A narrative form that sidelines the colonized is falsehood regardless of content

Evidence

75 Salman Rushdie, “Outside the Whale,” in Imaginary Homelands (London: Penguin, 1992), 90. On Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet he writes: … Indians get walk-ons, but remain, for the part, bit-players in their own history. Once this form is set, it scarcely matters that individual fictional Brits get unsympathetic treatment from their author. The form insists that they are the ones whose stories matter, and this is so much less than the whole truth that it must be called a falsehood. It will not do to argue that Scott was attempting to portray the British in India, and that such was the nature of imperialist society that the Indians would only have had bitparts. It is no defense to say that work adopts, in its structure, the very ethic which, in its content and tone, it pretends to dislike. It is, in fact, the case for the prosecution. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1513

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Rushdie’s formalist argument — that structural marginalization is itself an ethico-political falsehood independent of sympathetic content — reframes how we judge any historical or fictional account, colonial or otherwise.
• SEED: Angle: applying Rushdie’s ‘bit-players in their own history’ test to contemporary scholarship and journalism that center privileged protagonists.
• XREF: connects to: Urdu prose narratives bear no trace of colonial resistance or national sentiment