Indian sociology in the 1950s and 1960s was a discipline searching for direction. Much of its language was borrowed from colonial anthropology or from philosophical readings of tradition. Caste appeared in those writings as an ancient design, and Indian society was often described as a museum of customs. André Béteille entered this field with a different temperament. He carried no appetite for grand theories and no desire to defend inherited pictures. Béteille preferred to ask how people actually lived, how they argued with one another, and how institutions altered their chances. His intellectual world was built on observation, comparison, and a steady respect for evidence.

Béteille’s own life introduced him early to more than one horizon. He was born in September 1934 in Chandannagore, then under French administration. His father, a Frenchman who served as mayor of the municipality, and his Bengali mother created a home where European and Indian influences met without ceremony. The young boy listened to Rabindranath Tagore’s songs and read English novels, and he learned that identity could contain several rooms. This background did not turn him into a cultural romantic. It made him cautious about single explanations.

Béteille’s education carried him from Patna to Calcutta and finally to Delhi. At St. Xavier’s College he began with physics, attracted by its discipline and clarity. Halfway through his studies he moved to anthropology under the influence of N.K. Bose, who became his first intellectual guide. Bose taught him that societies reveal themselves slowly and that fieldwork requires humility. After an M.Sc. from Calcutta University and a brief period at the Indian Statistical Institute, Béteille joined the newly formed Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics in the late 1950s. Under M.N. Srinivas he learned the craft of village study and the value of long conversations with........

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