To the Editor:

As an exacting reviewer myself, I have always welcomed honest criticism of anything I have written or said. But I do believe your readers are entitled to a negative review when it engages with the book and takes it to task, if necessary, for its errors of commission or omission. Instead, Sunil Khilnani dismisses my book, “India: From Midnight to the Millennium” (Book Review, Sept. 14) in two sneeringly patronizing paragraphs, full of completely unsubstantiated judgments about its contents.

Khilnani is, apparently, the author of a forthcoming book that aims to cover much of the same ground as mine. Should your editors have allowed a writer in that situation to claim that “reflective and incisive nonfiction interrogations of India’s distinctive modernity have yet to be produced” and to add self-servingly that “this situation remains unaltered by the publication of Shashi Tharoor’s book”? How could your editors have let Khilnani allege that my work “lacks any driving focus” when he has already identified the four themes that drive its focus, while labeling them “slogans” around which “recycled journalist pieces” have been “arranged”? (This latter charge, irresponsibly inferred from my own list of acknowledgments, is particularly galling, since barely 15% of this rather substantiated book involves material that had been published before, in different form).

Your reviewer is, of course, entitled to his judgments, though this is the first time I have seen a lack of “puzzlement” listed as a disqualification. But I am amazed that your editors let pass a review that simultaneously condemns the book as anecdotal and describes it as “informative” and that presumes to damn the author with the faint praise of being “a decent and congenial man,” something Khilnani is not competent to judge, and which is completely irrelevant to the substance and thrust of the book being reviewed.

It appears that Khilnani’s principal problem with the book is that it is not his. That is a flimsy basis for his glib trashing of it, especially when every other major literary editor in the country, whether admiring or critical, has considered “India: From Midnight to the Millennium” worthy of full and serious discussion. In the process, your readers have been done a disservice.

Shashi Tharoor, New York

Sunil Khilnani replies:

I am glad, though unsurprised, that Tharoor is more pleased with his book than I was. He feels injured that only two paragraphs of my review were devoted to it; I could certainly have expressed my views at greater length, but somehow I doubt whether that would have left him feeling less injured.