Orientalism, ‘that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic’. To Rushdie, such portrayals did not belong only to the imperial past; ‘the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain’. Despite the efforts of the Orientalists and their glamorous exoticizing of British imperalism, however, there was one problem: once
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