Banu Mushtaq spotlights women in this year’s Intl. Booker Prize recipient

? This year’s International Booker Prize recipient captures the nuanced reality of women and girls in Southwest India. Translated from the city of Karnataka's native language Kannada by Deepa Basthi, Heart Lamp unveils a collection of short stories written by Banu Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023.

Women amidst an oppressive patriarchy lie at the center of all her stories. As an activist and a lawyer, Mushtaq writes about women fighting for their rights. She portrays disruptive familial structures whose male figureheads ignorantly or malevolently mistreat the women and girls. Her narrations vary from metaphorical to direct, with interesting relationship dynamics and introspective characters leading the plotlines.

Mushtaq’s writing primarily spotlights women struggling in toxic marriages, with ruthless in-laws, being denied education, and suffocating from gender norms that see them as easily replaceable. The collection heavily explores motifs of faith, caste, class, and religion. Her stories draw on personal experiences and incidents. As she tells the Booker Prize Foundation, her “heart itself is her field of study.”

The collection centers on the short story Heart Lamp, falling right at the book’s midpoint. Heart Lamp depicts a culmination of all these struggles through a woman who cut off her education for an early marriage, later finding out that her husband is cheating on her. Feeling unloved and disrespected by him, she seeks refuge from her parents and two older brothers who fail to see or understand her plight. She returns to her husband’s house and intends to take her own life before her eldest daughter persuades her not to. The pain she suffers in isolation is represented as a lamp that went out in her heart.

In a translation that preserves the character of the original, Basthi retains certain Kannada words, breathing new life into the text in a new language. The translation doesn’t read as an entirely new form, but rather as an extension of the text’s potential, owing to Basthi’s embrace of the linguistic rhythms and cultural textures of Mushtaq’s stories. The award represents a significant milestone, being the first victory for a Kannada-translated work and only the second for an Indian writer overall.

WHERE TO GET IT- You can get the paperback version of Heart Lamp at ShoroukBookstores. You can also get the ebook on Amazon and Kobo.