Those seeking religious or spiritual instruction may need a guru, who teaches and even orders them toward what he considers the correct path. The shishya is asked to follow the guru implicitly and even blindly. However, those who wish to become scholars would be ill-advised to look for a guru. Critical enquiry and original research require one to have a certain independence of mind, to adopt or discard theories and methods according to one’s own intellectual interests, not at the bidding of someone else, even if he be more powerful or (especially) more famous.

Tragically, this important difference between the spiritual search and the scholarly quest is largely lost sight of in India. The academic culture of our country is irredeemably feudal, with those who are older and of higher status almost feeling obliged to act as gurus, demanding obedience and getting reverence in return. This intellectual feudalism exists among the sciences and the humanities, and within the latter, amongst all ideological shades. Marxism is in theory opposed to social hierarchies, but in practice Marxist professors in Calcutta have been no less hierarchical towards their junior colleagues than professors of a conservative Hindu orientation in Varanasi.

While young scholars must not be in search of a single guru, when starting out they may yet benefit from interacting with scholars who are older than themselves. These more experienced hands can provide, to the beginning researcher, clues, orientations, and, above all, critical feedback. They can be guides, advisers, even (temporarily) mentors, but gurus, never. While listening attentively to what their elders have to say, ultimately it is for the individual scholar to decide which specific research problem to engage with, and in what particular ways.

These reflections on intellectual practice are prompted by the deaths, in quick succession, of the two older scholars who most influenced me when I was myself young. These are the ecologist, Madhav Gadgil, who died in Pune on January 7, aged 83, and the sociologist, André Béteille (picture, right), who died in Delhi on February 3, aged 91.

I first met Gadgil in 1982, when I was 24 and he 40. I first met Béteille in 1988, when I had just turned 30 and he was in his mid-50s. Despite the difference in our ages (large in one case, very substantial in the other), I struck up a friendship with each almost immediately, this continuing almost until their deaths. While........

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