, across time and space. Reading Weber was hard work. The department faculty emphasised that students must read original texts or their translations, not commentaries. We would have floundered if not for the lifeline of Professor Béteille’s classes. His lectures were the acme of lucidity. Elegantly structured, beautifully clear, they had been honed to perfection over the years. Now that I am a teacher, I marvel at how brilliantly he distilled complex ideas into a form that students could digest. We could then return to the library with a glimmer of understanding of what we were reading. We would even gherao Professor Béteille when we were baffled by what we encountered in courses taught by other professors, kinship and symbolism, in particular. His door was always open and he never turned away a student in intellectual distress.If teaching as a profession fitted André Béteille like one of his well-tailored tweed suits, it also imposed a discipline that he embraced. He never missed a class and tutorial. He always walked in on time, always prepared and fully present. It takes caring and commitment to be unfailingly generous to students and colleagues. It also takes a lot of homework.Also read: Andre Beteille: A Scholar RememberedFor generations of students who quietly absorbed the ethic behind this effort, teaching transformed from a career to a calling. When I’m feeling frustrated by students who use ChatGPT for assignments or who show up for class without having done the assigned reading, I sometimes think of Professor Béteille unflagging spirit as a teacher and I marvel at his constancy.In ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber notes that good scholars can be poor teachers (and vice versa). In Professor Béteille’s case, we were fortunate that he was both. His first book Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Social Stratification in a Tanjore Village was first published in 1965 and prepared the grounds for what we now call ‘intersectionality’. I would recommend it to any beginner in sociology as a clear exposition of how theory must be processed through empirical analysis. Dipankar Gupta has written incisively on Béteille’s scholarship (and Ramachandra Guha on his politics) so I will not dwell on his research on inequality and social stratification other than to note that, when I was doing research among adivasis in the Narmada Valley, Béteille’s essay in the European Journal of Sociology on the concept of indigeneity in India was a major catalyst for my own thinking. His work on the middle class was also ahead of its time; Raka Ray and I were fortunate to have him deliver the keynote address at the conference that resulted in our edited volume, Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. We are among many who have been directly influenced by Professor Béteille’s scholarship.I think Professor Béteille was fond of me. He would smile and remind me, ‘You know, Amita, I also taught your father’ [Baburao S. Baviskar was his student and, later, colleague]. So, besides lectures, conversations, and comments on drafts, Professor Béteille also gave me career advice. When I was bristling with indignation at an unfair book review, he told me to let it go. When I was employed at a research institute and missing the classroom, he told me about the Young India Fellowship (YIF) programme and how much he enjoyed lecturing to students from a mix of disciplinary backgrounds. Thanks to him, I taught those students too and, years later, came to work at Ashoka University, home of the YIF. André Béteille was its first Chancellor. And though in his latter years he occupied several such distinguished positions, I believe that a great many of his happiest moments were among students. The calm joy that he exuded in their company stays with me and, whenever I feel it, I am thankful that he taught me how to be a teacher.Amita Baviskar teaches at Ashoka University.