Andre Beteille was never my teacher. But he taught me from the time I got to know him some 30 years ago. I was always his pupil – and dare I say it? – one of his favourite pupils. My learnings from him only underline the point that a walled class room is too restricted a space to be truly educated.Mentors do not educate through lectures. They teach through conversations. From all that I have heard, Andre was a master teacher in the classroom. But I learnt from him through the countless conversations we had in his house, first in Probyn Road when he was in D School [the Delhi School of Economics] and then after his retirement, in Jor Bagh.My first meeting with him was in Calcutta. I knew of him but that first meeting was through a common friend and it lasted well over an hour. It was a wide ranging adda which broke my awe of him and I came away thinking to myself that maybe I had found a new mentor who unlike my other mentors in Calcutta and abroad was not a Marxist or Marxist inclined. The relationship blossomed over the years till the time, a few years ago, Andre made himself for reasons of ill health into a recluse. Over the years we spoke in person or over the phone once a week. The meetings in person, now as I look back, had a certain unintended pattern. I would arrive (mostly mid morning) to find him sitting on his patio overlooking their small garden. He would be reading and when he saw me, he would put down either the latest issue of The New York Review of Books or a book. As I sat down, he would ask invariably, “What are you reading now?” Then the conversation would flow and after about ten-fifteen minutes he would say, “You will have coffee, of course.” The coffee would come – he was very particular about brewing the coffee in the French press – and some biscuits from a local bakery. If I visited at tea time, his wife Esha, who loves me dearly, would ply me with cakes and savouries of different kinds and Andre would say, “Don’t make him eat so much. He must watch his health.” Esha’s affection and Andre’s concern were both touching.The conversations were not always around books and intellectual matters. He would recall his childhood. He had grown up in an area in north Calcutta called Gorpar, where my father had also grown up, and more famously, Satyajit Ray. Andre would want to know what that area was like now. He would talk about the Jesuit fathers in St. Xavier’s, Calcutta, who had taught him and about his two first teachers in sociology and social anthropology – two redoubtable figures, Nirmal Kumar Bose and K.P. Chattopadhyay (whose youngest son, Gouranga, became a close friend of Andre’s). He would also talk about the remarkable group of Bengalis who migrated from Calcutta in the late 1950s and early 1960s to teach in D School or Delhi University – Andre was among the first in 1959 and he was joined soon by Tapan Raychaudhuri, Amartya Sen, Sukhamoy Chakraborty, Partha Sarathi Gupta, and Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri. These were Andre’s close friends and colleagues. While reminiscing about them, Andre would also talk about two other friends who were not from Calcutta – M.N. Srinivas and Dharma Kumar. He recalled them fondly with telling anecdotes of their formidable intellect, their foibles and quirks.With Tapan Raychaudhuri he had a special bond and he would often tell me, half-teasingly, “You are a great admirer of Ranajit da but I think Tapan da was the better historian.” He had fond (and not-so-fond) memories of Ranajit Guha, but he would unfailingly ask after him since he knew I was in regular touch with him.Andre was known to be one of India’s leading non-Marxist intellectuals. I was thus surprised to learn that in the 1950s when he had worked in the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, he had been part of a small group that met once a week to read and discuss Marx. When he heard I knew Asok Sen he told me that Sen had been a part of that group. He wanted to renew his relationship with Sen and I took him to Sen’s house a number of times. It was a rare privilege indeed to be part of a dialogue between a committed Marxist and Andre – no acrimony but a perfectly civilised exchange of intellectual ideas.While leaving PM House after a meeting the eminent sociologist Prof Andre Beteille told Dr Manmohan Singh replied, “It’s hard to get in.” To this Dr Manmohan Singh, “It’s even harder to get out.”Dr Manmohan Singh and Prof Andre Beteille had been colleagues at The Delhi School… pic.twitter.com/3ZgUVdOYRD— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 29, 2024One major chapter in Andre’s relationship with Calcutta (by then Kolkata) opened when Gopalkrishna Gandhi came as governor of West Bengal. Ram Guha – another of Andre’s favourites – had probably introduced Gopal to Andre and as governor, Gopal got Andre involved in some academic projects especially in Viswa-Bharati. This meant Andre’s visits to Kolkata became more frequent. He stayed at the Raj Bhavan and thanks to Gopal’s most generous hospitality, there were many addas there. But the most unforgettable episode of this chapter was a visit to Chandannagar (Andre’s birth place) that Gopal arranged one morning. It was a very moving moment for Andre.Memories have been crowding my mind from the time I heard from Esha on Monday morning [February 2] that Andre was slipping away. We discussed so many things, especially writers and thinkers. Andre made me read Balzac’s Old Goriot. After I had read it, he remarked very perceptively, “Balzac’s writing is a model for a field anthropologist. The perfect mirror of French society of the time.” Most importantly, he made me read Max Weber – not the book on Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which as a student of history I had read – but his Politics as a Vocation. He underlined for me the following sentence, “Only someone who is confident that he will not be shattered if the world, seen from his point of view, is too stupid or too vulgar for what he wants to offer it; someone who can say, in spite of that, ‘but still’ – only he has the ‘vocation’ for politics.” In response when I said, Antonio Gramsci seemed to echo this in his oft-quoted statement about “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”, the sage Andre Beteille smiled and his hooded eyes twinkled.One outcome of my closeness to him was his agreeing to write a column for The Telegraph of which I was then the editor, Editorial Pages. Another different outcome was Andre agreeing at the urging of Ram Guha, Pramath Raj Sinha and myself to become a part of the project that made Ashoka University. Andre guided the project as it took its first toddler steps and then became Ashoka’s first Chancellor. I was fortunate to be the Vice Chancellor under his watch and I can never forget his gentle guidance on creating the DNA of the fledgling university. “Keep religion and politics out,” he would say again and again. Wise words. And in my blue moment I ask myself, did I fail him?His passing leaves an indescribable vacuum in my life. He was the last of my mentors to go. The others Time gathered long ago. Au revoir, monsieur Beteille, hors concours.Rudrangshu Mukherjee is the Chancellor and Professor of History at Ashoka University. Views expressed are personal.