Author versus author

William Dalrymple reviewed Pankaj Mishra's An End To Suffering for Outlook recently: "Few writers are as well qualified—at least in a literary sense—to tackle the tricky task Mishra has set himself. Over the last few years he has established himself as one of the finest essayists of his generation. His reviews, political analysis and travel writing in Granta, the TLS and especially the New York Review of Books have revealed him to be a commentator who can write with equal skill on fiction, politics and history, and whose fine measured Naipaulian prose is backed with a restless intelligence and astonishingly wide reading. Yet while he can write with authority on the latest trends in international fiction and politics, he knows mofussil India with as much intimacy as any other major Indian writer in English.
In a field still dominated by the St Stephen’s mafia and the Doon School diaspora, Mishra is an outsider. He was born in Jhansi and grew up in dusty railway colonies around Uttar Pradesh, before taking a degree in the decaying anarchy of Allahabad University. In contrast to the optimistic platitudes of a diaspora writer like, say, Sunil Khilnani—educated abroad and clearly knowing nothing of the grim reality of the boondocks of Bihar—Mishra does not lecture the world about South Asia from the sanitised safety of an East Coast campus. Instead, he writes as a man who really knows, from hard experience, the provincial India he writes about and in which he still lives for most of the year."
Ramachandra Guha took exception to some of Dalrymple's statements. His riposte has been published in this week's issue of Outlook (we'll link as soon as the new issue becomes available online):
"Dalrymple's argument is mischievous as well as wrong-headed. His dig at the 'Doon School diaspora' is calculated to stimulate prejudice and envy among his readers, sentiments that would quickly disappear were the category made more specific. For the major diasporic writers who studied at the Doon School are Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh. Both have displayed in good measure the writerly qualities Dalrymple says he prizes: honesty, hard experience, intelligence and learning..."
If you go by the principle that you should judge a man by the calibre of his enemies, I'd say Dalrymple's just gone up a notch. Farrukh Dhondy attempted to attack his essay on Naipaul's weak grasp of history in Tehelka recently, but not with much skill. Guha is a far more erudite opponent.