International Booker Prize 2025: How Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp insists on dignity, witness and repair

Indian Express

2 days ago

On the day Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi win the 2025 International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp (Penguin), the first Kannada book and only the second Indian literary work to win the award, the Supreme Court of India spends over three hours hearing the petitions challenging the Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025 on the question of passing interim orders; the after-echoes of hostility between India and Pakistan continue to ricochet off television studios and drawing-room conversations. On stage, however, Mushtaq speaks of a different world, one in which stories make it possible to pause and to listen, to speak and be heard, and most of all, to look differences in the eye and seek rapprochement. 'Tonight isn't an endpoint — it's a torch passed. May it light the way for more stories from unheard corners, more translations that defy borders, and more voices that remind us: the universe fits inside every 'I',' says Mushtaq, 77, in her acceptance speech.
A day later, over a telephone call from London, she speaks of why the human ability to overcome adversity drives her conviction in change. 'This rupture is not true only of India, it is playing out across the world. There is no faith. There is no harmony. There are wars. People are suffering. And yet, I feel hopeful. When you turn the pages of history, you see bloodshed, torture, sorrow and mourning. But even then, you know, the sun shines, good sense prevails, people turn to each other in trust. This time will pass and peace will prevail. I am hopeful about it,' she says.
A lawyer, activist and writer, through the course of her own life and career in Karnataka's Hassan, Mushtaq has known what it means to be an outlier. Despite her middle-class upbringing and the freedoms that shaped her, she had sensed early on that choice was a privilege not afforded to many women of her religion and class. Since her school days she had wanted to write. 'As a child, I would scribble on the walls and the floor and pretend that there was an audience waiting to read what I had to say. I would tell my father that I have written a story and he would sit with me as I read out whatever I had put together that day,' she says. Through her one novel and six story collections, her Kannada translations of legal texts, she sought to tell the stories of others like her, yet not quite, in the polyphonic cadences of a colloquial Kannada that she made her own.
In the aftermath of Heart Lamp's win, a collection of 12 short stories written between 1990 and 2023, and put together by Bhasthi, there have been murmurs on social media about the book's success, its worthiness to garner one of literature's most coveted awards, about the possibility of its journey being eased by the zeitgeist of a fractured world in search of inclusive symbols.
To be honest, Heart Lamp is not a seductive read in the traditional sense. It doesn't dazzle with plot twists or offer the slow burn of psychological complexity. Instead, it demands something more uncomfortable from the reader: to sit with pain, to listen to voices that have long been smothered and to recognise that certain stories aren't told to entertain; they are articulated to hold space for grief, for defiance, for survival; that the emotional squalor they portray is so routine, so normalised by its perpetuation that it could almost slip into the terrain of dark comedy. To suggest that Heart Lamp is unworthy of its honour is to disregard the urgency of its demand — for dignity, for equality, for witness. That the very excess that some critics of Heart Lamp find overwrought, the self-sameness of the stories, is, arguably, its point — its most deliberate and political feature.
Unlike Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell's Tomb of Sand (Penguin) — the first Indian novel to win the International Booker Prize in 2022 — whose expansive canvas was Partition, Mushtaq's literary universe deals with the quotidian — the microaggressions, domestic confinements and everyday brutalities that define women's lives. In a deeply stratified social landscape, where class and gender often dictate access and agency, her characters rebel, endure or cave in. They challenge both the mainstream Kannada literary canon and the sanitised narratives of Muslim womanhood. This is literature that does not flatter the elite reader's gaze — it confronts it.
Mushtaq says her stories are a consequence of her long association with the Bandaya (rebellion) movement in Karnataka, of which she was one of the few Muslim women participants. She had worked as a journalist with Lankesh Patrike for almost a decade before getting drawn into the cultural upheaval in the state. 'In Karnataka of the late 1970s, there were a lot of social movements that demanded revival and reformation. There were commerce union agitations, besides movements by Dalit sangathan samitis, environmentalists, theatre activists, feminists. Together, there was a movement that was keen on social justice, that dreamed of changing society and its hegemonies. People who were involved in it wrote slogans, poems, essays and moved on to writing stories, novels, plays and other forms of literature. At that time, the situation in Kannada society was such that women, Dalits and backward-caste people were denied education. Even women from high-caste society did not necessarily have access to education. Only high-caste males dominated Kannada literature. But when the movement began, Dalits started writing, women started writing, people from backward-castes started writing, and some Muslims like me, also became involved in it. In the beginning, we were confused — we didn't know what to write, how to write and how to express our solidarity. It so happened that Kannada literature branched out into three segments at the time: Dalit sahitya, women's literature and Muslims involved in these social movements also began writing. Even today, these segments are the prominent branches of Kannada literature,' she says.
In that sense, Mushtaq turns her back on the masculine literary tradition and the refinement that has come to symbolise 'good writing' in regional Indian literature. She embraces melodrama, repetition and sentiment — tools that have historically been dismissed as lesser, feminine or unliterary — and uses them as instruments of resistance. Stories like 'Black Cobras' and 'Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!' showcase this defiance. In the former, a woman finally goes in for a tubectomy after birthing seven children against her husband's long-standing order to the contrary; the latter is a demand for empathy. 'Patriarchy, religion and politics form a powerful centre, a lord, whose only aim is to control women and impose restrictions on them. They have to become sensitised to the suffering of women,' says Mushtaq.
In the discomfort that her stories leave behind, Mushtaq's hope remains that something will shift — not loudly, not all at once, but just enough.