The Royals Write Back: Khwaja Hasan Nizami's Tears of the Begums as a Denotative Testimonio

In the aftermath of the revolt of 1857, the offended and cautious British introduced a series of stringent measures to alter and erase the collective memory of the colonized Indian people, in an effort to ensure that no organized rebellion occurs in the future. The reign of terror that ensued sought its justification in the accounts of British historians, who branded this rebellion as the “Sepoy Mutiny.” These narratives were further reinforced by a scarcity of genuine efforts among Indians to contest them until well after the nation’s independence. Khwaja Hasan Nizami’s Tears of the Begums (originally in Urdu) is a different case, though. Written in the 1910s and 1920s, it documents the testimonies of members of the royal family, who bore the brunt of the cruellest aspects of this domination. The collection of twenty-nine accounts of decolonized history makes this text worthy of being cited as an earlier example of testimonial literature or testimonio. The present paper aims to discuss the prospects and problems of situating it within this Latin American genre by studying it against the ideas of prominent testimonial writing scholars such as George Yúdice, John Beverley, and Kavita Panjabi, finding reverberations of features considered indispensable for categorizing it in this genre.