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158 pages

English

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André Béteille’s memoir, spanning his childhood, his schooldays and his early years as a sociologist, encompasses many worlds—that of colonial Chandannagar, where he spent his early years; of Patna and Calcutta, where he went to Englishmedium as well as Bengali-medium schools; and of his college days, where he started off as a physicist and then turned to sociology—a fi eld in which he was to win international renown.There are unforgettable descriptions of his colonial childhood and his two grandmothers, one French and the other Bengali; and of momentous events he lived through such as famine, communal riots and Partition. Equally compelling are his portraits of family members, his neighbourhood, school friends, teachers and Calcutta’s intellectual stars, among them Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen. With its lucid and eloquent prose infused with acute sociological observations and insights into family relationships, childhood and adolescence, caste, class and community, this is a book that illumines the evolution of a brilliant teacher and scholar, even as it deepens our understanding of universal human dilemmas and desires.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
Date de parution	01 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184757057
Langue	English

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ANDR B TEILLE
Sunlight on the Garden
Contents
Dedication
1. My Two Grandmothers
2. Discord at Home
3. Boarding School
4. Calcutta 1946
5. The Great Calcutta Killings
6. A Neighbourhood School
7. 30 Park Street
8. Setback and Recovery
9. A New Orientation
10. At Large in the University
11. An Early Taste of Research
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
To the memory of Shibani Mukherji, my maternal grandmother whom we all knew as Dida
The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold. We cannot cage the minute Within its net of gold, When all is told We cannot beg for pardon.

