Banu Mushtaq's Importance Goes Much Beyond the Booker
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Banu Mushtaq's Importance Goes Much Beyond the Booker
Irfan Chowdhury
38 minutes ago
Mushtaq's determination and resilience showcases how individuals still continue to fight for greater betterment of society at large. She is a beacon of solidarity.
International Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq during her felicitation ceremony by the Karnataka Union of Working Journalists, at Gandhi Bhavan, in Bengaluru, Wednesday, May 28, 2025. Photo: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak
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Her eight-minute acceptance speech tells it all: No story is ever small, and together we build a world where every voice is heard and every person belongs.
A woman with extraordinary desire to express herself in words. But in which language? As a woman from South India's minority Muslim population, it was her family and community that imposed upon her the Dakhini or southern Urdu – somewhat distinct from the varieties spoken in northern places like Allahabad or Lucknow. But her home state Karnataka's native language, which she chose to write it in, is Kannada.
Not many with this profile, particularly in her generation, achieve higher education, let alone dream of writing or pursuing a professional life or even choosing their own life partners, as she did.
For a Southasian to win a Booker is no novelty. Many luminaries from the region have been awarded this prestigious literary award for the best single work of sustained fiction over the last few decades. Sir Salman Rushdie not only got the Booker for his acclaimed Midnight's Children but also won the Booker of the Booker, a special award that recognised the best of the prize's winners, and Best of the Booker, at the award's 25th and 40th anniversaries respectively. Other Southasian Booker awardees include Arundhati Roy for her The God of Small Things which had made a big storm with a story based in Kerala, Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss, and Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger, just to name a few.
Nor is Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp the first translation from Southasia to win the prize. Geetanjali Shree won it for her Hindi book translated to English, Tomb of Sand in 2022.
So what's so special about Banu Mushtaq? For one, hers an exceptional tale of a spirited human journey overcoming societal taboos and defying cultural, even habitual boundaries put up by generations of practice. It is a triumph of stories that many may imagine but usually do not get a chance to appreciate, pushed aside amid daily grinds of life, or not prioritised due to stereotypes.
To appreciate Mushtaq and her work is to celebrate the diversity of Southasian languages, culture and many minorities. Over a century ago, the iconic poet Rabinrantah Tagore won the Nobel for translating his own work from Bengali to English. However, seldom do we take time to explore works in other regional languages, for example, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese or Balochi. Kannada is estimated to be spoken by 65 million in a region of nearly two billion people.
Of course, there is a successful South Indian movie industry and its music that many devour. Eminent local literary figures like R.K. Narayan are widely read. But we rarely take time to hear, learn or share the riches of diversity that our region presents. As tasty cuisines from Southasia's diverse regions whet our appetites, there are plenty of unheard stories and views to enrich our souls, and widen our understanding of each other. Stories which could help us see that deep down we are mere human societies trying to overcome mostly common challenges, regardless of what nationalistic politicians may have us believe
Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
Penguin, 2025
Mushtaq's achievements have put a spotlight on significant issues worthy of attention. Her stories contain vital social context, focussing on Muslim and Dalit women and children – showcasing her lifelong dedication and commitment to marginalised voices. Through fiction, she captures the textures of life in southern India's patriarchal Muslim society, which she also experiences first-hand as a lawyer fighting for these women. As an activist, her insights carry both emotional depth and political weight, making Heart Lamp a work of both literary and social importance.
In Deepa Bhasthi's translation, Mushtaq's work, spanning over three decades, gains a new international audience — a significant milestone given the linguistic and cultural barriers often faced by regional writers, especially women.
This award has come at a time when the region from Bangladesh to Pakistan is embroiled in uncertainty and conflicts. Mistrust among communities and countries are high.
