'Heart Lamp' shines at Int'l Booker: First Kannada title and 1st short story collection to win prize

Time of India

21-05-2025

Kannada writer, lawyer, and activist Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi on Wednesday scripted history by winning the International Booker Prize for 'Heart Lamp', the first Kannada title and the first-ever collection of short stories to be awarded the 50,000 pounds (about Rs 58 lakh) prize.
"This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting up a single sky - brief, brilliant, and utterly collective," said Mushtaq after receiving the award.
The award was announced by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter in his role as chair of the five-member voting panel, at a ceremony at London's Tate Modern. Hailing 'Heart Lamp' as "something genuinely new for English readers", Porter termed it a "radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes.
It challenges and expands our understanding of translation".
Bhasthi is the first Indian translator - and ninth female translator - to win the prize since it took on its current form in 2016. Mushtaq is the sixth female author to be awarded the prize since then. It is the second time an Indian language book has won the International Booker Prize after Geetanjali Shree's 'Tomb of Sand', translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, won the award in 2022.
Mushtaq's collection of 12 short stories, translated from Kannada into English by Bhasthi, chronicles the everyday lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. In her acceptance speech, Mushtaq said it was an affirmation that "we as individuals and as a global community can thrive when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences and uplift one another."
The tales in 'Heart Lamp' were written over 30 years, from 1990 to 2023. agencies
Navy stitches past with present to sail into future
The Navy commissioned
INSV Kaundinya
, a 20m-long sailing yacht based on a 5th-century fresco at the
Ajanta caves
, at the Karwar naval base on Wednesday.
The
wooden ship
, stitched together entirely by hand in Goa, will embark on a
transoceanic voyage
along the ancient trade route from Gujarat to Oman, scheduled for later this year. Naval officials said if the first voyage is successful, the yacht will then sail from Odisha to Indonesia later.
The induction of this wooden vessel comes 40 years after the Navy decommissioned INS Bhatkal, its last wooden-hulled minesweeper.
"We knew that these stitched ships were used to cross the ocean from very ancient times.
We know that Indians were sailing the oceans from the bronze age, from the Harappan period. There's enough evidence of Indians crossing from the ports of Gujarat to Oman and Bahrain and going all the way to Mesopotamia," said Sanjeev Sanyal, PM's economic advisory council member, who initiated the whole project.
"The problem is that there are no records of exactly what sea-going ships during the Harappan period looked like.
There are some texts, like the 'Yukti Kalpa Taru', which we used. We used some testimonies of ancient travellers from other countries who came to Indian Ocean," said Sanyal.
With no detailed blueprints available, multiple stakeholders put their heads together to get INSV Kaundinya to sail. "From Sanyal's vision to Malayali shipwright Babu Sankaran's skill, and from the Navy's oversight to the Goan shipyard Hodi Innovations' determination, the stitched ship replica is a model for successful collaborations," said Commodore Srikant Kesnur (retd).
INSV Kaundinya is named after India's first known mariner who, according to legend, established the Fuhan dynasty after marrying a Naga princess.
"Kaundinya is not mentioned in Indian records, but we know of him from records of Cambodia and Vietnam. We can only guess where he came from, but just as a hint, there is still a gotra called Kaundinya that lives along the Odisha-Andhra coast, and it is possible that Kaundinya is actually not his first name but his gotra name," said Sanyal.