What Banu Mushtaq's Booker Means for India

Author Banu Mushtaq (left) and Translator Deepa Bhasthi (right.) | Photo Courtesy: The Wire

On May 21st, author Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, a collection of twelve short stories, originally written in Kannada and later translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, won the coveted International Booker Prize, becoming the first ever Kannada book to do so. It came as a rebuke to India’s literary establishment. For decades, Mushtaq’s stories of Muslim women simmered in small Karnataka presses without mainstream recognition. Her Booker triumph exposed a hard truth: The most vital Indian writing often thrives in the shadows, untranslated, until the West stamps it ‘important’. Heart Lamp existed in the margins, until the Booker Prize forced the world to look. Mushtaq wrote in a patchwork language of Kannada, Urdu, and Dhakini. Perhaps, it never belonged to the urban English-reading audience but to a different ecosystem entirely, one defined by oral memory, regional publishing, and community readership. Her win is historic not just because it is the first for a Kannada work, but because it disrupts long-standing assumptions about what Indian literature is “meant” to look like on a global stage; and whose stories get preserved, translated, and awarded. For readers accustomed to canonical Indian literature in English translation, this feels like a paradigm shift, long overdue. It tells us that the stories tucked into regional presses, never meant for international audiences, are finally being taken seriously, not as exotic outliers, but as literature. Real, world-shaping literature. 

A rotating cast of women threads its way through the stories. One woman organizes a mass circumcision ceremony for boys in her town, believing it would ‘tame’ them, while another follows a woman abandoned by her husband for failing to bear a son. These women aren’t heroes or villains, they’re constrained by tradition, yet quietly resistant. Her stories explore complex societal themes of systemic oppression, class disparities in healthcare, societal injustice, while most of her protagonists are confined to the walls of their homes. In Mushtaq’s world, power isn’t loud or liberating. But,  for every woman who wins, there’s another who disappears quietly, not defeated but simply forgotten. 

The stories in Heart Lamp don’t scream profundity, but are impactful in their own subtle way.  A mother of three deciding to end her life after her husband remarries, a young tutor who holds Arabic classes for girls with the aim of finding a suitable bride for himself, someone who must know how to make his favourite dish; a young man obsessed with his sister in law’s high-heeled shoes. There’s no plot twist that comes to save the day in any of them. Things don’t happen so much as they unfold, where what’s left unsaid tells you more than any of the dialogue. These themes aren’t “plot points” in the traditional sense; instead, they nudge the reader towards introspection and emotional revolutions that feel enormous because they are not explicitly declared as such. I found myself - three stories in- confused, unsettled, and very much hooked. 

It was not a book that came at me with urgency, which is perhaps why it feels so disarming when it started speaking to me anyway, through characters who feel like they have always been living around me, just slightly out of view. What you will find here is a narrative refusal, Mushtaq’s refusal to explain, to translate, to perform. 

Her stories are interior, they do not rush or come across as desperate for understanding. They simply exist, like the many women in them, on their own terms. Much of modern feminist literature relies on either women’s pain or triumph to feel “important.” But Mushtaq’s characters do neither. They simply live, observe, and struggle, but not performatively, and that quality, in itself, feels radical.  

Some stories feel too brief, some characters dart in and out too quickly, with moments that feel like they belong to another time. That’s not a criticism, it felt like the point. The collection refuses neatness. The narratives orbit kitchens and courtyards, unfolding through gestures and glances. Mushtaq doesn’t write spectacle, she writes pause, and in doing so, elevates the everyday to something fascinating. 

Much of the brilliance of Heart Lamp’s English edition rests on translator Deepa Bhasthi, who has been a long-time advocate of Kannada literature and regional voices. The translation makes no attempt to flatten the unfamiliar. There are cultural nuances and emotional cadences that remain slightly out of reach. They maintain their cultural specificity rather than becoming universal. What Bhasthi accomplishes is the sense that the prose never really flattens into English. It resists being too smooth, too digestible. She leaves words from Kannada in, and that resistance became part of the reading experience. In words and spirit, she has stuck to her reminder in the translator’s note at the end that says,  “translation of a text is never merely an act of replacing words in one language with equivalent words in another; every language, with its idioms and speech conventions brings with it a lot of cultural knowledge that often needs translating too.”

The title Heart Lamp is, I believe, a microcosm of the collection’s style and substance. A lamp is not a spotlight. It does not expose, it illuminates dimly. Reading these stories feels exactly like that, not a flash of revelation, but a slow representation of the world Mushtaq lays bare for the reader. Banu Mushtaq didn’t write for the mainstream or for institutions. She didn’t let the language of her writing deter or bother her. In her own words in an interview given to the Hindu Frontline, she advises young writers, “Whatever language you write in, just write. Write and write.”  She wrote for the people around her, women navigating shame, duty, guilt, memory in words that never strived too hard to be “universal”, and yet somehow ended up feeling more truthful than any I’ve read in a long time. 

(Edited by Maya Ribeiro and Giya Sood.)