At a personal level, Mushtaq's success is far more than just another Booker. Over three decades ago, I lived in Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, for undergraduate studies in a Muslim neighbourhood, Shivajinagar, just after the demolition of historic Babri Masjid in 1992 and the arrest of Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt, coinciding with the release of his blockbuster Khal Nayak. Communal tensions ran high, but as a teenager from a Muslim majority Bangladesh, I had the opportunity for casual, unguarded discussions with local Muslims, including over occasional meals at their homes. It was starkly obvious how ostracised ordinary Muslim women were in the glitzy, globalised metropolis
Muslim girls in Mushtaq's generation seldom got the chance to finish high school before being married off to begin and look after families. She herself was allowed to attend a Kannada-medium missionary school on condition that she would be able to read and write in Kannada within six months. If this puzzles you, my observation from a long while ago was that Indian Muslims regardless of the regions they were from usually spoke Urdu with varying accents and proficiency as their first tongue, sometimes before the local native languages. There are post-Moghul historical and political reasons for this.
What about the situation of Muslim girls in the three decades since? Mushtaq responded to this question from Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed in an English-language video interview for Frontline Magazine, after Heart Lamp was shortlisted for the Booker. She said that there are more Muslim (and other) girls with education and degrees now compared to then, but alas not so for Muslim boys who are accepting jobs, even menial jobs. This discrepancy is probably creating tensions, disharmonious relationships, issues and challenges for women which Mushtaq's work highlights.
In fact, listening to Mushtaq in numerous interviews has been truly inspirational. We often hear how successful people overcome unfathomable odds to reach their goals. Mushtaq's obstacles were manifold, they include her own postpartum depression. Her dogged pursuit of raising her voice for marginalised women brought threats and attacks on her.
Mushtaq's over three decades-long work encompasses these experiences,portraying the injustices, unfairness and confinement that society subjects girls and women to. Her success is about resilience and defying patriarchy.
It is important to realise that Mushtaq would not have achieved her goals, specially the goal of writing, without the help and guidance of her community and wider public – majority non-Muslim. Besides her husband, she mentions a number of local literary societies and her involvement in the Bandaya Sahitya movements in the early 1970s which introduced protest writing by minority communities in the Kannada language, aiming to establish an equal society, without hierarchy – based on caste, creed, gender or languages.
While the movement appealed to her as a youngster, Mushtaq struggled not only to choose the language she would write in, but her topics. Workshops and discussions with the Bandaya Sahitya guided her, and she began writing about her own Muslim community and challenging its patriarchy.
Recognition of her work should be heartening to all Southasians, helping to remain positive during an uncertain time. Southasian artists, sport personalities have always tried to break the arbitrary boundaries, and the general public also responded positively. Ask many Indians who contributed to Imran Khan's cancer hospital for example.
Mushtaq's determination and resilience showcases how individuals still continue to fight for greater betterment of society at large. She is a beacon of solidarity. As she said in her acceptance speech at the Booker award ceremony, 'This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting up a single sky – brief, brilliant and utterly collective…'
She accepted the honour 'not as an individual but as a voice raised in chorus with so many others.'
'I am happy for the entire world which is full of diversity… this is more than a personal achievement… it is an affirmation that we as individuals and as a global community can try when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences, and uplift one another… that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole… '
Irfan Chowdhury is a public-sector policy analyst and adviser from Bangladesh based in Australia. He writes opinion columns for Bangladeshi dailies and online platforms, like The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, Alalodulal, besides Sapan News.
This is a Sapan New s syndicated feature.
