About the author
Andre Beteille has had a distinguished academic career at the Delhi School of Economics where he is professor emeritus of sociology. He has held visiting appointments at Cambridge, London, Berkeley and the Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has published scholarly works on social inequality and social institutions, and also writes for the editorial pages of newspapers. Two collections of his newspaper articles, Chronicles of Our Time, and Ideology and Sociology, have been published by Penguin Books. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Andre Beteille was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2005
