Banu Mushtaq: Indian author scripts history with International Booker Prize win
Indian writer-lawyer-activist Banu Mushtaq has scripted history by winning the International Booker prize for the short story anthology, Heart Lamp.It is the first book written in the Kannada language, which is spoken in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, to win the prestigious prize. The stories in Heart Lamp were translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. Featuring 12 short stories written by Mushtaq over three decades from 1990 to 2023, Heart Lamp poignantly captures the hardships of Muslim women living in southern India.
Mushtaq's win comes off the back of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand - translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell - winning the prize in 2022.Her body of work is well-known among book lovers, but the Booker International win has shone a bigger spotlight on her life and literary oeuvre, which mirrors many of the challenges the women in her stories face, brought on by religious conservatism and a deeply patriarchal society.It is this self-awareness that has, perhaps, helped Mushtaq craft some of the most nuanced characters and plot-lines."In a literary culture that rewards spectacle, Heart Lamp insists on the value of attention — to lives lived at the edges, to unnoticed choices, to the strength it takes simply to persist. That is Banu Mushtaq's quiet power," a review in the Indian Express newspaper says about the book.Mushtaq grew up in a small town in the southern state of Karnataka in a Muslim neighbourhood and like most girls around her, studied the Quran in the Urdu language at school. But her father, a government employee, wanted more for her and at the age of eight, enrolled her in a convent school where the medium of instruction was the state's official language - Kannada. Mushtaq worked hard to become fluent in Kannada, but this alien tongue would become the language she chose for her literary expression. She began writing while still in school and chose to go to college even as her peers were getting married and raising children.It would take several years before Mushtaq was published and it happened during a particularly challenging phase in her life.Her short story appeared in a local magazine a year after she had married a man of her choosing at the age of 26, but her early marital years were also marked by conflict and strife - something she openly spoke of, in several interviews.
In an interview with Vogue magazine, she said, "I had always wanted to write but had nothing to write (about) because suddenly, after a love marriage, I was told to wear a burqa and dedicate myself to domestic work. I became a mother suffering from postpartum depression at 29".In the another interview to The Week magazine, she spoke of how she was forced to live a life confined within the four walls of her house. Then, a shocking act of defiance set her free."Once, in a fit of despair, I poured white petrol on myself, intending to set myself on fire. Thankfully, he [the husband] sensed it in time, hugged me, and took away the matchbox. He pleaded with me, placing our baby at my feet saying, 'Don't abandon us'," she told the magazine.In Heart Lamp, her female characters mirror this spirit of resistance and resilience."In mainstream Indian literature, Muslim women are often flattened into metaphors — silent sufferers or tropes in someone else's moral argument. Mushtaq refuses both. Her characters endure, negotiate, and occasionally push back — not in ways that claim headlines, but in ways that matter to their lives," according to a review of the book in The Indian Express newspaper. Mushtaq went on to work as a reporter in a prominent local tabloid and also associated with the Bandaya movement - which focussed on addressing social and economic injustices through literature and activism.After leaving journalism a decade later, she took up work as a lawyer to support her family.In a storied career spanning several decades, she has published a copious amount of work; including six short story collections, an essay collection and a novel. But her incisive writing has also made her a target of hate.In an interview to The Hindu newspaper, she spoke about how in the year 2000, she received threatening phone calls after she expressed her opinion supporting women's right to offer prayer in mosques. A fatwa - a legal ruling as per Islamic law - was issued against her and a man tried to attack her with a knife before he was overpowered by her husband.But these incidents did not faze Mushtaq, who continued to write with fierce honesty."I have consistently challenged chauvinistic religious interpretations. These issues are central to my writing even now. Society has changed a lot, but the core issues remain the same. Even though the context evolves, the basic struggles of women and marginalised communities continue," she told The Week magazine.Over the years Mushtaq's writings have won numerous prestigious local and national awards including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award.In 2024, the translated English compilation of Mushtaq's five short story collections published between 1990 and 2012 - Haseena and Other Stories - won the PEN Translation Prize.
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The Herald Scotland
5 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Review: Literary masterpiece may be the best book of the 21st century
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The world has both broken down and speeded up; our identities are splintered; we're unmoored as a species, adrift and lost; time itself has ceased to make sense on a planet where we face oblivion at our own hand, be it by plundering the Earth or destroying ourselves through war. Our connections are broken - to family, friends and place; we are - each of us - very much on an existential plane. In a post-truth world, we are all Tara. 'I will never find the explanations I seek,' she says. 'I will only find new questions and new answers.' There's some added spice for Scottish readers. As you lose yourself in the text, you'll sometimes find yourself arrested by words like 'outwith' and 'swither' jumping off the page. Why is a Danish writer with a taste for wry philosophical speculative fiction employing words that only Scots really use? It turns out the translator is Scottish. Barbara J Haveland, who now lives in Copenhagen, has done a remarkable job. More prizes here too, please, literary world. Let's crown this great home-grown translator. I cannot emphasis enough how desperate I am for the next five volumes. Volume Two - each book is short and just rips along - closes as Tara realises she can spend her entire life trying to learn everything there is to know. Over many long, slow months she becomes an expert on ancient Rome, for example. Tara can attend university lectures wherever she likes, listening to the greatest minds discuss the most complex ideas. What hasn't occurred to Tara, though, is she could, if she wished, use what's happened to her for evil. She could kill someone and nobody would know. But would her victim return to life or disappear forever like an apple she's eaten? Balle is both a consummate and profound artist, and a writer who knows how to keep readers turning pages. Volume Two ends on a pitch-perfect cliffhanger. I just hope she doesn't need another decades-long hiatus from the world in preparation for her next masterpiece.
