Indian writer, Banu Mushtaq’s fiction Heart Lamp won the International Booker Prize this week. The 77-year-old writer  said “ I never dreamt it could happen. I don’t know how to express my emotions, except to say it is the greatest experience of my life”. Her translator Deepa Bhasthi 41, said “the honour lies in becoming the first translator of colour to win the annual award which goes to the best work of fiction translated into English. splits the £50,000 prize money equally between author and translator.

Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 stories Mushtaq  exquisitely captures everyday lives of women and girl in Muslim communities in southern India, wrote in Kannada, a language spoken by an estimated 65 million people from south India, between 1990 and 2023. Praised for  their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions have garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards. The book reveal verbal energy, teeming with voices, revealing the lives of women in patriarchal communities of southern India.

Max Porter chair of the International Booker Prize 2025 judges, called Heart Lamp a “ radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes”.

Bhasthi who lives in Madikeri, 100km from Mushtaq’s home in Hassan says “This is our lived experience. We have different languages in southern India. Even though we speak certain language at home, the language of the streets is different and we work our professional lives in English. Banu and I engage with different languages on a daily basis.”

“ There is an attempt in India to other minorities and put all communities in boxes eventhough in reality everyone bleeds into each other” Bhasthi said referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist movement. Authoritarian politicians do not want harmony between communities so they try to bracket them in certain ways. Where I live, irrespective of caste and creed people are happy that Karnataka has won global attention”.

Mushtaq was born into a Muslim family in 1948 but her parents sent her to a convent school where she started writing in Kannada. She became a lawyer, a feminist activist and member of the Bandaya Sahitya movement which in the 1970s and 80s protested against upper-caste and male dominated literature.

Banu Mushtaq said, “When I started writing, I was challenging the patriarchy. I wrote about dowry debt, which meant a newly-wed bride would be burned to get more dowry from her parents and domestic violence. My subjects have changed because the social situation has changed. I have started to write about communalism, solidarity, neighbourhood life in Karnataka.” 

“ In a story, you have to be stingy with your words and use them diligently,” she says lighting up the opportunity to talk craft. You need to route map, otherwise it will become a novel .. If an issue is haunting the people, I don’t want to write a report or an essay. I want to write a story. The short story is intimate and has the power to remain in readers’ minds”.

Her title story concerns a young woman who confides in her parent when her husband starts seeing another woman, only to be told to accept her lot. Mushtaq reveals the woman’s unhappiness with characteristic economy of language: “ The feeling of being a stranger in her own house nagged at her, and the fire of insults ground her down”.

The International Booker Prize judges called Mushtaq’s women characters “ astonishing portraits of survival and resilience”.

In the incendiary story “ The High-Heeled Shoe”, about a woman whose unstable husband forces her to wear ill-fitting, three-inch stilettos even though she is five months pregnant and unwell. Mushtaq says “ the husband should have worn the high-heels shoes. These roles that say how women should be are very dominant. The woman in the story defies her husband but he doesn’t understand, so she breaks the shoe, thereby breaking the stereotype. It is what I have done throughout my life, breaking the stereotypes one by one. How artfully you break it is the important thing.”

Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq, Translated by Deepa Bhasthi, published by Penguin Random House, India, And Other Stories, £14.99