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Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
International Booker Prize 2025: How Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp insists on dignity, witness and repair
On the day Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi win the 2025 International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp (Penguin), the first Kannada book and only the second Indian literary work to win the award, the Supreme Court of India spends over three hours hearing the petitions challenging the Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025 on the question of passing interim orders; the after-echoes of hostility between India and Pakistan continue to ricochet off television studios and drawing-room conversations. On stage, however, Mushtaq speaks of a different world, one in which stories make it possible to pause and to listen, to speak and be heard, and most of all, to look differences in the eye and seek rapprochement. 'Tonight isn't an endpoint — it's a torch passed. May it light the way for more stories from unheard corners, more translations that defy borders, and more voices that remind us: the universe fits inside every 'I',' says Mushtaq, 77, in her acceptance speech. A day later, over a telephone call from London, she speaks of why the human ability to overcome adversity drives her conviction in change. 'This rupture is not true only of India, it is playing out across the world. There is no faith. There is no harmony. There are wars. People are suffering. And yet, I feel hopeful. When you turn the pages of history, you see bloodshed, torture, sorrow and mourning. But even then, you know, the sun shines, good sense prevails, people turn to each other in trust. This time will pass and peace will prevail. I am hopeful about it,' she says. A lawyer, activist and writer, through the course of her own life and career in Karnataka's Hassan, Mushtaq has known what it means to be an outlier. Despite her middle-class upbringing and the freedoms that shaped her, she had sensed early on that choice was a privilege not afforded to many women of her religion and class. Since her school days she had wanted to write. 'As a child, I would scribble on the walls and the floor and pretend that there was an audience waiting to read what I had to say. I would tell my father that I have written a story and he would sit with me as I read out whatever I had put together that day,' she says. Through her one novel and six story collections, her Kannada translations of legal texts, she sought to tell the stories of others like her, yet not quite, in the polyphonic cadences of a colloquial Kannada that she made her own. In the aftermath of Heart Lamp's win, a collection of 12 short stories written between 1990 and 2023, and put together by Bhasthi, there have been murmurs on social media about the book's success, its worthiness to garner one of literature's most coveted awards, about the possibility of its journey being eased by the zeitgeist of a fractured world in search of inclusive symbols. To be honest, Heart Lamp is not a seductive read in the traditional sense. It doesn't dazzle with plot twists or offer the slow burn of psychological complexity. Instead, it demands something more uncomfortable from the reader: to sit with pain, to listen to voices that have long been smothered and to recognise that certain stories aren't told to entertain; they are articulated to hold space for grief, for defiance, for survival; that the emotional squalor they portray is so routine, so normalised by its perpetuation that it could almost slip into the terrain of dark comedy. To suggest that Heart Lamp is unworthy of its honour is to disregard the urgency of its demand — for dignity, for equality, for witness. That the very excess that some critics of Heart Lamp find overwrought, the self-sameness of the stories, is, arguably, its point — its most deliberate and political feature. Unlike Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell's Tomb of Sand (Penguin) — the first Indian novel to win the International Booker Prize in 2022 — whose expansive canvas was Partition, Mushtaq's literary universe deals with the quotidian — the microaggressions, domestic confinements and everyday brutalities that define women's lives. In a deeply stratified social landscape, where class and gender often dictate access and agency, her characters rebel, endure or cave in. They challenge both the mainstream Kannada literary canon and the sanitised narratives of Muslim womanhood. This is literature that does not flatter the elite reader's gaze — it confronts it. Mushtaq says her stories are a consequence of her long association with the Bandaya (rebellion) movement in Karnataka, of which she was one of the few Muslim women participants. She had worked as a journalist with Lankesh Patrike for almost a decade before getting drawn into the cultural upheaval in the state. 'In Karnataka of the late 1970s, there were a lot of social movements that demanded revival and reformation. There were commerce union agitations, besides movements by Dalit sangathan samitis, environmentalists, theatre activists, feminists. Together, there was a movement that was keen on social justice, that dreamed of changing society and its hegemonies. People who were involved in it wrote slogans, poems, essays and moved on to writing stories, novels, plays and other forms of literature. At that time, the situation in Kannada society was such that women, Dalits and backward-caste people were denied education. Even women from high-caste society did not necessarily have access to education. Only high-caste males dominated Kannada literature. But when the movement began, Dalits started writing, women started writing, people from backward-castes started writing, and some Muslims like me, also became involved in it. In the beginning, we were confused — we didn't know what to write, how to write and how to express our solidarity. It so happened that Kannada literature branched out into three segments at the time: Dalit sahitya, women's literature and Muslims involved in these social movements also began writing. Even today, these segments are the prominent branches of Kannada literature,' she says. In that sense, Mushtaq turns her back on the masculine literary tradition and the refinement that has come to symbolise 'good writing' in regional Indian literature. She embraces melodrama, repetition and sentiment — tools that have historically been dismissed as lesser, feminine or unliterary — and uses them as instruments of resistance. Stories like 'Black Cobras' and 'Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!' showcase this defiance. In the former, a woman finally goes in for a tubectomy after birthing seven children against her husband's long-standing order to the contrary; the latter is a demand for empathy. 'Patriarchy, religion and politics form a powerful centre, a lord, whose only aim is to control women and impose restrictions on them. They have to become sensitised to the suffering of women,' says Mushtaq. In the discomfort that her stories leave behind, Mushtaq's hope remains that something will shift — not loudly, not all at once, but just enough.
