Andre Béteille interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, 1^st June 1986, filmed by Julian Jacobs

0:00:05 Introduction; childhood and family background, father French, mother Bengali; at College in Calcutta started as a student of physics but changed to anthropology; eventually began teaching in the Department of Sociology at Delhi University

0:02:32 Had natural inclination to compare ways of life because of own mixed background and prompted orientation towards anthropology

0:03:26 Did honours degree in anthropology at University of Calcutta and afterwards an M.Sc. taught degree; shortly after the Department of Sociology opened in Delhi and was emerging as premier department so moved there as a lecturer in sociology and began research for Ph.D. degree; department headed by M.N. Srinivas with whom I worked for Ph.D.

0:04:35 Influenced by N.K. Bose; memories of Srinivas; stress on the importance of fieldwork; had first intended to work with Tamal speakers in Delhi; Srinivas insisted I work in an area very different from the one in which I had grown up which was unusual for social studies in India

0:08:45 Choice of Tanjore mainly own idea; had intended to study temples and how they worked; first impressions of Tanjore; Tamal speakers, living with Brahmins and found I could understand their ritual language; Mother’s family were orthodox Brahmins; Grandmother particularly religious and noted similar behaviour among widows in Tanjore; surprised by relations between castes which were much more formal than in Calcutta or Delhi; Brahmins attention to detail

0:13:08 Experience of fieldwork; feelings about loss of privacy; didn’t really enjoy fieldwork except in retrospect

0:16:24 ‘Caste,  Class and Power’ was written from Ph.D. thesis; a village study; previous books of village studies by F.G. Bailey, Adrian Mayer and McKim Marriott based on caste structure; own work added class and power structure; examined the changing relationship between the three and the forces that brought about the change; reflections on deficiencies in the book

0:22:53  Interest in equality and inequality in human societies; after book published pursued  work on caste in larger context than one village which appeared as ‘Castes: Old and New’; moved on to study class through agrarian relations and only after that to the more general theme of inequality

0:25:06 Srinivas’s work on caste limited; own essay ‘The Future of the Backward Classes: The competing demands of status and power’ looked at wider political issues than just sanscritization

0:27:20 Own thoughts on future of the caste system; won’t disappear but will change; Hinduism and the religious basis of caste; life inconceivable without some inequality; premise of equality in societies in past and present, East and West; conflict in West between value of  achievement and equality; exacerbated  in secular societies with lack of an afterlife to correct inequalities

0:37:08 Reflections on the work of Louis Dumont; Marxism and extreme positions; unsatisfactory nature of Dumont’s which work equates Indian society with Hinduism; too little appreciation of the economic and political forces in contemporary India

0:39:48 Second reason for unsatisfactory nature of Dumont’s work; Marxism much more important but very holistic; collective identities; Dumont’s work on India is important but needed more emphasis on material factors rather than ideas; Dumont’s work had shifted Indian sociology from the field view to book view of Indian society, now need to redress the balance

0:47:29 Hinduism and Islam; Hindu pluralism and Islamic fundamentalism; India and China and the management of polity; India’s weakness may be related to proliferation of religions where China’s strength is that it generated few

0:52:26 Reflections on Europe and India; thoughts on the future of scheduled tribes in India

0:56:31 Importance of the work of N.K. Bose; ‘The Structure of Hindu Society’ foreshadows much of the work of Dumont and Pocock; he was a great fieldworker and lived with tribal people and showed the value of ethnographic observation combined with classical texts; showed how it was; differences between Bose and Srinivas; Bose’s political interests

1:01:15  Among British anthropologists, most influenced by Evans-Pritchard through his writings and his influence on M.N. Srinivas and Max Gluckman; Simon Fellowship at Manchester; Gluckman’s contributions to anthropology; John Barnes idea of social networks

1:06:22 Memories of Edmund Leach; ‘Political Systems of Highland Burma’; shook British anthropology out of its complacency but avoided the role of a guru; Meyer Fortes and his influence on Srinivas; a craftsman

1:12:09 Sociology and anthropology; dominance of ideas of Radcliffe-Brown in 1950’s then Levi-Strauss in 1980’s changed nature of anthropology

1:14:40 Nationalism in India and tribal identities; integration; sub-nationalism; religious identity;

1:17:05 Now working on backward classes and their position in Indian society based on Smut’s Lectures given in Cambridge in 1985