Banu Mushtaq's ‘Heart Lamp' burns bright
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated May 19, 2025)In 'Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal', the opening story from Banu Mushtaq's short story collection Heart Lamp (translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi), there's a passage where the female narrator is struggling with how to introduce her husband to readers. 'Mujahid is my home person. Oh. That sounds odd. A wife is usually the one who stays at home, so that makes her the home person. Perhaps then Mujahid is my office person. Che! I have made a mistake again. The office is not mine, after all. How else can I say this? If I use the term yajamana and call him owner, then I will have to be a servant, as if I am an animal or a dog.'advertisementHeart Lamp, for which Mushtaq and Bhasthi have been shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, has several passages like this one, where a straight line is drawn between the mechanisms of language and the socio-political consequences of a patriarchal society. The 77-year-old Mushtaq, who has worked as a lawyer, an activist and a reporter previously, has been writing in Kannada for over four decades now, and the 12 stories in Heart Lamp have been chosen from this corpus.
HEART LAMP: Selected Stories By Banu Mushtaq Translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi PENGUIN Rs. 399 | 224 pages
advertisement'Usually, research students and teachers want a single edition of my Kannada work, so my publisher released an omnibus edition with over 50 stories,' says Mushtaq. 'In 2022, a journalist interviewed me about the issue of hijab in Karnataka educational institutions and it was during this process that I was introduced to Deepa (Bhasthi).... She read this omnibus edition and chose the ones that impressed her the most. "I didn't have any role in that selection process, but I suggested she add one-two more.'
As Bhasthi explains, once the selection process was over, the next challenge was rendering Mushtaq's unique style of Kannada into English. A conscious choice made by the translator-writer duo was to forgo italics, glossaries et cetera that 'explain' Kannada words. Instead, the translation itself makes the context clear.'She uses a polyglot's version of Kannada wherein there are words and sounds from the other languages spoken in the region,' says Bhasthi. 'Hindi, Urdu, Dakhani, et cetera, and this is a very normal thing for both of us, as well as for so many South Indians. Working with writers like Banu Mushtaq makes you push yourself as a translator. It makes you challenge notions of 'classical' and 'colloquial' in a language.'It's tough to pick a favourite among the 12 stories in Heart Lamp, but personally, I found 'Black Cobra' and 'Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!' deeply moving. The women in these stories realise that the dice is loaded against them, and whatever respite they get is usually symbolic. In 'Black Cobra', a beleaguered young mother, Aashraf, mounts a public protest against her husband's abrupt abandonment of her and her daughter Munni, with disastrous results. The 2004 National Award-winning Kannada film Hasina, directed by Girish Kasaravalli, is based on this story.advertisement'Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!' is a critique of the role played by organised religion in the 'domestic enslavement' of women. As the title suggests, the hapless female protagonist here directly addresses God, claiming that God cannot fully understand her plight until he takes on a female form.'In 2000, I was working as a lawyer and travelling to a taluka court by bus,' recalls Mushtaq. 'And I saw a woman, a beggar, who was singing a devotional Kannada film song. She had a marvellous voice and she was referring to herself as 'daasi' (servant) for her prabhu (God). I was very affected by her singing and her feelings of devotion and when I was writing this story ('Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!'), those two words, prabhu and daasi, were on my mind.'While announcing Mushtaq and Bhasthi's place on the International Booker shortlist, the judges had praised the 'immense emotional and moral weight' wielded by the stories in Heart Lamp. Rightly so, for these stories command the reader's undivided attention. And as is the case for top-shelf literature in any language, by the time the last page is turned, it is the reader who is forced to confront the prospect of change, not least within themselves.advertisement
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