23 February 2026, 17:17 PM A A.I. Mahbub Uddin Ahmed My first encounter with the ideas of Professor André Béteille was in July 1966 in an introductory sociology course at the University of Dhaka (at that time in East Pakistan) through Professor Tom Bottomore’s book, Sociology: A Guide to Problems and Literature (1962). The emphasis on general theory of social stratification for an explanation of the Indian caste system found its empirical reflection, as Bottomore refers to, in the work of Béteille, especially in Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (1965). My second encounter with him was in the Fall of 1975 at Dalhousie University, Halifax where I was writing my Master’s thesis under Professor Bottomore, and he referred to read me Béteille’s “Closed and open social stratification” (1966).…