Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi take Indian regional literature to world stage

The Hindu

21-05-2025

In winning the International Booker Prize for 2025, Banu Mushtaq has scripted history on several counts. Her book Heart Lamp, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, is the first collection of short stories to be awarded the £50,000 prize, and it's the first time Kannada has been honoured. The 12 stories, picked from works the 77-year-old lawyer and activist had written between 1990 and 2023, delve into the quotidian lives of Muslim girls and women.
In a moving acceptance speech, Mushtaq began by saying that the moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting up a single sky, brief, brilliant, and utterly collective. 'This is more than a personal achievement, it is an affirmation that we as individuals and as a global community can thrive when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences and uplift one another. Together, we create a world where every voice is heard, every story matters and every person belongs.'
In telling their stories, and what they are up against — from patriarchal mindsets, religious oppression to gender inequality, suffocating homes and terrifying lack of choices — Mushtaq universalises the experiences faced by a majority of women, at least in the subcontinent.
We may be in the 21st century, but in many homes, there's still a collective sigh when a girl child is born. Often, a girl does not have equal access to education; there is an unfortunate possibility she will be married off at an early age, with her worth depending only on her ability to bear a male heir. In the poignant title story, a struggling mother of five, Mehrun, is pulled back from the brink by her daughter; in 'Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal', a husband boasts about building a palace better than the Taj Mahal for his wife but forgets his love as soon as she is no more — inevitably, the daughter has to pick up the pieces, school long forgotten.
'Fire Rain' is a tragic story of the perils of identitarianism. She writes with candour, irony and wry humour with devastating effect, evident in the title of the last story in the collection, 'Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!'. The narrator, at the end of her tether with life's anxieties and unfairness, pleads with god: 'If you were to build the world again, to create males and females again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman, Prabhu! Be a woman once, Oh Lord!'.
In interviews, Mushtaq has said that she was inspired to chronicle these stories after hearing about the experiences of women who sought help from her as a lawyer.
Literature to bear witness
Mushtaq becomes the second Indian writer to win the International Booker Prize after Geetanjali Shree bagged it for Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, in 2022.
In her translation of Heart Lamp, Deepa Bhasthi retains the flavour of the original. A fact which was acknowledged by Max Porter, Chair of the 2025 Prize jury, who called it a 'radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes'. He said the 'beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women's lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression'.
Mushtaq thanked her readers, saying they were the soil where her stories grow. 'This book is my love letter to the idea that no story is local or small...' She also showered praises on Kannada — 'to write in Kannada is to inherit a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom,' she said. In a world that often tries to divide us, she said literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other's minds if only for a few pages.
Shoutout to regional language voices
Pointing out why the win for a book on women is important, Bhasthi said the story of the world is a history of erasures — and is often characterised by the effacement of women's triumphs and their stories. She gave a shout out to translators, and to Kannada, hoping that the Prize will lead to more translations from Kannada and other South Asian languages.
Also on the shortlist were Anne Serre's A Leopard-Skin Hat, translated by Mark Hutchinson, a touching 'memorial' to Serre's sister who died by suicide; Perfection, written by Vincenzo Latronico and translated by Sophie Hughes, about empty social media-driven lives; Hiromi Kawakami's sci-fi novel, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda; On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland, about an antiquarian bookseller stuck in a time loop; and Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat, translated by Helen Stevenson, on how and why an English Channel crossing by migrants went horribly wrong.
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