Divide-and-Rule is an old British sport. Once, Winston Churchill warned Indians against following Mahatma Gandhi on the grounds that Gandhi represented the Indian poor less reliably than did Churchill himself. Now comes William Dalrymple, who in his review of Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (Outlook, November 8) instructs us on which Indian writers we may trust and which not. He thus dismisses "the St Stephen's mafia and the Doon School diaspora" who presume to "lecture the world about South Asia from the sanitised safety of an East Coast campus". These elitists, says Dalrymple, must bow down before writers born in the mofussil who (in his colourful phrase) know the "grim reality of the boondocks of Bihar".



Born to privilege, you cannot understand India; reared in a humble home, you must. This is Dalrymple's thesis, to buttress which he offers two names: Sunil Khilnani and Pankaj Mishra. He is pretty vicious...

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