Indian Express
5 hours ago
- Indian Express
Mango's chemistry and history: what gives it its distinct aroma; its link to the Buddha and Babur
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In a well-practised heist – we had done such things before – the salt and sugar jars, the bottle of mustard oil, and a couple of green chillies were quietly taken to the large bedroom we shared. The green mangoes were peeled and then their white and woody flesh grated, sprinkled with salt and sugar, the chillies broken and crushed, and finally, a generous splash of sharp mustard oil added to the mix, to make an impromptu mango relish, that could only be properly enjoyed when licked off one's fingers. What we were doing had been done by countless children, in some form or the other, across India's long tryst with mangoes, for we have known mangoes for millennia before most other cultures. The first mango trees are believed to have sprouted in the foothills of the Himalayas, some 4,000 years ago, and then gradually spread to the rest of South Asia. This view is now contested by some scientists based on DNA evidence, which suggests mangoes grew independently in India and the South Asian regions of Sumatra and Borneo. However, the Western world certainly learnt about the king of all fruits from us, and, hence, bestowed upon it the botanical name Mangifera indica. The name itself originates from the Tamil and Malayalam words – mankay, mannakay. The Portuguese came across it when they landed in India, and took it across the world, calling it manga. It would ultimately become mango in the English language. The early expeditions of the mango, across the seven seas, required it to be pickled in brine, and it was in this form that the West first encountered it in their homes. So closely intertwined were the fruit and the art of pickling that in some tongues, 'mango' became synonymous with pickle. So, even now, in the West Midland regions of the USA, especially in Illinois, large green peppers, meant for pickling, are sold as mangoes. In North India, mango was known as aamra to our ancients. It finds many mentions in the later Vedas, Dharma shastras, and the Puranas. The mango has a special place in the Buddhist tradition, too. The Buddha was supposedly born under a mango tree and used the fruit as a metaphor to convey his ideas to people, and his disciples are credited with spreading mangoes to the rest of South Asia, carrying mango saplings with them, on their missions to far-off lands. Aamra became aam in common parlance, but was equally popular among the khaas people of medieval India. One apocryphal story goes that Babur was lured into the Indian subcontinent when an Afghan warlord promised to gift him a box of mangoes if he defeated Ibrahim Lodhi. The reason why this is unlikely is that Babur himself wrote that, although 'the mango is the best fruit of Hindustan,' and it is highly praised by some, 'such praise outmatches it.' For Babur, the Central Asian musk melon was the king of all fruits. His son Humayun, however, was as addicted to mangoes as he was to opium. Even when he was in hiding from the armies of Sher Shah, he found a way to get mangoes secretly delivered to him. The Hamam, or Himam Pasand, variety of mango, now popular mostly in the South, is supposed to have been grafted especially for Humayun, and was originally called Humayun Pasand. Humayun is associated with another variety – the Chausa (or Chaunsa) – but this time, in defeat. The name was supposedly given by Sher Shah when he vanquished Humayun's forces at the battle of Chausa. By this time, Portuguese Jesuit priests had already reached Goa, tasted the local mangoes, and started grafting them to micro-engineer their flavour. Akbar learnt about this and invited them to his court in Agra to train the royal horticulturists in the art of mango-tree grafting. A special mango orchard was set up in Lakhi Bagh, where one lakh trees were planted, and grafting experiments produced over 100 new varieties, some of which survive to this day. There are many fruits like the mango, which are sweet, tart, firm, yet soft. That the mango commands such a fanatical fanbase comes from its singular 'nose' – the dance of delicate, yet strong aromas that it releases, when one holds an unpeeled fruit to the nose, or lets a morsel yield itself upon one's tongue. The scent of a mango comes from a vast array of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), most important of which are terpenes, lactones, esters, and aldehydes. The esters impart the sweet, tropical fruity scents, the lactones give it a creamy, earthy undertone, terpenes