Ramachandra Guha: On André Béteille’s 90th birthday, a tribute to the wisest man in India

The Indian scholar I most admire, Professor André Béteille, celebrates his ninetieth birthday on September 15. Born and raised in Bengal, he moved to Delhi after an MA in Calcutta University and has lived there ever since. For four decades, he taught at the Delhi University’s department of sociology, while writing a stream of books and articles alongside. After his retirement, Professor Béteille has served as the first chancellor of Ashoka University, while continuing to publish works of scholarship as well as a charming memoir about his youth and education.

André Béteille is half-French, half-Bengali, and wholly Indian. He loves his country in a way Bengali intellectuals rarely do. Bengalis are not at all insular; except that when they interest themselves in other people, it tends not to be other Indians. I once joked (in this newspaper) that all famous Bengalis have two nationalities. Thus Nirad C Chaudhuri was Bengali and English; Satyajit Ray, Bengali and French; Jyoti Basu, Bengali and Russian; Charu Majumdar (the Naxalite leader), Bengali and Chinese. I added that Rabindranath Tagore might have been the last famous Bengali to have been both Bengali and Indian.

Like Tagore, Professor Béteille is curious about the world and about the rest of India...

Read more