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Author: Shyama Haldar
Publication: Tehelka
Date: June 10, 2006
India's leading sociologist André Béteille resigned recently from the National Knowledge Commission.
André Béteille once began an editorial piece in The Hindu (20 June, 2000) with an anecdote that is as much a sharp slice of academic wit as it is quintessential of its teller. Over table talk with a scholar from Cambridge, Béteille relates, he told the don that he "did not think the English were a particularly civilised people" The Cambridge man asked for a definition of 'civilised'. "Simply someone who's at home in at least two different languages," Béteille replied; "having one language makes us human, being at home in two makes us civilised."
The article goes on to make a case for languages as passports to intellectual traditions other than one's 'own', to new realms of sensibility. It is here that the aphorism on civilised people becomes self reflective - not simply because Béteille is himself a proficient multilingual, but because the engagement with social forms beyond the purely local is integral to his work, and repute. "Sociology is comparative or is not sociology at all," is a motto Ramchandra Guha ascribes to him in the introduction to Ideology and Social Science, Béteille's most recent publication (a collection of his newspaper writings, including the one just cited).
Béteille has often criticised his Indian colleagues for being sluggish about offsetting their considerable field data against comparable instances from other societies. Nor, he says, have they made systematic use of sociology's universal concepts in analysing their findings, a parochialism he has refused all his career. Deeply influenced by MN Srinivas, the founder-professor of the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Béteille chose a Tamil Nadu village for his PhD field study. For a thoroughly urbanised Bengali, it was an experience that resonated with his own small-town boyhood quite as strikingly as the obvious differences between the two. In the doctoral thesis that followed - the seminal Caste, Class and Power - Béteille consciously studied caste not just as an India-specific, even somewhat exotic, entity, but as a variant in the wider phenomenon of social stratification and inequality. "Béteille made Indian sociology to a large extent part of sociology in general, not just a specialist's subject," says Dipankar Gupta, who has edited and introduced anti- Utopia: Essential Writings of André Béteille. "He was also one of the first to look at how the caste system is affected by politics, and not only politics at the local level; he was among the earliest to recognise that the caste system is undergoing change and will continue to do so."
Béteille is appalled by the recent quota announcements as a potentially damaging interference in caste relations that were of their own showing- signs of positive -alteration. His resignation from the National Knowledge Commission this month is a stance backed by decades of consistency. "I have been a sceptic, not an opponent but a sceptic of reservations," he says. The reservation debate, for him, cannot be limited to a zero-sum game between the competing interests of the 'forwards' and the 'backwards'. Intrinsic to it is a third party: the institution, its character. Further, while he is convinced that the government "has the obligation to devise policies which will make the student body and the faculty socially more inclusive", he sees it as a mistake to define this issue in the language of rights. "We go on creating rights which cannot be enforced and which are probably unenforceable," he says. "I call it the Marie Antoinette solution. They don't have schools so give them rights. Why do you only allow these children abysmal schooling and then think you can make up for it by quotas in the IIT's?"
Growing up, Béteille can be said to have gained a sort of first-hand knowledge of hierarchy from the social attitudes to his parents' marriage: his mother was a Bengali Brahmin, his father a French colonial. Life was not easy for those who married out of caste, Hindu or European. Born in 1934, Béteille spent his early years with his maternal grandmother in Chandannagar. The family was not well-off; despite a supposed (on his grandmother's part) family connection with Surendranath Banerjea, Béteille's future ascendance as a scholar was quite of his own making. He came to live in Calcutta when he was 11 and went later to St. Xavier's College. Intending to train as a physicist, he changed mid-stream to anthropology. He speaks of his student years with great warmth; even though he remained staunchly unmoved by the promises of the revolutionary dawn, his most stimulating encounters were with his large circle of Marxist friends. At the time he also impressed Nirmal Kumar Bose, the eminent anthropologist who was Gandhi's interpreter during the Noakhali riots. In 1959, Srinivas and VKRV Rao appointed him to the first faculty of the new sociology department at 'D School'. He was to teach there for the next four decades.
Ask him about his D School years and affection creases his face for Béteille delighted in its liberal, secular and intellectually vibrant atmosphere. One of only three lecturers in the infant department of 1959, he relishes how the sociologists used to he the poor cousins on a campus blindingly set with star economists. ("Joseph Stiglitz somewhere calls economics the 'Imperial Science' - they really behaved like that!") Among them, however, he remembers KN Raj with special regard, followed by Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh. ("He was a very patient teacher, never intolerant of people who were not high achievers.") As the department began to consolidate itself, Oxford-returned Srinivas wanted its programme to be a true copy of the Oxford syllabus - Béteille, the Calcutta man, insisted on Marx, and on making the discipline real to students in India. He genuinely enjoyed teaching - former students and colleagues remember that he was never one to be bullying, stand-offish or patronising. A long-time colleague and friend, Abhijit.
Dasgupta, speaks of Béteille as a beguiling repository of little-known tales: whole genealogies and plots involving eccentric twists to seamless lives pour from him when the conversation gets going. Although quite capable of joining a student for talk and a drink in a hostel cubicle, his capacity for discipline is still spoken of with awe - in his tutorial room at 8am, break at 12.30, back- at work at 2 and on till late evening. Invitations to seminars and lectures were turned down if they clashed with class time; Surinder Jodhka, who teaches sociology at JNU, retells what he suspects is the blatantly apocryphal story of how Béteille took class even on the day he married. Those who have probed why he never accepted the sometimes quite fabulous teaching offers he received from foreign universities have been told, simply, "Because I like it here" No rhetoric, no patriotic fuss. But then, polemics was never his style.
Passionate about the health of institutions of learning, Béteille also trailed a wake of antagonisms; for one, he was wholly opposed to teachers' unions. His reason: organising university teachers along the lines of workers' associations undermines the teachers' active part in the ownership of their institutions. Sociology offered as an undergraduate course was not to his liking - this was no 'soft' subject, he insisted; one needed maturity to approach it. His position on inequality raised several hackles through the 1960s and '70s, a time when it was an article of faith to maintain that hierarchy could be done away with in the not-too-unattainable future. Béteille stated outright that inequality was not only ineradicable, it was not even entirely desirable that it be eradicated. Béteille's imperative, instead, was the creation of equality of opportunity - conditions where competition can occur without predetermined outcomes - not the expectation of equality of results.
Differences regardless, Béteille has never been less than willing to go the extra mile to bridge them. Dipankar Gupta has a story about a colleague who was picked up during the Emergency. He was detained for a time at Delhi's Red Fort and produced in court blindfolded. When he was allowed to open his eyes, tears came to them, he told Gupta later. In court was Béteille, a man he had had ideological spats with verging on serious dislike, leading a delegation of teachers in his defence.
The story is, of course, a perfect instance of Béteille's commitment to civil society. Béteille, though, might, in his typically demystifying way, have the same to say of it as he does of his discipline: "It's a mistake to believe we connect only with those like us. I think we can connect much better with those unlike us, precisely because we are different."
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