André Béteille is Indian sociology's foremost analyst of inequality. Where M. N. Srinivas taught the discipline to look at the village, Béteille taught it to look at more than caste — to treat caste, class and power as three distinct dimensions of stratification whose relations must be established empirically rather than assumed. His finding, that these dimensions have become progressively dissociated in modern India, is one of the field's most frequently cited conclusions.
Around that empirical core he built a wider theoretical project: a comparative sociology of inequality drawing on Marx, Weber, Tocqueville and Dumont, and a sustained defence of equality and universalism as the working principles of modern Indian institutions.
Life and intellectual formation
Born in 1934 at Chandannagar in Bengal to a French father and a Bengali mother, Béteille studied at Presidency College, Calcutta, and worked briefly at the Indian Statistical Institute before turning to sociology. He completed his doctorate at the Delhi School of Economics under M. N. Srinivas, whose emphasis on fieldwork he retained while widening its analytical frame. He taught at Delhi for his entire career, and became one of the few Indian sociologists to write continuously for both the discipline and the public.
His intellectual position is distinctive: empirically he is an ethnographer of village India, theoretically a comparativist who reads Indian stratification against Europe and the United States, and temperamentally a liberal who takes institutions seriously as carriers of universalist norms.
Caste, Class and Power: the Sripuram study
Caste, Class and Power (1965) studies Sripuram, a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, where the population divided into three broad blocs — Brahmins, non-Brahmins and Adi-Dravidas — each occupying its own quarter, so that hierarchy was inscribed in the very layout of streets.
Béteille's method was to separate analytically what tradition had fused. He treated caste as a matter of ritual status, class as a matter of position in the agrarian economy — chiefly control of land — and power as a matter of office, party and the ability to influence collective decisions.
In the traditional order these three dimensions were superimposed: Brahmins were highest in ritual rank, owned the land, and controlled village decisions through their moral authority and the machinery of the mirasdar system. Status, wealth and power converged in the same persons, and each reinforced the others.
What Béteille documented was the progressive disjunction of the three under conditions of land reform, the migration of Brahmins to urban professions, the extension of adult franchise, panchayat politics and the rise of the non-Brahmin movement in Tamil Nadu. Landownership passed increasingly to non-Brahmin cultivating castes; political power passed to numerically strong groups mobilised through parties; ritual status remained with the Brahmins but was decoupled from both. High ritual standing no longer guaranteed wealth, and wealth no longer guaranteed office.
Three consequences follow, and they are the analytical payoff of the study. First, stratification in India became multidimensional and less predictable — one must ask which dimension a given actor commands. Second, status inconsistency became a normal condition, generating new resentments and new strategies. Third, since class and power are more open to acquisition than ritual rank, mobility became genuinely possible in a way the closed traditional order had not allowed.
Harmonic and disharmonic inequality
Béteille's most elegant conceptual contribution generalises this material. Every society, he argued, exhibits both an existential order of actual inequalities and a normative order of ideas about how inequality ought to be arranged. The relation between the two defines the type of system.
A harmonic system is one in which the two orders correspond: inequality exists and is normatively endorsed as right and natural. Traditional caste society is his exemplar — differences of rank were justified by an ideology of ritual purity, karma and dharma, so hierarchy carried its own legitimation.
A disharmonic system is one in which substantial inequality persists alongside an ideology of equality. Modern industrial societies, and independent India in particular, are disharmonic: the Constitution proclaims equality of status and opportunity while caste, class and gender inequalities remain entrenched. Béteille's point is that disharmony is not hypocrisy but a distinct sociological condition — it makes inequality a permanent object of criticism, politics and reform, and it is the source of the characteristic tension of Indian public life.
Equality, universalism and the backward classes
Much of Béteille's later work examines what happens when egalitarian norms are carried by real institutions. He distinguished equality of opportunity from equality of outcome, and argued that modern Indian institutions — the university, the bureaucracy, the hospital, the court — are constituted by universalist norms: they are supposed to judge individuals by competence and citizenship, not by birth-group membership.
This gives his writing on reservation and the backward classes its characteristic tension. He accepted the moral necessity of redressing historic disability, especially for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but warned that extending group entitlement indefinitely risks converting caste from a disability into a permanent political resource and hollowing out the universalist premise of the institutions themselves. He also insisted, in a well-known intervention, that caste is not race, resisting the assimilation of Indian hierarchy to biological categories.
Critique of caste-only readings of India
Béteille's implicit target throughout is the habit of explaining India by caste alone. Against Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus, he objected that treating hierarchy as the single encompassing ideology of India makes it timeless, ignores the material and political dimensions, and cannot register change. Against culturalist accounts more generally, he insisted that landholding, occupation and political organisation do independent work.
Equally, he resisted the mirror error of reducing India to class. Marxist analysis, he argued, rightly foregrounds material relations but underestimates the persistence of status and the way caste organises agrarian class formation itself. His agrarian studies deliberately hold both together, describing cultivating owners, tenants and landless labourers as classes whose recruitment is nevertheless patterned by caste.
Criticisms
Critics have questioned the generalisability of a single Brahmin-dominated Tanjore village, where the unusual concentration of Brahmin landholding may exaggerate the drama of later dissociation. Marxist writers hold that his disjunction thesis overstates change: caste and class remain heavily overlapping, Dalits are still disproportionately landless, and formal political inclusion has not displaced material domination. Others find his defence of universalist institutions insufficiently attentive to how thoroughly caste privilege is already embedded in the criteria of merit, and read his caution about reservation as an elite liberalism. Dumontian scholars, conversely, argue that separating ritual status from power dissolves precisely what makes caste distinctive.
Legacy
Béteille shifted Indian sociology from the study of caste to the study of inequality, and gave it a comparative and theoretical register it had largely lacked. The Sripuram triad remains the standard framework for analysing rural stratification; the harmonic and disharmonic distinction is the standard way of naming the gap between constitutional promise and social fact; and his work on agrarian structure underlies much subsequent study of class in the countryside.
For the UPSC answer
Béteille is the reliable instrument for any question that pairs caste with class or power. Open with the Sripuram case — name the village and Thanjavur district — and state the argument as a movement from superimposition to dissociation, listing the drivers: land reform, Brahmin out-migration, adult franchise, panchayats and the non-Brahmin movement. Deploy harmonic versus disharmonic wherever a question asks about the persistence of inequality in a constitutional democracy; it is the single highest-yield phrase in his corpus. Use him as the corrective to single-factor readings — against Dumont's ideological hierarchy on one side and crude class reductionism on the other — and balance the answer by conceding the Marxist point that caste and class still overlap substantially, so dissociation is a tendency rather than an accomplished fact.
References & further reading
- Béteille, A. (1965). Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Béteille, A. (1974). Studies in Agrarian Social Structure. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Béteille, A. (1977). Inequality among Men. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Béteille, A. (1983). The Idea of Natural Inequality and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Béteille, A. (1992). The Backward Classes in Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Béteille, A. (2002). Equality and Universality: Essays in Social and Political Theory. Delhi: Oxford University Press.