5 min readNew DelhiFeb 5, 2026 10:43 AM IST
First published on: Feb 5, 2026 at 10:37 AM IST
While India is headed to its first caste enumeration since Independence as part of the 2027 Census, many years ago, an ethnographer – a young Andre Beteille – who studied in a small village named Sripuram at Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, wrote: “Although the Brahmins, the Non-Brahmins and the Adi-Dravidas have each an identity of their own, this does not mean that they constitute homogeneous units. The Brahmins can be regarded as a unit only in relation to the Non-Brahmins and the Adi-Dravidas. Internally, there are many subdivisions among the Brahmins, just as there are among the Non-Brahmins.”
These notes were later published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1962, which offered an early glimpse of the mind of the Bengali-French scholar whose nuanced understanding of caste, class, and democracy would reshape the trajectory of Indian sociology.
With Beteille’s death at the age of 91 Wednesday, India loses one of its most independent minds, whom historian Ramachandra Guha once called the “wisest man in India”.
Beteille had been a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Delhi since 2003. His prominent works include “Caste, Class and Power”, “Society and Politics in India” and “The Idea of Natural Inequality and Other Essays”. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2005 for his contribution in literature and education.
Born and raised in West Bengal, and having taught in India throughout his life despite offers from several leading foreign universities, Beteille became that rare Indian academic who stayed back.
In his obituary of sociologist M N Srinivas, Beteille recalled that Srinivas advised him not to give a letter of reference to a student who was going to an American university. Srinivas told him that Beteille would “realise one day the futility of putting so much effort into the training of students and then sending away the best ones to graze in distant pastures”. Beteille disagreed, but three decades later, he wrote, “I have much more sympathy for it than for the shabby and self-serving argument that in the post-modern world it does not matter very much for the Indian sociologist whether he works in Calcutta or in Colorado.”
Disagreement over caste
Beteille’s disagreement with Srinivas, or for that matter, with another doyen of Indian sociology Louis Dumont, lay in the fundamental understanding of caste and how it operates in Indian society. In his 1965 book “Caste, Class and Power” and 1966 paper “Closed and open social stratification”, published in the European Journal of Sociology, Beteille departs from Srinivas’s notion of “Sanskritisation” – lower caste groups tending to adopt rituals and culture of upper castes to gain upward social mobility – and his undue emphasis on caste units in modern society. Rather, Beteille pointed out that “the factors such as class and power have to be considered as independent variables”, which allows greater scope “to the individual as the unit of mobility and tends to relegate caste to a less important position”. He also criticised Dumont’s oversimplification of caste and religion through the binary of ritual purity and pollution.
As a scholar who brought Karl Marx and Max Weber to the centre of Indian sociological studies, and as a staunch believer in the possibilities of modernity, Beteille thought the importance of caste would decline over time. He was also against caste enumeration. For him, it would further harden caste cleavages, instead of blurring them. During the 1990 agitation against the Mandal Commission’s recommendations on reservations, Beteille upheld meritocracy and noted in an opinion piece in The Times of India, “Caste has no function today except in politics.” He was criticised by many scholars. But it was a time when “agree to disagree” used to mark discourse, not intellectual hegemony.
However, he recognised the need for the university spaces to be more inclusive. In a 2005 paper, “University as Public Institutions”, published in the EPW, Beteille wrote, “The Brahminical tradition of learning was not only narrowly focused intellectually, it was also socially very exclusive. Women and members of the lower castes had little or no access to it. The new centres of learning – the colleges and the universities – opened up new fields of knowledge, and also opened their doors to excluded sections of society.” These spaces of inclusivity are gradually shrinking. When cases like the suicides of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi convulse our university campuses, there is a serious need to contemplate caste in a modern urban setting.
There might be many disagreements with Beteille and his understanding of Indian society, but to take a cue from his obituary for Dumont, who died in 1998, students of sociology learnt more from disagreement with him than “agreement with many scholars of lesser intellectual vitality”. The understanding of caste in India needs both a nuanced argument and lived experience, far beyond the political rhetoric or sloganeering.