‘Like a thousand fireflies lighting the sky'

Hindustan Times

22-05-2025

Banu Mushtaq wrote her first short story when she was in middle school in Karnataka's Hassan town in the 1950s. That journey came full circle on Wednesday as the 77-year-old writer, lawyer and activist scripted history by winning the international booker prize along with her translator Deepa Bhasthi, becoming the first Kannada writer to clinch the prestigious award.
The winning book, Heart Lamp – a collection of 12 short stories written over a period of 30 years that exquisitely captured the everyday lives of Muslim women in Karnataka with wit and poise – beat five other titles from around the world. It is the first short story collection to win the annual prize that honours the best fiction translated into English.
'This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky -- brief, brilliant and utterly collective,' Mushtaq said at a ceremony at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
'This book is my love letter to the idea that no story is local or small…to write in Kannada is to inherit a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom.'
Bhashti added, 'What a win this is for my beautiful language.' She became the first Indian translator to win the International Booker.
This is the second Indian book to win the international booker prize in three years after Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell won the 2022 award for Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi). The writer and the translator receive 25,000 pounds each.
'Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women's lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression,' said jury chair Max Porter.
A celebrated name in Karnataka, Mushtaq started writing in the 1970s and blazed a trail with her outspoken advocacy of women's rights and freedoms, attracting a volley of threats, social boycotts, and even surviving a knife attack. Her internal turmoil, often reflected in her protagonists, once brought her on the brink of taking her life in her late 20s as a young mother, but she survived that too.
'My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates,' she told the Booker Prize in an interview.
Her early grounding in the progressive movements in Karnataka served as the foundation for her decades-long body of work. She worked with Lankesh Patrike, a noted Kannada newspaper, for close to a decade, and one of her stories was adapted by director Girish Kasaravalli into a National Award winning film, Hasina, in 2004.
'The daily incidents reported in the media and the personal experiences I have endured have been my inspiration. The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write,' Mushtaq added.
Born in 1948 in Karnataka's Hassan town, Mushtaq grew up in a large Muslim family and initially went to an Urdu medium school before joining a Kannada language institution at the age of eight, quickly learning the regional language within a month. Her father, a government health inspector in the erstwhile Mysore state, encouraged her writing and bought her books in Kannada, despite their precarious financial situation.
Her writing began when she was in school, but it was after she was married at 26, when her first short story appeared in the popular Kannada magazine Prajamata.
In early interviews, she spoke about the indelible influence of her father and his constant support in her rebellion against the authoritarian atmosphere of her school. As she grew older and then started teaching, she fought back a pincer attack of patriarchy and community norms that muzzled her independence. She defied social expectations by marrying a man of her choice in 1974 but quickly felt overwhelmed by the orthodox gaze of her in-laws.
'One day, we had a terrible fight and I decided to commit suicide. I went to our room and poured petrol all over my body. I was just about to light a match and set myself on fire when my husband grabbed my hand and stopped me. He asked me why I was doing this to myself. I explained my mental anguish to him,' she said in a 2010 interview. As she broke free of shackles, her family also battled perennial financial woes for some time, forcing her to sew clothes for money and her husband to work in a watch repair shop.
She wrote sporadically over the next decade, coming into her own only by the 1980s. During this time, she travelled across the state and found her footing in the Bandaya Sahitya movement, a progressive protest literary circle that challenged caste and class oppression.
'The 1970s was a decade of movements in Karnataka – the Dalit movement, farmers' movement, language movement, rebellion movement, women's struggles, environmental activism, and theatre, activities among others, had a profound impact on me,' Mushtaq said.
'My direct engagement with the lives of marginalised communities, women, and the neglected, along with their expressions, gave me the strength to write. Overall, the social conditions of Karnataka shaped me,' she added. In the early 2000s, her advocacy of women's entry into mosques brought her into the crosshairs of social conservatives who ordered a social boycott for three months, a diktat that sparked a string of threats and a knife attack on her.
Mushtaq has written six volumes of short stories, apart from a novel, a book of poems and another of essays. She won the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award, among others.
Bhasthi is a distinguished writer, literary translator, and cultural critic, whose translation of K Shivarama Karanth's novel, The Same Village The Same Tree, was published in 2022, followed by Fate's Game and Other Stories, a collection of short stories by K Gouramma in 2023.
'With Banu's stories, I first read all the fiction she had published before I narrowed it down to the ones that are in Heart Lamp. I was lucky to have a free hand in choosing what stories I wanted to work with, and Banu did not interfere with the organised chaotic way I went about it,' she said.
'I was very conscious of the fact that I knew very little about the community she places her stories in, so I only experienced art that was either set in or was about the milieu that she writes about. Thus, during the period I was working on the first draft, I found myself immersed in the very addictive world of Pakistani television dramas, music by people like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Sethi, Arooj Aftab and others, and I even took classes to learn the Urdu script,' she added.
Women and girls who challenged norms of society and patriarchy in quiet, rebellious ways formed a central theme in her work, often blended with humour and poignance. In Heart Lamp – a collection that was whittled down from a list of 50 stories written between 1990 and 2023, and also won the English PEN Translation Award – a grandmother craves soft drink to get over bereavement, a cleric is obsessed with Gobi Manchurian, and a wife's jealousy forces her husband to look for a groom for his widowed mother.
'The more intensely the incident affects me, the more deeply and emotionally I write,' Mushtaq said. 'I do not engage in extensive research; my heart itself is my field of study.'