Rumor functioned both as unreliable noise and as the best available colonial intelligence

Evidence

In the fractious social and political environment that characterized Deli’s mythic “pioneering” years, rumor carried uneven weight—sometimes dismissed as everything the “facts” were not, at other moments the best sources of them. Workers, in turn, further amplified European stories of native violence, interrupting official efforts to identify its sources and perpetrators. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1038

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s themes on colonial commonsense and how colonized subjects played back European fears; connects to Ranajit Guha’s work on rumor in colonial India. — connects to: Colonial authorities erred by treating rumor as speech — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1809