My walks with Andre Beteille: He was a true scholar who never thought of himself as an academic star

Should there be a death penalty? Why didn’t reservations work? Was Dostoevsky not far better than Tolstoy? As we got to know each other, we talked about his life. We argued about his parents. I had a soft spot for his feisty, indefatigable Bengali mother. He who had been exhausted by her fighting spirit returned in his conversations to his French father, a gentler man, who I felt was defeated, and who Andre saw as otherwise. Andre’s wonderful essay on his two grandmothers and his memoir captures some of that terrain.

We talked too about his peers, the brilliant trio of economists who were the stars of intellectual India in the ’60s, Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, and Sukhomoy Chakraborty. Andre respected Bhagwati for being a free market economist at a time when it was deeply unfashionable to be one; for Sen, the star, he felt admiration and some hesitation, perhaps a kind of jealousy. Sukhomoy Chakraborty, to him, was the great intellect. He was not one of the A-listers in his telling, but he watched them from the sidelines.

In fact, in Andre’s own telling, he was never the star – that was the point. In Kolkata, he studied in St Xavier’s, not the prestigious Presidency College. He never taught at Oxford or Harvard or Columbia, choosing to work all his life in India. Nor did he influence government policy like Sukhomoy Chakraborty. His intellectual views were neither stridently left or right. He didn’t think caste was the only lens to see the country from.

Each one of these beliefs and decisions made him a small rebel. And put together, it made him live a life that was uncompromised by vanity, fashion, and the temptations of prestige and power. He believed what he did, he carved a narrow, straight path and walked down it. He felt this was the true scholar’s way. One should think clearly, not lie to himself.

The last time I really saw him was shortly after my son had died. He had by then retreated, staying largely in his room, sitting quite still, not speaking much. When he asked me how I was, I burst into tears, and like the indifferent professor of our walks, he watched me cry silently, waiting for me to stop.

As always, his calm soothed me. I noticed Amartya Sen’s memoirs on his table and asked if he had read it, and told him Sen had written of him very warmly. He hadn’t read it and so I opened the book to that section and read to Andre about himself. He listened politely. “Are you bored?”, I asked him once I was done. “What do you think about, sitting in the room all day.” “I think about him,” he said with a smile, pointing to a photograph of his beloved grandson. I squeezed his hand and left.

The writer is publisher, Juggernaut