Negotiating the testimonial impulse from fictional spaces: Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness

Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess (2014) and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (2004) are both novels based on historical events. While the former chronicles the 1968 massacre of Dalit agricultural workers in Kilvenmani (Tamil Nadu, India) by upper-caste landlords due to caste and class conflicts, the latter thematizes the production and reception of the testimonio in the context of a genocide of Indigenous people in Guatemala that lasted more than thirty years. This essay attempts to read both texts dialogically to offer insights into the epistemic interactions between two parts of the Global South through formal experimentations around ethics, justice, and truth. I argue that both texts use “novel” means to assemble real events from within a testimonial impulse. This unconventional and self-reflexive metafictional mode enables the retrieval of subaltern histories and the assertion of indigenous non-Western perspectives of historical events.