The first Urdu autobiographies were written in the 1880s. (The term “autobiography” will be used here in a broad sense, for any kind of consistent autobiographical narrative, including reminiscences that cover only part of the narrator’s life.) These autobiographies engaged in various ways with the colonial situation and particularly with the events of 1857–8. In later autobiographies, the freedom struggle and India’s partition in 1947 came to figure prominently alongside more personal affairs and …