India’s Banu Mushtaq scripts history with International Booker win
Indian writer-lawyer-activist Banu Mushtaq has scripted history by winning the International Booker prize for the short story anthology, Heart Lamp.
It is the first book written in the Kannada language, which is spoken in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, to win the prestigious prize.
The stories in Heart Lamp were translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi.
Featuring 12 short stories written by Mushtaq over three decades from 1990 to 2023, Heart Lamp poignantly captures the hardships of Muslim women living in southern India.
Mushtaq’s win comes off the back of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand – translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell – winning the prize in 2022.
Her body of work is well-known among book lovers, but the Booker International win has shone a bigger spotlight on her life and literary oeuvre, which mirrors many of the challenges the women in her stories face, brought on by religious conservatism and a deeply patriarchal society.
It is this self-awareness that has, perhaps, helped Mushtaq craft some of the most nuanced characters and plot-lines.
“In a literary culture that rewards spectacle, Heart Lamp insists on the value of attention – to lives lived at the edges, to unnoticed choices, to the strength it takes simply to persist. That is Banu Mushtaq’s quiet power,” a review in the Indian Express newspaper says about the book.
Who is Banu Mushtaq?
Mushtaq grew up in a small town in the southern state of Karnataka in a Muslim neighbourhood and like most girls around her, studied the Quran in the Urdu language at school.
But her father, a government employee, wanted more for her and at the age of eight, enrolled her in a convent school where the medium of instruction was the state’s official language – Kannada.
Mushtaq worked hard to become fluent in Kannada, but this alien tongue would become the language she chose for her literary expression.
She began writing while still in school and chose to go to college even as her peers were getting married and raising children.
It would take several years before Mushtaq was published and it happened during a particularly challenging phase in her life.
Her short story appeared in a local magazine a year after she had married a man of her choosing at the age of 26, but her early marital years were also marked by conflict and strife – something she openly spoke of, in several interviews.
