Fragmented Memories, Fictional Histories: Reimagining India through Rushdie and Ghosh

This paper explores how Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines utilize postmodern narrative strategies to deconstruct official histories and reimagine Indian national identity. Grounded in Linda Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction, the study examines how both novels blend memory, myth, and historical events to challenge the linear, unified narratives promoted by colonial and nationalist discourses. Through fragmented structures, unreliable narrators, magical realism, and intertextuality, these texts foreground the constructedness of history and the subjectivity of memory. Rushdie’s flamboyant and parodic rewriting of India’s post-independence past contrasts with Ghosh’s introspective, memory-driven critique of borders and communal violence. Together, the novels underscore the role of fiction in voicing marginalized perspectives and emphasize the plural, contested, and evolving nature of national identity. This paper argues that postmodernism, far from being a Western import, functions as a critical tool in the Indian postcolonial context for interrogating dominant ideologies and amplifying subaltern voices.