The Indian-activist writer Banu Mushtaq scripted history by winning the International Booker Prize for the Anthology of the New, Heart Lamp.
This is the first book written in the Kannada language, which is spoken in the state of southern Karnataka, to win the prestigious prize.
The HEART lamp stories were translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi.
With 12 news written by Mushtaq on three decades from 1990 to 2023, Heart Lamp poignantly captured the tests of Muslim women living in southern India.
Mushtaq’s victory comes from the back of the Getanjali Shree sand tomb – translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell – winning the prize in 2022.
His work is well known among book lovers, but Booker’s international victory has shone a greater projector on his life and his literary work, which reflects many challenges that women in his stories are confronted, provoked by religious conservatism and a deeply patriarchal society.
It is this self-awareness that may have helped Mushtaq to make some of the most nuanced characters and lines.
“In a literary culture that rewards the show, Heart Lamp insists on the value of attention – to lives lived on the edges, with unnoticed choices, to the strength that it takes simply to persist. It is the calm power of Banu Mushtaq”, says a criticism of the Indian Express newspaper about the book.
Mushtaq grew up in a small town in the southern state of Karnataka in a Muslim district and, like most girls around her, studied the Koran in the Ourdou language at school.
But her father, an employee of the government, wanted more for her and at the age of eight, enrolled her in a convent school where the means of teaching was the official language of the state – Kannada.
Mushtaq worked hard to speak fluent in Kannada, but this extraterrestrial language would become the language it has chosen for its literary expression.
She started writing when he was still in school and chose to go to university even though her peers married and raised children.
It would take several years before Mushtaq’s publication and this has happened during a particularly difficult phase of his life.
Her news appeared in a local magazine a year after marrying a man of his choice at the age of 26, but his first conjugal years were also marked by conflicts and conflicts – something that she spoke openly, in several interviews.
In an interview with Vogue Magazine, she said: “I had always wanted to write but had nothing to write (about) because suddenly, after a marriage of love, I was told to wear a burqa and devote myself to domestic work. I became a mother suffering from postpartum depression at 29”.
In another interview with the Week magazine, she explained how she was forced to live a confined life in the four walls of her house.
Then, an act of shocking challenge released it.
“Once, in a crisis of despair, I poured white essence on myself, with the intention of setting fire to me. Fortunately, he (the husband) felt it in time, hugged me in his arms and removed the matchbox. He pleaded me, placing our baby at my feet saying:” Do not abandon ourselves “,” she explained to the magazine.
In Heart Lamp, his female characters reflect this spirit of resistance and resilience.
“In traditional Indian literature, Muslim women are often flattened in metaphors – silent people or tropes in someone else’s moral argument. Mushtaq refuses both. His characters persist, negotiate and sometimes repel – not in a way that claims titles, but in a way that matters to their lives”, according to a review of the book of Indian newspaper.
Mushtaq then worked as a journalist in a prominent local tabloid and also associated with the Bandaya movement – which focused on the fight against social and economic injustices by literature and activism.
After leaving journalism a decade later, she took work as a lawyer to support her family.
During a career in a corrected field covering several decades, she has published an abundant amount of work; Including six new collections, a collection of essays and a novel.
But her incisive writing also made her a target of hatred.
In an interview with the Hindu newspaper, she explained how in the year 2000, she received threatening telephone calls after having expressed her opinion supporting the right of women to offer prayer in mosques.
A fatwa – a legal decision in accordance with Islamic law – was issued against it and a man tried to attack her with a knife before he was mastered by her husband.
But these incidents did not decline Mushtaq, who continued to write with fierce honesty.
“I have constantly challenged Chauvinist religious interpretations. These problems are at the heart of my writing, even now. Society has changed a lot, but fundamental questions remain the same. Even if the context evolves, the basic difficulties of women and marginalized communities continue,” she told Week magazine.
Over the years, Mushtaq’s writings have won numerous prestigious local and national awards, including Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award and Daana Chiltamani Award Award.
In 2024, the English compilation translated from the five short mushtaq collections published between 1990 and 2012 – Haseena and other stories – won the pen translation award.
