Tears of the Begums: Stories of Survivors of the Uprising of 1857

Khwaja Hasan Nizami was born into a Sufi family who were descendants of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and belonged to the Sufi order Chishti- Nizamiya. He was born in 1878 or 1879, twenty years after the 1857 Uprising, then known as the ghadar. A curious mind steeped in spiritual knowledge, he became interested in the stories of the survivors of Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar's family, and recorded their experiences in his book titled Begumat ke Aansoo.

Rana Safvi is a renowned writer, scholar and translator. She is a passionate believer in India's unique civilizational legacy and pluralistic culture which she documents through her writings, podcasts and videos. She has published eight books so far on the culture, history and monuments of India. These are Tales from the Quran and Hadith, The Delhi Trilogy which includes Where Stones Speak, The Forgotten Cities of Delhi and Shahjahanabad: The Living City of Old Delhi. She has translated both the editions of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's seminal work on Delhi, Asar-us-Sanadid and Dastan-e-Ghadar, and four accounts of nineteenth and twentieth-century Delhi from Urdu to English as City of My Heart and A Saint, A Folk Tale and Other Stories: Lesser-Known Monuments of India.