'Heart Lamp' Burns Bright: How Banu Mushtaq Illuminates Muslim Women's Hidden World

The Wire

30-05-2025

Let us start with the obvious categories of perception, that Banu Mushtaq is a Muslim, a woman and a writer. All three terms are important aspects of her identity that inform her literary perspective. Her lived experience as a Muslim woman undoubtedly shapes the intimacy and empathy with which she writes, influences her literary concerns, and contributes to the authenticity of her voice. However, to suggest that her recent honour – the Booker International Prize for her book Heart Lamp – stems from these identity markers alone would be reductive and unfair to her considerable literary merit. Her translator Deepa Bhasthi emphasises this point, saying 'it would be a disservice to reduce Banu's work to her religious identity, for her stories transcend the confines of a faith and its cultural traditions'. Indeed, her identity extends far beyond these markers, as evidenced by her conscious evolution the day she threw off the burkha and became an activist, a journalist, a protestor in public rallies and wore a black coat as any other lawyer and went to court. Banu's characters could well be named Gita and Sita instead of Arifa, and Jameela because the poverty that pervades Muslim women pervades the Hindu women too. That's where her universal appeal lies but the oppression of Muslim women is markedly different because the patriarchy that suppresses them is empowered and sanctioned by religious authority. The subterranean power of the 'Tablighi Jamaat' (a group of men that go home to home preaching how to be a 'good Muslim') is so pervasive that no woman can dare challenge it. By putting the women in burkha, the Muslim men have succeeded in erasing their individual identity. When you see them in a public space, you do not see Arifa and Jameela, you merely see a different gender walking out there. That's the power of Muslim patriarchy. They control their women's right to exist as individual beings. The woman first belongs to the family – the father, husband, brother, and son, similar to what 'Manu Smriti' prescribed for the Hindu woman. But in public spaces they are a large community of non-entities, thanks to the burkha. No Hindu woman has conceded that power to her man. And therein lies a huge difference. Also read: Banu Mushtaq's Importance Goes Much Beyond the BookerThe Hindu patriarchy, on the other hand, cannot impose its will on women on the implicit authority of religion, though caste factors do play an important role in the assertion of 'family honour' – a pride that always rests on denying the autonomy of the female agency. This is one crucial area where the Hindutva-led majoritarianism is reviving patriarchy by undergirding family values and community unity in the face of threats from the Other. A typical example of this are the laws passed by some BJP-ruled states aimed at the imaginary crime of 'love jihad' – which have now ended up as a joke because in UP they could not even find half-a-dozen such cases. There is a more important identity of Banu Mushtaq that I wish to focus on – one that she has crafted for herself and suits her far more significantly than anything else. That she is a 'critical insider'. She proclaimed this identity, quite justifiably, at a recent event in Mysore before the Booker prize was announced. Let us develop these two terms a bit more. Belonging, as she does to the 'Bandaya Movement' that produced the 'Bandaya Sahitya' of the mid-1970s in Kannada literature, critical thinking and questioning were a necessary precondition to her writings and public acts. The pioneers of the movement came from the oppressed classes, the Muslims, Dalits, and women. And she has a foot in two of the three camps – an authenticity that is doubly reinforced. She acknowledges without any hesitation, the contribution of Baraguru Ramachandrappa and P. Lankesh to her own literary and social awareness. It was P. Lankesh who prodded her to become a journalist by filing stories for his famous Lankesh Patrike on the events in her home-town Hassan and its surroundings. Later, he encouraged her to tell her story and the stories of others in her community. From a journalist to an activist to a lawyer, her journey has been one of continuous progression in social and political consciousness that has regularly found literary expression.Coming back to the issue of being a 'critical insider', let us understand where she stands with the help of her stories. The most frequent characters that recur in her stories are women, mostly poor and uneducated, the maulvis and mutawallis (those who interpret the Sharia laws). All of them operate within the pervasive control of the mosque and the madrassa. They seem to live in a different universe. And different rules and an arcane system of justice apply there. Banu Mushtaq tells their stories with great empathy and at times, wry humour. Being an 'insider', Banu Mushtaq implicitly accepts the cosmology and the world-view of her faith, abides by its holy scriptures – the Qur'an and the Hadith. But being 'critical' she questions the men that mediate between her and her Allah. She questions their knowledge of the holy texts and their ability to perceive the humanism and the nobility inherent in it. She questions the web of institutions and the rules built by the men of religion to subjugate other men and more so, the women. But the critical insider doesn't go beyond questioning, or perhaps that is the journalist in her, who sees her role as the asker of questions rather than the provider of answers. Her protagonists certainly protest but it seems muffled, and they do not rebel. They seem to have only two options – to die by suicide or fall in line. Walking out of the all-enveloping confines and fear of the jamaat does not exist as an option in her stories, except in one, 'Huttu' – 'Birth' (not included in Heart Lamp but in the larger Kannada collection, Hasina and other Stories). Here the young girl, Nishat, elopes with her tuition teacher, a Hindu boy, but then, in an act of repentance and as an expiation of her guilt, sends back her five-year-old daughter to live with her grandparents and her mamas and mamis. But why? Why should she sacrifice her dearest daughter to the very confines from which she has escaped? The wider world that seems the natural habitat of a similarly placed Hindu protagonist does not seem to be an easy option for her character. Also read: No Story Is Ever 'Small': Banu Mushtaq's International Booker Acceptance SpeechIn one poignant story, the woman drops the match-stick that she was about to strike after dousing herself in kerosene, at the heartrending cry of her eldest daughter, as in 'Heart Lamp', or the wife of the mutawalli walks out of home, as in 'Black Cobras', determined to get a vasectomy operation done for herself. Here the vasectomy operation is seen as a slap to the mutawalli who has been preaching to all the women that getting such an operation is 'haram' – against the will of God. One must accept that Banu Mushtaq writes of present-day reality in Muslim society with profound insight. And the reality is depressing and disturbing. A poor, uneducated Muslim woman's life is indeed hellish and brutal. Their men are mainly responsible for this, and religion hardly provides any succour. As a chronicler of her community's state of affairs, Banu Mushtaq could not have been more accurate. As a 'critical insider', she offers something invaluable to young Muslim girls—a mirror to see their reality clearly and a voice that validates their struggles. Her own journey from traditional constraints to becoming an activist, journalist, and award-winning writer serves as a powerful testament to what is possible. Through her authentic storytelling and public presence, she creates space for protest, rebellion, and reform within her community. Her work doesn't provide easy answers, but it asks the essential questions and shows that transformation, however difficult, remains within reach.Ravi Joshi was formerly in the Cabinet Secretariat.