Why Heart Lamp's booker win breaks many barriers

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25-05-2025

When Heart Lamp, Deepa Bhasthi's English translation of a collection of Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq's short stories, was declared the winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize on Tuesday, literary history was made in more ways than one.
The second winner of the prize from India – after Tomb of Sand (2022) – Daisy Rockwell's translation of Geetanjali Shree's Hindi novel Ret Samadhi – the book actually did not exist as a single volume in the original Kannada. Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the International Booker, chose the stories from over 30 years of Mushtaq's work to curate Heart Lamp, which was the first short story collection to win the prize.
With two winners in 10 years of the International Booker, India now tops the country list. Of course, we have an unfair advantage in having vibrant literatures in more than two dozen distinct non-English languages, compared to one for most other countries.
But what this conceals is how few books from India are published in global Anglophone markets. The numbers in any given year amount to less than 10% of the 100-plus titles published in English translation in India. So the real achievement of a Heart Lamp and a Tomb of Sand is breaking through the resistance of the Western publishing ecosystem to being published in the United Kingdom and/or the United States in the first place.
As in 2022, the question is being asked again in 2025 by wide-eyed journalists: will this open the floodgates to translated books from India in the West? The short answer is no.
Books from India do not have the two tailwinds that have seen a flood of translated works from Japan or South Korea – to name two other Asian countries – being published in the West by both large and independent publishers. These tailwinds come in the form of funding support from the respective countries for publishing their books, and certain country-specific literary trends that have become popular in the West – for instance, 'healing literature' from Japan and South Korea.
What such awards open up, actually, are huge sales for the winning titles back home in India, easily 10 to 20 times the normal sales of translated books that have not won the International Booker Prize (all but two). Significantly, both the winning titles were accepted and then edited by UK-based publishers first, with the Indian publisher using the same edited version (and saving themselves the work involved).
But we would be shortsighted to examine this win for Heart Lamp from the perspective of publishing alone. What is especially significant is that it has come to a writer who has not really been part of the canon in her own language, although she has a large number of readers.
An activist and a lawyer, Mushtaq writes from an intersectional space of marginalisation on the basis of caste, religion and gender. She is a rebel writer, whose works, operating within the Bandaya Sahitya literary movement in Kannada – narrating dissent and rebellion against injustice through fiction and poetry – have been met with protests and threats from her own community. It needed not only a translation into English but also a respected international prize to draw attention to this literature outside its immediate circles.
Also of vital importance is translator Bhasthi's decision to use ' an accent ' – what the jury chair Max Porter termed a 'radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes'. This is a powerful riposte to colonisation, where the coloniser's language is owned and then transformed by those from a former colony to then win the world's top award for translated books in the heart of that very colonising power. If only for these reasons, the significance of Mushtaq's and Bhasthi's win cannot be overstated.
Here is a summary of the week's top stories.
The Maoist conflict. Nambala Keshav Rao, the leader of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), was among the 27 suspected Maoists killed in a gunfight with security forces in Chhattisgarh's Narayanpur.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah described CPI (Maoist) General Secretary Rao, who is also known as Basavaraju, as the 'backbone of the Naxal movement'. This was the first time that a general secretary-ranked Maoist leader had been killed by the security forces, Shah added.
A District Reserve Guard team member was also killed in the gunfight, according to the police.
The Union government has repeatedly vowed to eradicate 'Left Wing Extremism' in the country by March 31, 2026.
, writes Malini Subramaniam.
Bail for Ashoka professor. The Supreme Court granted interim bail to Ashoka University Associate Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad for his comments about the press briefings on Operation Sindoor. The court also instructed the Haryana Police to form a special investigation team to look into the meaning of the words used by Mahmudabad.
He was arrested on May 18 after being booked in two cases for his social media posts highlighting the apparent irony of Hindutva commentators praising Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who represented the Army during the media briefings about the Indian military operation.
Mahmudabad suggested that they should also call for justice for victims of mob lynching and 'others who are victims of the Bharatiya Janata Party's hate mongering'. The top court has barred him from posting or publishing any content related to the social media posts under scrutiny.
Defamation case. After being reprimanded by the Delhi High Court, commentator Abhijit Iyer-Mitra said that he would delete social media posts in which he made purportedly sexually abusive remarks about women employees of digital news outlet Newslaundry. The court warned that it would order a first information report against Iyer-Mitra if he failed to remove the posts.
The women employees of Newslaundry have filed a defamation suit against Iyer-Mitra. They have sought a public apology and Rs 2 crore in damages, alleging that Iyer-Mitra had 'falsely and maliciously' targeted the news outlet's women employees using derogatory language and slurs through a series of social media posts between February and April.
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