produce the slightly intoxicating, floral and pinelike notes, while aldehydes provide the grassy, and somewhat 'spicy' feel. While these are the key VOCs that create the 'base' bouquet of mangoes, the distinctive characteristics of individual varieties are determined by the minor compounds present in small amounts. Mangoes are part of the wider Cashew family, which makes them a distant cousin of the poison ivy plant. Like poison ivy, mangoes contain urushiol-type compounds, especially in the peel, which can cause contact allergies. That is why, sometimes, if you squeeze and soften an unpeeled mango, bite the top off, and then suck out the pulp, your lips start to itch. It might also happen when you eat an unpeeled slice of mango, and your mouth comes in contact with the skin. The mango, thus, hides a mild sting behind its sweetness. This makes it a perfect political gift, especially in international diplomacy. In fact, there is a proper name for it – mango diplomacy. It has been most notably practised by Pakistan; successive Pakistani heads of state have sent mangoes as peace offerings to Indian Prime Ministers, Presidents, and even opposition leaders. In Pakistani politics, Mangoes are part of a major conspiracy theory surrounding the death of the former President, General Zia Ul Haq, in a plane crash in 1988. Back then, it was believed that bombs in a box of mangoes, that had been loaded at the last minute, exploded mid-air and brought the aircraft down. It is an allegation that was repeated a few years ago by Zia's son. Incidentally, this theory is a central motif in Mohammad Hanif's award-winning debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Perhaps Zia would have been saved had he not been so partial to mangoes. But who in the subcontinent isn't? In India, most people who can afford mangoes dedicate the summers to gorging on the fruit. It is part of breakfast, lunch, and dinner; not just as a fruit or dessert, but also in pickle and chutney form. It is also added to savoury dishes, like the meen manga curry, which is a fish curry with green mangoes from Kerala; the Gujarati ripe mango kadhi, made like a regular besan-based kadhi with sweet mango pulp added to it; and the Mangalorean mango curry, made with ripe mangoes, ginger, garlic, jaggery, tamarind, and tempered with curry leaves, red chillies, and whole spices. Today, I will leave you with a savoury recipe from Bengal, which combines green mangoes and red masoor dal. It is known both as aam dal (mango dal) and tok daal (sour dal). It is a sweet-savoury dish, bordering on a mango chutney. There are many variations to this dish, this is how my mother used to make it. Red Masoor Dal: 1 cup (190-200 g) Green mangoes: 2-3 pieces (200-250 g) Mustard Oil: 2 tbsp Kalonji: ½ tsp Black Mustard seed: ½ tsp Saunf: ½ tsp Red Chillies (whole): 2-3 Turmeric powder: ¼ + ¼ tsp Red chilli powder: ½ tsp Sugar: 4 tsp Salt: 1 + 1 tsp Water: 2½ cups (500 ml) + 1 cup (250 ml) Method · Wash and soak the red masoor dal for 30 minutes. · Boil the dal with 2½ cups of water, ¼ tsp turmeric powder, and 1 tsp salt, till it is soft but not mushy. · While the dal is cooking, peel the green mango, cut it in half, and remove the stone, but retain the cardboard-like endocarp of the stone. · Cut the green mango into long wedges, about an inch thick. · Apply 1 tsp of salt, the remaining ¼ tsp of turmeric powder, and ½ tsp of red chilli powder on the mango pieces and keep them covered. · Heat the mustard oil in a kadhai till it is smoking hot. · Lower the heat, and add the saunf, kalonji, mustard seeds, and whole red chillies, and stir for a few seconds. · Now add the mango pieces, cover the kadhai, and cook for 5 minutes on low heat, till the mangoes soften. Stir occasionally to stop the mangoes from burning or sticking to the kadhai. · Add the sugar, mix and cover and cook again on low heat for another 4-5 minutes, till the sugar melts and the mango releases some of its pulp. Stir occasionally. · While this is happening, break the cooked dal with the back of a ladle, but don't mash it entirely. · Add it to the kadhai and mix well. · Add one cup of water, stir through, cover and cook for 6-7 minutes. · If the mango pieces are mostly intact, take a few out, mash them, return them to the dal, and cook covered for another 2-3 minutes. · Taste and adjust the salt and sugar, depending on how sweet you want the dal to be. The dal is supposed to be sweet, savoury and tangy. It is usually eaten hot with plain boiled rice, but I like to add it straight from the refrigerator onto hot rice. Be bold, and try it, even if you balk at the idea of a sweet dal.
