Rebel’s Reckoning

THIS BOOK IS MY love letter to the idea that no story is local, that a tale born under a banyan tree in my village can cast shadows as far as this stage tonight,” said Banu Mushtaq at the International Booker Prize 2025 ceremony. Kannada author Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi created history at London’s Tate Modern on May 20 by winning the top award in translations against five other contenders on the shortlist. Their victory, remarkable in itself, is also noteworthy for the many firsts to its credit. Heart Lamp is the first collection of short stories to win. It is the first time a Kannada book has won. And Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win the award. Mushtaq is only the second Indian author to win the International Booker Prize after Geetanjali Shree in 2022. Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand was translated by American translator Daisy Rockwell. The £50,000 prize money will be divided equally between the author and the translator. Heart Lamp has been published by And Other Stories internationally and by Penguin Books in India.

The significance of this win can only be compared to Arundhati Roy becoming the first Indian Booker Prize recipient, for her debut novel The God of Small Things in 1997. While it is easy to see Roy’s victory as a personal triumph, it should be seen as a part of a greater whole. The prize was also a celebration of Indian writing in English for the first time. Roy’s novel was the cherry on rich pickings. The 1990s were after all a period when Vikram Seth was at his best, Amitav Ghosh was flexing his literary muscles, and Salman Rushdie was churning out books such as Imaginary Homelands (1991) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). It was 50 years since India got its independence, and Indian writing in English was enjoying its glory days in ways it hasn’t since. Similarly, the victory of Heart Lamp coming so soon after Tomb of Sand’s win tells of a larger story. Indian translations are finally coming into their own. Many translations still leave much wanting, but there are a handful of expert translators who own the text and thus elevate it. The Booker judges described Heart Lamp as “something genuinely new for English readers”, “a radical translation”.

Today some of the most exciting fiction in India abides in these radical translations that uplift the original.

Mushtaq concluded her heartfelt speech with the line, “Tonight is not an end point…it is a torch, may it light the way for more stories from unheard corners, more translations that defy borders and more voices that remind us the universe fits inside every I.”

The stories of Heart Lamp are 0milieu specific, the language is the argot of homes, and yet it transcends borders. Or one should say, these stories once again prove the truism that in the particular lies the universal. The 12 short stories in the collection centre on Muslim women and their families. But to pigeonhole these stories to a particular religion or community is to do them a disservice. Originally published in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, Mushtaq’s portrayals of family and community speak of her battles against oppression and injustice. In the translator’s note (fittingly titled ‘Against Italics’), Bhasthi (winner of an English PEN Award) writes that Mushtaq’s entire career can be summed up in the one Kannada word—bandaya, meaning “dissent, rebellion, protest, resistance to authority, revolution and its adjacent ideas”. One of the few women of the Bandaya Sahitya movement, Mushtaq’s writing is inherently feminist, and anti-class and caste.

IN MOST OF the stories in Heart Lamp, the plea of the women to an unknown and unseen force is—‘Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!’ (the title of the last story). If the Lord were a woman, perhaps, the injustices would have been fewer. The first-person speaker tells the Lord of the many trials she has faced and the cruelties of her husband. He is a man devoid of love or grace. The woman speaker says to the Lord, “You know all this; your own bookkeepers bring you crores and crores of such reports every day, but they are all written with a pen, whereas this report was written from the heart, a woman’s heart, a string of letters written with the heart’s sharp nib and the red ink inside.” Similarly, Mushtaq’s stories are written from the heart, engraved with the nib of experience and coloured in blood.

Speaking at the prize-giving ceremony, Deepa Bhasthi said, “The story of the world is a history of erasures. It is characterised by the effacement of women’s triumphs and the furtive rubbing away of collective memory of how women and those on the many margins of the world live and love.” Heart Lamp is not a collection of stories of the voiceless, it is the rallying song of those who have been denied a voice. By giving her women characters a voice, Mushtaq gives them an agency that they are most often denied in their own lives. In life they may be buffeted by the forces of patriarchy and religion and dogma, but in literature they can (and will) rise.

At the event, Chair of the International Booker Prize 2025, Max Porter said, “Translated literature is a way of communicating over a border, under a wall, beyond an algorithm’s reach. We therefore need it more than ever—those of us who believe in the migration of ideas, people, languages and feelings.”

At a time when the very word and concept ‘migration’ is under attack, the International Booker Prize, which celebrates translations, and the triumph of Heart Lamp, proves that words and ideas cannot be walled in. It is their nature to move from the mind of the author, to the page, to the consciousness of the reader. The women in these stories might be based in villages in Karnataka, but they speak for all women. They tell us that even in the hardest of times, hope and faith can be found in sisterhood, in the bonds between mothers and children, that while some cruel men will always be cruel, some cruelties are born from buffoonery, that even the darkest of stories often end with a twist, and that where oppression falls, resistance springs.

Banu MushtaqBooker Prize 2025booksDeepa Bhasthi