Louis MacNeice
1

My Two Grandmothers
Like most children, I had two grandmothers, but none of the children I knew had two who were as unlike as mine in background, association and temperament. My two grandmothers were both widows in straitened circumstances, and they both lived in the same small town where I grew up. But their social worlds were far apart, and I have no recollection that they ever met. Their differences were in any case very large; what made it impossible for them to meet was of course the marriage of my parents which had overturned the worlds of both. From the social point of view, that marriage was a recipe for disaster-all the more since neither of my parents belonged to the kind of affluent and cosmopolitan world in which their match might have been considered just a little risqu , and to that extent fashionable. In my adult life I have had many encounters with that world but have not found it more appealing than the ones I will now describe.
My paternal grandmother lived in an old, colonial-style house on the strand facing the river.
She had come down in the world, or so she believed, and made my father, her only child, believe. She was still beautiful when I knew her as a child. Her parents had come out from France as indigo planters, and they settled in Chandannagar where she was born. I doubt that they made much money, and she married an official with the designation of tr sorier, which would correspond roughly with collector in English, who had come out from France in the colonial service. Shortly after my father was born and just a few years after her marriage, her husband died, a victim of cholera, a disease which must have carried away many Europeans who came to seek their fortunes in the colonies.
Thus, while still in her twenties, my grandmother, known to everyone in our town as Madame B teille or simply Madame, became a widow with a small son and hardly any means of support. The local French community came to her aid and established a small school with the grand title of cole de jeunes filles , and placed it in her charge. There she taught and lived, for the school had only three or four classrooms, the rest of the building being used as her apartment.
She devoted the early years of her widowhood to the raising of her only son around whom she must have woven many dreams. Her resources were meagre, and she had to strain herself to maintain good relations with the few families of French notables in the town: the administrator, the judicial magistrate and the police commissioner. When I knew her, the strain was obvious even to the eyes of a child, for, by then, her only son had shamed her by marrying a native woman.
The French officials who came and went may have stood a little in awe of her for she had a majestic presence, but on the whole, they treated her kindly. However, she had an enemy in the parish priest, also a Frenchman, Father Durier, after whom I was named Andr Marie. He was by all accounts a most remarkable man, and for some reason he took a great liking to my mother and so became my grandmother s enemy. I never saw Father Durier, but my mother was devoted to his memory. She was an anarchist at heart, and her heroes were people who tilted at windmills. She would recount with great relish how Father Durier had told off the administrator, the magistrate and the police commissioner. My mother believed he could do this because, unlike the others, he was learned, and upright. She had great faith in learning and in rectitude and believed, rather innocently, that the two went together. When in later life I would point by name to the many learned people I knew who were petty schemers, she would reply doggedly that they could not be really learned. She herself was not learned, and I wondered what she would have thought if she had been.
Father Durier berated my grandmother about her hardness of heart towards my mother. Madame B teille heard him out patiently and courteously as became a good French Catholic woman, but did not yield a millimetre. She did not have to put up with Father Durier for the rest of her life. He was replaced by Father Daniel, a tall and gaunt man with watery blue eyes who was the first parish priest I can recall. He was a Frenchman of a very different stripe from his predecessor, and for him, as for many others of his calling, race came before religion. He was condescending towards my mother, and my grandmother had no difficulty in establishing easy relations with the new director of her soul. My mother may have prejudiced me against him, but I still remember with distaste the patronizing manner in which he would pat me on the head when I greeted him on the street as I was instructed by my father to do.
My grandmother s house had a small clock tower adjacent to it, which was one of the landmarks of the town. The clock tower had an inscription recording the name of the person who had made the benefaction; he was my grandmother s paternal uncle or her grandfather, I cannot recall which. The name, Domain de St Pour ain, was a source of some strife between my parents. My father believed, although he did not assert his belief too strongly, that his mother s ancestors were squires of some sort as was indicated by the name on the clock tower. My mother hotly repudiated this, for she had found out from Father Durier that the Domains were common people who had merely come from St Pour ain, and assumed aristocratic pretensions in the colonies. True or false, my grandmother was quite capable of imposing upon the petty officials who came out to the colonies on short spells of service.
My grandmother s house on the strand was a somewhat mysterious place for us in our childhood. We passed it almost every day, in the evenings, and sometimes also in the early mornings, during our rambles along the strand and down the bank to the edge of the river, but we did not have free access to it. I wonder now what would have happened if we just wandered in and presented ourselves as her grandchildren. My mother s fierce pride stood in the way for she did not want us to go where she thought we would not be welcome. There was an additional impediment which might have been the more important one in my case. Till I was nine, I hardly spoke any language other than Bengali, and I worried about what I would do if she addressed me in French or English. Perhaps my peculiar childhood has made me unusually sensitive to the processes of social exclusion, and keeping my distance has become a part of my nature with somewhat mixed consequences for my career as a sociologist.
In the arrangement of her household, my grandmother maintained the lifestyle of a French gentlewoman living under adverse conditions in an alien land. I am certain that in her circumstances, she would have found living in France even more difficult. She did in fact return with her infant son shortly after losing her husband, but found little help from the people on whom she thought she could depend. She had cut her roots from France, and there was no going back to the land of her ancestors.
The French in Chandannagar were in those days an odd assortment of people, but we had very little to do with them, with a few exceptions. One exception was the family Lehuraux, consisting of two brothers and a sister, all elderly persons in my childhood, of my grandmother s rather than my father s generation. The two brothers had moved to France where they were joined by the sister who had married and become widowed in America. During the war they came back to Chandannagar, but there was no suitable house for their accommodation. My mother promptly offered them ours. All the children were bundled into a single room, my mother slept on the veranda, and the house was turned upside down. My father could not say very much since the Lehuraux were French with active connections in France and America, were highly respectable, and had supported his mother in her distress, before she had acquired an impossible daughter-in-law. They had been, to begin with, friends of his and not her family.
My mother either liked or disliked people intensely. She liked the Lehuraux. So she gave all of them Bengali names which they accepted patiently and good-humouredly. The elder brother, a widower, was called Dada , the widowed sister Didi , and the other brother an amiable, elderly bachelor, was for some reason known only to my mother called Pishima . My father, of course, called them all by their names, Alfred, Anna and Ren , although they were of an older generation. Being brought up in the Bengali etiquette of address, we found it strange that my father should call someone Alfred who called his own mother Nora.
The Lehuraux interlude did not last very long. The war in Europe was soon over, and they went away, first to Europe and then to the United States. But while it lasted, it was full of excitement. We had exotic food, the parents had expensive presents and the children were generously tipped. Most generous of all was a nephew, Phil Delaunay, who showed up from time to time, and gave each one of the children a silver rupee and the most exquisite Belgian chocolates.
Phil s mother had been the eldest of the Lehuraux sisters and her husband had amassed large estates in Comilla and the neighbouring districts. What connection they had with my grand