Heart Lamp takes you by the hand and plunges you into the tangled chaos of the everyday lives of Muslim women in Karnataka. Where children dart through rooms, wronged women await justice with patience born from disappointment, disloyal husbands avoid consequences, and families navigate domestic life. The twelve short stories, written over a thirty-three-year period, explore the intimate worlds of the women in the book. Originally in Kannada, it is through translation that these voices travel across the globe, and even India, carrying their full weight of emotion and resilience in the themes of gender, patriarchy, religion, and class.
When we think of translation, we often imagine words slipping through the cracks, parts of the story lost, or nuance diluted. But Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, and this year’s International Booker Prize winner, challenges that assumption on every page with every story.
Heart Lamp doesn’t shout out political proclamations; instead, it sears the reader with the age-old feminist slogan of ‘personal is political’. It invites you into the small, private spaces where complicated lives are lived. The rooms these women inhabit are microcosms of the society they live in, where tradition, familial dynamics, hierarchies, and expectations create limitations.
Mushtaq’s work pulls you in with this focus on interiority, thoughts, wishes, and daily negotiations made under patriarchy. The prose with its dry humour, burning truths, tragedy, and commentary on community, compels you to feel the fierceness of the women against the stark bleakness of their realities.
And it is exactly there that the translation steps in as a bridge and an act of defiance in language. Deepa Bhasthi’s translation does not attempt to create a neutral or safe version of the Kannada text. The original, a mix of Kannada, Urdu, Arabic, Dakhni, slang, and regional expressions, shines through the deliberate and careful act of translating the work.
In an interview, Bhasthi describes the language of Heart Lamp as ‘an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum’. This hum vibrates through the text, in exclamations of ‘rii’, ‘arey’, ‘eyy’, and ‘chey’, and in the use of kinship terms like ‘ammi’, ‘bhaiya’, and ‘ajji. Along with lines referring to fridge colours and likening them to Holi, saying ‘masala on (her) discomfort’ instead of salt in the wounds. Or the repetition of words, ‘dip-dipping’, ‘shining-shining’, all evidence of the cadence of the original text is kept in the translation.
These layers of inflections and sayings that anchor the novel in its cultural context are preserved. Bringing you into the world where the stories take place, in the kitchen where gobi manchuri is cooked, in the living room of a house split between a daughter and mother-in-law, in a courtyard that smells of kerosene, instead of attempting to bring the stories out into a different, disconnected world.
The last few pages of the book hold the Translator’s Note, titled ‘Against Italics’, dismissing the typography as visually distracting and a marker of words being imported to English and thus alienated or exoticised. When I met Bhasthi in a bookstore in New Delhi, she reaffirmed her take on italics; she is ‘absolutely against them’, preferring to let readers find new words without any interference.
The Translator’s Note quotes Banu as having said to Bhasthi, ‘Women everywhere face similar if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues I write about.’ This universality resonates in the book. As we meet women dealing with complicated marriages, abuse, divorce, control, and dowry. These struggles show up as familiar painful experiences while remaining uniquely nuanced and specific to their identities as Muslim women in Karnataka. In the final story ‘Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord,’ a woman asks Prabhu, God, to come to Earth as a woman, as she describes a life of sexual abuse under a controlling husband. She pleads to understand why there is an inequality in creation, why one is supreme while the other seemingly made by an ‘inexperienced potter’. Echoes of this story can be found in the lives of women around the world, in literature, on the internet, and even in newspaper reports, a shared pain spanning cultures.
Writing at the end of and after the Bandaya Sahitya movement, a literary wave that encouraged women, Dalits, and minorities to tell their own stories in defiance of the male-dominated, upper-caste Kannada literature of the 1970s and 80s, Banu Mushtaq remains a vital voice of that resistance. A lawyer, activist, and journalist, Mushtaq has spent her career advocating for women’s rights and challenging caste and religious oppression, ensuring that marginalised voices find a place in literature and outside.
Heart Lamp reminds us that there is more to seeing. Many readers outside India, or even ones outside southern India, may never have encountered women like those in Mushtaq’s stories. Yet, through translation, we come to know them not as others, but as familiar in their humanity as well as problems.
The International Booker Prize recognition of Heart Lamp marks more than literary acclaim. It is a celebration of Indian literature’s rich, multilingual diversity, and a recognition of translation’s role in amplifying regional voices. India’s literature is not one thing, nor one language, nor even one tradition. Language here has always been a jumble of borrowed and modified words, fusion cultures, code-switching, and a mix of multiple tongues.
In line with the unique blend of English that Heart Lamp is home to, Bhasthi, in another interview, calls for more translators to fight to write in ‘different Englishes’. Multilingualism in India spills over the neat boundaries of language names; there are also many Kannadas, depending on the region.
The spotlighting of Kannada literature on a global front signals a shift toward acknowledging the vibrancy of India’s linguistic mosaic, and the key role translators play in bringing these stories to more shelves.
Moreover, Heart Lamp feels urgent today in the country. Conversations about feminism, representation, and intersectionality continue to be framed and driven by a select few. This book pushes against that narrow lens. It showcases and puts into the mainstream lives of Muslim women, often relegated to the sidelines of discourse.
Mushtaq’s women do not merely add to the diversity of Indian writing, but through Bhasthi, they insist on being read on their own terms, through a translation that refuses to erase their quirks.
Surmayi Khatana is a writer and journalist based in Delhi. Her work has appeared in Civil Society Magazine, Feminism In India, The Coil, and The Times of India. She writes short dramas and enjoys poetry and super-long think pieces about culture. You can follow her on @surmayi.pdf
