First Published in Eurasia Review Indian sociology in the 1950s and 1960s was a discipline searching for direction. Much of its language was borrowed from colonial anthropology or from philosophical readings of tradition. Caste appeared in those writings as an ancient design, and Indian society was often described as a museum of customs. André Béteille entered this field with a different temperament. He carried no appetite for grand theories and no desire to defend inherited pictures. Béteille preferred to ask how people actually lived, how they argued with one another, [...]