From UR Ananthamurthy to Banu Mushtaq: How Kannada literature finally brought home the Booker

Indian Express

21-05-2025

'If I have seen further,' Isaac Newton wrote in 1675, 'it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.'
For Kannada literature, that giant was UR Ananthamurthy. In 2013, the 80-year-old literary icon became the first Kannada writer ever shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with global luminaries such as Alice Munro and Philip Roth. Though the £60,000 award went to American short-story writer Lydia Davis that year, Ananthamurthy's nomination cracked open a door—one that remained tantalisingly ajar until this year, when Banu Mushtaq kicked it down completely.
Now, twelve years after that near-miss, Kannada literature has its watershed moment: Mushtaq's Heart Lamp (translated by Deepa Bhasthi) has won the 2025 International Booker Prize, fulfilling Ananthamurthy's dream and cementing Kannada's place on the world literary stage. What Ananthamurthy's nomination began, Mushtaq's win completes—not as an end, but as a powerful new beginning for regional Indian literatures on the world stage.
Born in 1932 in Melige, Karnataka, Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy was a writer, critic, and intellectual who reshaped Kannada literature. A central figure in the Navya (modernist) movement, he interrogated caste, tradition, and morality with a literary sharpness that found equal resonance in India and abroad. His classic Samskara remains a touchstone in Indian literature and was later adapted into a critically acclaimed film.
Over his long career, Ananthamurthy received the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, and the Padma Bhushan. His nomination for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 was for his entire body of work—a corpus that includes novels such as Bhava, Bharathipura, and Avasthe, along with short stories that have been translated into multiple Indian and European languages.
The Booker panel praised him for the humanity and complexity of his fiction, which explored the friction between traditional values and modernity. Though he didn't win, the nomination placed Kannada literature in the global spotlight for the first time.
In many ways, Banu Mushtaq represents the next chapter of the story Ananthamurthy began. Born in Hassan, Karnataka in 1948, she emerged during the Bandaya (protest) movement of the 1970s—a literary current influenced by writers like Ananthamurthy, but focused on amplifying the voices of Dalits, women, and minorities. Her work, written with searing clarity and political courage, brings forth the stories of Muslim women often silenced in both mainstream narratives and within their own communities.
Her International Booker-winning Heart Lamp (originally Edeya Hanate) spans three decades and 12 stories—each a meditation on injustice, resilience, and survival. But Mushtaq's literary career has never been detached from real-world danger. In 2000, she became the target of a fatwa and survived a knife attack after advocating for Muslim women's right to pray in mosques.
Geetanjali Shree's 2022 International Booker win for Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) broke Indian literature's glass ceiling, creating a blueprint for Indian writing for conquering global literary imagination.
Just as Shree's win made space for Hindi, Ananthamurthy's 2013 Booker nomination prepared the ground for Mushtaq's triumph. Where Ananthamurthy interrogated the internal contradictions of Hindu orthodoxy through metaphysical allegory, Mushtaq exposes gendered repression within Islamic traditions.
Together, they form a continuum—proof that India's bhasha literature articulates the universal.
The Man Booker International Prize—as it existed from 2005 to 2015—honoured a writer's lifetime contribution to fiction, rather than a single work.
The International Booker Prize, in its new form since 2016, awards a specific work of fiction in English translation. Geetanjali Shree became the first Indian writer to win the International Booker Prize, while Mushtaq is the first Kannada writer to win this version of the prize.
Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks.
She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year.
She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home.
Write to her at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More