Stories From the Margin: Theorizing and Historicizing Testimonial Writings in Regional Indian Literature

Abstract

Testimonio is a new genre that emerged in the 1960s in Latin America and came to be used by liberation and social movements of women, black, Adivasis, and other oppressed people. As the oppressed reasserted themselves publicly, their voices became more audible, and they began to vigorously develop their strategies for effective communication. When the oppressed find the existing genre is not appropriate to express their feelings, they start to introduce new forms of literature; it is because of the existing genre’s inadequacy of representing the oppressed in early literary forms like novels, short stories, essays, picaresque novels, lyrics, sonnets, autobiographies, and secular theatres. This paper is an attempt to engage with the ongoing debate of the testimonio literature in post-colonial Writings. Taking some works written in Indian Regional Literature, we pose the question that the marginalized and indigenous people start to reflect on their lives through literature and a new type of genre called ‘Testimonio Literature’ is slowly emerging from the margin. To extend the scope of the question, we take a few autobiographical anecdotes and narratives on such marginalized lives. We argue that marginalized lives have never been represented as they deserve, and their identity is always hidden in the wider genre of literature.