How a Booker Prize-Winning Work From India Redefined Translation

New York Times

26-05-2025

Banu Mushtaq's book 'Heart Lamp' last week became the first story collection to win the International Booker Prize. It was also the first work translated from Kannada, a southern Indian language, to receive the award.
But 'Heart Lamp' is unusual for another reason. It is not a translation of an existing book. Instead, Ms. Mushtaq's translator, Deepa Bhasthi, selected the stories that make up 'Heart Lamp' from among Ms. Mushtaq's oeuvre of more than 60 stories written over three decades and first published in Kannada-language journals.
The collaboration that won the two women the world's most prestigious award for fiction translated into English represents an extraordinary empowerment of Ms. Bhasthi in the author-translator relationship.
It also shows the evolution of literary translation in India as a growing number of works in the country's many languages are being translated into English. That has brought Indian voices to new readers and enriched the English language.
'I myself have broken all kinds of stereotypes, and now my book has also broken all stereotypes,' Ms. Mushtaq said in a phone interview.
Ms. Mushtaq, 77, is an author, lawyer and activist whose life epitomizes the fight of a woman from a minority community against social injustice and patriarchy. The stories in 'Heart Lamp' are feminist stories, based on the everyday lives of ordinary women, many of them Muslim.
Ms. Bhasthi, in a brief separate interview, said that she had chosen the stories in 'Heart Lamp' for their varied themes and because they were the ones she 'enjoyed reading and knew would work well in English.'
Ms. Mushtaq said she had given Ms. Bhasthi 'a free hand and never meddled with her translation.' But consultation was sometimes necessary, Ms. Mushtaq said, because she had used colloquial words and phrases that 'people in my community used every day while talking.'
Finding translations for such vernacular language can be a challenge, Ms. Bhasthi, who has translated two other works from Kannada, wrote in The Paris Review. Some words, she wrote, 'only ever halfheartedly migrate to English.'
But that migration can be an act of creation. In the brief interview, Ms. Bhasthi said that her translation of 'Heart Lamp' was like 'speaking English with an accent.' That quality was especially lauded by the Booker jury.
Its chairman, the writer Max Porter, called the book 'something genuinely new for English readers.' He said the work was 'a radical translation' that created 'new textures in a plurality of Englishes' and expanded 'our understanding of translation.'
Translation is a complex matrix in India, a country that speaks at least 121 languages. One saying in Hindi loosely translates to 'every two miles, the taste of water changes, and every eight miles, the language changes.' Twenty-two of India's tongues are major literary languages with a considerable volume of writing.
Translations can happen between any of these, as well as in and out of English. This year's International Booker was the second for an Indian book. Geetanjali Shree won in 2022 for 'Tomb of Sand,' translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
But for too long, said Manasi Subramaniam, editor in chief of Penguin Random House India, which published 'Heart Lamp,' translation operated largely in one direction, feeding literature from globally dominant languages to other languages.
'It's wonderful to see literature from Indian languages enriching and complicating English in return,' Ms. Subramaniam said.
But even as works in India's regional languages find more domestic and international readers, there has been an increasing push toward making India a monoculture — with a single prominent language, Hindi — since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.
Hindi is spoken mostly in northern India, and efforts by Mr. Modi's Hindu nationalist government to impose the language in the south have been a source of friction and violence. As internal migration grows in India, skirmishes between Hindi speakers and non-Hindi speakers happen virtually daily in southern states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Kannada, the language of Ms. Mushtaq's original stories, is spoken by the people of Karnataka, whose capital is Bengaluru, India's technology center. There are about 50 million native speakers of Kannada. In 2013, a Kannada literary giant, U.R. Ananthamurthy, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
In the past decade, books by Vivek Shanbhag, translated into English by Srinath Perur, have popularized Kannada literature among non-Kannada domestic and international readers. One of his books, 'Ghachar Ghochar,' was listed among the top books of 2017 by critics at The New York Times.
Unlike Ms. Mushtaq and Ms. Bhasthi, this author-translator team engaged in a 'lot of back-and-forth' to 'bring out what was flowing beneath the original text while ensuring the translation remained as close to the original as possible,' Mr. Shanbhag said.
In her acceptance speech for the Booker award, Ms. Bhasthi expressed hope that it would lead to greater interest in Kannada literature.
She recited lines from a popular Kannada song immortalized on movie screens by the actor Rajkumar, which compares the Kannada language to 'a river of honey, a rain of milk' and 'sweet ambrosia.'