BBC News
14 hours ago
- BBC News
MF Husain: How India's 'biggest art deal' buried masterpieces in a bank vault
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Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
An extraordinary debut from a young British writer, plus the best novels of June
Saraswati ★★★★★ by Gurnaik Johal According to Hindu scripture, the Saraswati was one of the great rivers of ancient India. In this ambitious debut, named for that river, by the British Indian writer Gurnaik Johal, a young man of similar heritage from Wolverhampton travels to his ancestral village in the Punjab following his grandmother's death. On his last visit, as a child, the well on her farm had been dry for decades. But now Satnam finds water in it. Could, as the villagers claim, this be the return of the Saraswati? The politicians who get wind of it certainly think so. If Satnam will just sign over the land, they tell him, he could be part of an 'era-defining project' to resurrect the river and 'return our country back to its former greatness'. Satnam, who's unemployed, going through a breakup and looking for a sense of purpose, cannot sign fast enough, and is soon committing acts of thuggery to encourage other landowners to do the same. We're made to wait to find out what happens to him, as the novel then cuts to the Chagos Islands and the story of a Mauritanian pest exterminator; indeed, each of Saraswati's seven long sections concern a different main character. But we continue to hear about the Saraswati, the Narendra Modi-esque prime minister who's elected on the promise of resurrecting it, and the rising tensions between India and Pakistan over the project's contravention of a water treaty. Saraswati is a sobering parable: we corrupt what is miraculous. Yet Johal never loses sight of his characters. In one section, a Canadian eco-saboteur keeps watch for her comrades as they sabotage a lumber mill. She has heard that their next target is where her mother works and phones her, casually suggesting she take some time off. But she can't say what for. It's a brilliantly charged scene. Johal's other characters include an asexual Kenyan academic, a Bollywood stuntman, a 15-year-old Pakistani influencer and a nameless female journalist: all very different, all well realised. Then, there's Sejal, a 16-year-old girl when we first meet her in 1878, 'destined to live the life of her mother, who had lived the life of her mother'. She elopes to the Punjab with a man called Jugaad, but still ends up living the narrow, destitute life she's hoped to escape. It seems an incongruous tale to be telling, until we realise it's the same tale – that our seven present-day characters are all Sejal's descendants. The connection forms a beautiful counterpoint with the Saraswati storyline. There, like the proverbial flap of a butterfly's wings, a small thing escalates into something terrible; here, the reverse happens – that is, from someone seemingly insignificant comes an amazingly various diaspora. But then almost everything in Saraswati works beautifully. Johal has written a major novel, and at his very first attempt. GC Saraswati is published by Serpent's Tail at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books So People Know It's Me ★★★★☆ by Francesca Maria Benvenuto On Nisida, an island off the coast of Naples and site of a notorious juvenile prison, one inmate called Zeno – a 15-year-old who has been detained for shooting and killing another boy – is given a simple task by his Italian teacher, Ms Martina: write down what you're thinking, and you'll get furlough for Christmas. Zeno duly complies. And so through a run of sprawling entries that make up Francesca Maria Benvenuto's engrossing debut novel, So People Know It's Me, we learn about Zeno's life both before prison and inside it. There's his impoverished upbringing, which forced his mother to resort to sex work; descriptions of friends he's made on the inside, among them a guard called Franco; his girlfriend, Natalina; and the story of his slow capture by a world of criminal drug gangs that has led him to where he is now. Almost instantly, we see that Benvenuto is presenting us with that most tempting of literary archetypes: the loveable rogue, who despite having committed some of the most awful acts imaginable, still wins our sympathy through charm, and – in the case of a young criminal such as Zeno – the glimpses of innocence he occasionally betrays. We see this, and we prepare ourselves not to be taken in by it. Only here, through the unusual twists and turns of Benvenuto's narrative, the trick of the archetype works on us all the same. Compelling though this is, So People Know It's Me has an equally strong sales pitch: Benvenuto is an accomplished criminal lawyer who has defended minors in court. Her book draws from the experiences of her mother who – just like Ms Martina – worked as a teacher on Nisida, home to a very real prison for young people. And yet Benvenuto avoids wielding that authority too heavily. She never bashes over our heads the very legitimate moral problems of housing minors in a prison complex as on Nisida; rather, intimate experience affords her an empathy that feels real without being sentimental. Zeno is under no illusions that what he has done is wrong – but that does not make him less human or beyond hope. With time, his simple writing exercise becomes a project of self-realisation; near the end of the novel, Zeno begins to envision a life for himself beyond prison, perhaps even as a writer. As befits her setting near Naples, Benvenuto's original prose blends Italian with Neapolitan. Inevitably, the translator Elizabeth Harris has replaced this interplay between two languages with just one: but the more diminished English, with Zeno's voice peppered with vague colloquialisms, feels as though it belongs everywhere and nowhere at once ('she don't got no problems'). And where Harris has let the occasional Neapolitan word or phrase stand on its own – strunz, scornacchiato, 'nnammurata – we're only reminded of a layer of meaning that has been lost. This dualism is important, though: in particular, I'm left wondering where Benvenuto might have originally slipped into Neapolitan to distinguish between other dualities, such as between social classes or children and adults. (That isn't to criticise Harris's work, however. Another translator might have cast the Neapolitan in another mutually intelligible dialect – imagine a back and forth between English and Scots – but the specificities of Italy would still be lost.) But perhaps this musing is all too hypothetical, and in any case, the unavoidable compromises of translation aren't enough to detract from Benvenuto's strength as a storyteller. Her messaging is similarly deft: everybody is simultaneously the product of structural problems and also not, as Zeno proves. Good people can arise even from difficult circumstances and vice versa. That's a philosophy that survives change and iteration – and is always worth retelling. DMA
