From village courts to world stage: How Banu Mushtaq's stories of women and margins won the booker

Time of India

22-05-2025

Banu Mushtaq, author of 'Heart Lamp' holds the trophy after winning the International Booker Prize
Banu Mushtaq, a longtime women's rights advocate and Kannada writer, won the 2025 International Booker Prize for Heartlamp, a collection of short stories drawn from decades of listening to the silences and struggles of Indian women.
In this conversation with Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, she shares why she writes, how pain becomes protest, and what her win means for voices from the margins
Q: Maybe I'll address Banu first. Why did you choose to write fiction?
A: What else can I do? I cannot provide any relief to the aggrieved women who approach me with a lot of worries, sorrows and while I take up their cause, earlier as an activist and further as an activist-cum-advocate, I do struggle to get them relief, but, at the same time, I want to document it and show the entire world that patriarchy cannot continue to commit violence against women in this way and it has to be stopped.
Q: But it requires more than just listening. It requires something else to make you write and write with the precision that you have.
A: I cannot simply forget their issues. It haunts me like anything and it never allows me to be at peace. I want to be a voice to their worries and I want to voice all their issues and say to the entire world that these women should be compensated, they should be liberated and they should be given their due place and you should not perpetrate this type of all violence against them continuously.
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Stop it. Somebody has to say no. That's what I'm saying.
Q: The ordinariness of the scenarios that you depict in your stories and the violence which is depicted is not necessarily always physical violence.
A: Even along with the women's issue, there is the issue of marginalised people. I wanted to show even marginalised people, and those from the minority community, are human beings. They have their own issues, their own problems.
I want to share their experiences with the entire world and to bridge the gap and to open a window.
Q: There is a sense of universality about the kind of violence depicted because Deepa (Bhasthi) has chosen different phases of motherhood or that of a woman's life or a child's life, isn't it?
A: Yes, I have addressed patriarchy. Patriarchy is prevalent among all sections of society, all communities and it is universal in nature.
And I have addressed this patriarchy and I have challenged the power structure which is subjugating women and compelling them to stay within four walls and which is compelling them to adhere to their orders without questions.
Q: Deepa, what was your principle of curation?
A: I see translation as a very instinctive process. I'm not sure I am quite able to intellectualise the politics of choice at the moment, at least maybe it's something that I need to think about for a long time.
But that said, I'm very interested in the idea of choice when it comes to the practice of translation, because translation is about choosing one this word over that or one phrase over the other. A lot went into the selection of these stories, first and foremost stories that I personally liked as well, because it is important for me to enjoy the stories I'm working with.
And then I wanted it to be a career-spanning selection.
I wanted to bring a variety of themes that were being explored in these stories. And what was also interesting for me was even though there are different stories, the underlying theme is always the treatment of women under patriarchal systems.
Q: The compilation of stories have different phases of a girl or a woman's life. Was that a conscious decision?
A: These were part of the many factors that I was looking into when I was making these choices.
So one of the factors was to look into how women were treated in different situations and circumstances. And, the life cycle of a woman from childhood to girlhood to a new wife and and so on. There are interesting things about the multiple roles that are foisted upon a girl child or the periods of discomfort that she can feel.
Q (to Banu Mushtaq): Writers do tend to put in a bit of their own DNA. They tend to put in a bit of their own experiences. Would it be fair or would it be too far-fetched to say that there are glimpses of semi-autobiographical elements in these stories?
A: In my stories, there are no very serious autobiographical elements, but day-to-day experiences that women shared with me, that has been the raw material for my stories.
As an activist and as an advocate, I meet many women every day. They come and talk to me and sometimes I counsel them, sometimes I get them legal relief.
They think me as a counsellor and they start telling so many things which are not necessary for a legal drafting.
Q (to Deepa Bhasthi): Banu speaks Dakhni, a fascinating mix of Persian, Dehlvi, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu. But your mother tongue is Havyaka, a dialect that harks back to old Kannada and is spoken by a small community of Brahmins from the Arabian coast. But the rhythm of the English flows beautifully. How did this process come about?
A: Multilinguality is not as rare as we like to think it is, especially in the South Indian context.
We engage with a lot of different languages, at least three, and likely more. So, words or phrases from another language creep into our everyday conversations. And I was very clear from the beginning that I wanted to maintain this multilinguality in the translation and not flatten it out into just English, and I was very aware of the musicality of the Kannada language, which i hopefully managed to preserve by retaining some words.
And the decision to italicise or not, I think is super important. It is anothering of the language itself when you do it, and when you don't, it sort of blends into the English that the reader is experiencing in the book as well. And I think somewhere along the way, we all seem to have decided that English is this very precious object which must not be touched and played around with. And I wanted to completely reject that premise because we don't speak like the British, we don't speak like the Americans.
And I think that is where the musicality is retained. And when you bring in these everyday experiences of multilinguality into a translation by retaining the Dakini or Arabic or Urdu or Kannada or whatever other languages, I think that is where the retaining of the cadence, the musicality, the rhythm, those things remain in the translation.
Q (to Banu Mushtaq): You do not capitulate to any form of othering, but you choose to depict life as it is within the community.
You bring in the syncretic culture that we live in, a cross-pollination of experiences of our diversity.
A: Our culture teaches us, whether it be Hindu or Muslim or Christian or whether it may be Kannadiga or
Tamil
or Malayali, the culture of human beings, the culture of neighbourhood. So we are Muslims, and if there was a feast the female elders of the family would bring a plate of sweets, coconut, prawn, flowers, everything to share with our neighbours, who were vegetarian. Though they won't take non-veg food, we used to go to their home and we used to offer them sweets and all these types of things. And they would invite us for their feasts.
And this culture of coexistence is there even today. The fabric seems to be tarnished, but it remains there. So, there is no question of othering. There is a question of only inclusiveness.