Storia e conoscenza storica in Midnight’s Children e The Shadow Lines

The troubled relationship between truth and history after Nietzsche is the starting point of this paper. It observes how two Indian writers, Rushdie and Ghosh, react to the post-modern scepticism in very different ways. Rushdie dramatizes it and mocks any claim to true to fact historiography. Ghosh seems to have absorbed scepticism and historical unreliability to the point of taking it for granted and "moving on" towards a conscious use of literary imagination in historiography. Partiality and subjectivity become the main ingredients to the construction of a memory, which the writer considers more valuable than history.