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First, the name. Part of learning to become a D School (Delhi School of Economics) sophisticate was to know how to pronounce it – the Ls are silent in French – and later, to write it with the accent marks in the right place. That aura of foreign glamour that distinguished Professor André Béteille when we entered his class as MA students of sociology never quite faded with familiarity.

We knew he was Indian and that he broke into Bangla when speaking to fellow-Bengalis, but we also knew that in true bhadralok fashion, he inhabited an Anglo-French intellectual milieu with consummate confidence. His way of being at home in the world was our first lesson in how not to be overawed by or defensively dismissive of the Great White Gods of sociology – the then holy trinity of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim – but to make them our companions in critical thinking. 

Looking back, I now understand how important this was. In the mid-1980s when I was an MA student at the Department of Sociology, Delhi University, the post-Emergency surge of social movements around civil liberties and environmental issues – state-sponsored violence against Sikhs and the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred within months of each other in 1984 – drew us to Marx and Gandhi, Gramsci and Ivan Illich.

Giddy with radical critiques of the state, capitalism, industrialism, and the dominant model of development, we dismissed every other inquiry as boring, irrelevant, or complicit in maintaining the status quo. We read feverishly but narrowly, measuring an author’s........

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