Andre Beteille is one of India’s foremost sociologists, well known for his work on social inequality and institutions, and for his qualities as a teacher, always meticulous and eloquent, enthusiastic, supportive and generous with students, and ever ready for a good discussion and argument. In his engaging style, he is willing to spar on any contemporary issue, social or intellectual problem. He is a serious and deeply respected presence in academia and more so, a popular figure among younger and even middle-aged scholars who clamour for his attention whenever he visits the Delhi School of Economics where he spent over forty years of his active academic life. The volume under review is a remarkable collection of essays on a theme close to Professor Beteille’s heart, working as he has been in recent times on his autobiography: childhood and its dreams, his two grandmothers, memories and reflections of his later life.
In a delightful vignette of his first few days in a boarding school in Patna, Andre Beteille (2005) records the anguish and anxiety he experienced as a new boy. More than his actual arrival at the school, Beteille’s experience of being prepared for the experience is far more revealing in terms of the gradual building up of the anxiety it provokes in a child for an unknown experience for which he is fated. There was a curiosity tempered by a nervousness about the future, an excitement about entering the somewhat privileged world to which his brothers had access muted by the dismay that separation from home would inevitably cause.