Lady with the lamp

The Hindu

24-05-2025

Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq has been lending expression to the voiceless for five decades, and when Deepa Bhasthi came on board as translator, her stories leapt across linguistic barriers and provincial borders. On Tuesday (May 20, 2025), Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada to English by Bhasthi, won the International Booker Prize for 2025.
This is the first honour for Kannada, a language Mushtaq says has 'cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom', on this stage. It's also the first time a collection of short stories has been feted, and the second time in three years an Indian writer has gotten the top prize. Geetanjali Shree had won for Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell in 2022.
Heart Lamp (And Other Stories/Penguin) is a selection of 12 tales, written between 1990 and 2023. An array of characters have walk-on parts — maulvis, thuggish brothers who flex muscles on their whims, grandparents, uncles, broods of children — but the spotlight is firmly on Muslim girls and women on the margins, searching for a toehold in a claustrophobic patriarchal world. It was published originally in Kannada (Haseena Mattu Itara Kathegalu) by Abhiruchi Prakashana, Mysuru. One of the stories in Heart Lamp, 'Black Cobra', was made into a feature film, Hasina, by Girish Kasaravalli.
A lawyer and activist based in Hassan, a town on the leeward side of the Western Ghats and a gateway to coastal Karnataka, Mushtaq, now 77, was inspired by the Bandaya Sahitya movement of the 1980s, which urged women to write about their lived experiences. An empathetic observer and listener, Mushtaq began documenting stories from unheard corners, jotting down every aspect of the women's lives, their drudgery, anxieties, as well as their joy. 'This book is my love letter to the idea that no story is local. [It] was born from the belief that no story is ever small, that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole,' she said in an impassioned acceptance speech high on grace and gratitude.
Most of the women she writes about lack agency over their bodies. They are often powerless, financially dependent, and have little say over any other aspect too, particularly education. Girls are withdrawn from school at the drop of a hat.
Dash of wry humour
If they are married, like Mehrun in the title story, it means they can never return to their parents' home; whatever the husband's misdemeanours, Mehrun is asked to bear it or look away. When she can't take it anymore, it's her daughter Salma who pulls her from the brink. When this spirit of sisterhood works, women extend a hand to others; when it doesn't, there's misery and silent tears deep into the night. Her stories have wry humour too — in the last, a mother weary after giving birth, appeals to god: 'Be a woman once, Oh Lord!'
Like Sara Aboobacker, who wrote about Muslim women in coastal Kerala and Karnataka and was critical of patriarchy and other issues, Mushtaq too has been outspoken about women's lack of choice in matters of faith and reproductive rights. Both writers faced the wrath of fundamentalists.
For making Mushtaq's stories gain a global readership, Bhasthi's 'radical translation' has come in for praise. Bhasthi writes in the translator's note that between them they know more than six languages. Bhasthi retains the rhythms of the many Kannadas spoken in the region. For instance, Mushtaq speaks Dakhni at home, whose base is Urdu with loan words from Persian, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu — but her language at work and on the street is Kannada. Readers will break into a smile on hearing the words mothers often spit out in shock — 'thoo, thoo.'
Booker Jury Chair Max Porter said the radical translation hits 'viscerally.' Both writer and translator harped on the richness of Kannada and hoped it would lead to more translations from other 'magical' languages of South Asia.
Calling literature one of the 'last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other's minds, if only for a few pages,' Mushtaq hoped her win would 'light the way for more stories that defy borders.' The finest of literature offers an honest mirror, and surely Mushtaq holds a luminous one.