Banu Mushtaq | Lady with the lamp-OxBig News Network

Kannada author Banu Mushtaq has been lending expression to the unvoiced for 5 a long time, and when Deepa Bhasthi got here on board as translator, her tales leapt throughout linguistic obstacles and provincial borders. On Tuesday (May 20, 2025), Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada to English by Bhasthi, won the International Booker Prize for 2025.

This is the primary honour for Kannada, a language Mushtaq says has “cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom”, on this stage. It’s additionally the primary time a group of quick tales has been feted, and the second time in three years an Indian author has gotten the highest prize. Geetanjali Shree had won for Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell in 2022.

Heart Lamp (And Other Stories/Penguin) is a choice of 12 tales, written between 1990 and 2023. An array of characters have walk-on elements — maulvis, thuggish brothers who flex muscle tissue on their whims, grandparents, uncles, broods of youngsters — however the highlight is firmly on Muslim women and girls on the margins, trying to find a toehold in a claustrophobic patriarchal world. It was revealed initially in Kannada (Haseena Mattu Itara Kathegalu) by Abhiruchi Prakashana, Mysuru. One of the tales in Heart Lamp, ‘Black Cobra’, was made right into a characteristic movie, Hasina, by Girish Kasaravalli.

A lawyer and activist primarily based in Hassan, a city on the leeward facet of the Western Ghats and a gateway to coastal Karnataka, Mushtaq, now 77, was impressed by the Bandaya Sahitya motion of the Nineteen Eighties, which urged ladies to jot down about their lived experiences. An empathetic observer and listener, Mushtaq started documenting tales from unheard corners, jotting down each side of the ladies’s lives, their drudgery, anxieties, in addition to their pleasure. “This book is my love letter to the idea that no story is local. [It] was born from the belief that no story is ever small, that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole,” she stated in an impassioned acceptance speech excessive on grace and gratitude.

Most of the ladies she writes about lack company over their our bodies. They are sometimes powerless, financially dependent, and have little say over some other side too, significantly schooling. Girls are withdrawn from faculty on the drop of a hat.

Dash of wry humour

If they’re married, like Mehrun within the title story, it means they’ll by no means return to their dad and mom’ house; regardless of the husband’s misdemeanours, Mehrun is requested to bear it or look away. When she will’t take it anymore, it’s her daughter Salma who pulls her from the brink. When this spirit of sisterhood works, ladies prolong a hand to others; when it doesn’t, there’s distress and silent tears deep into the night time. Her tales have wry humour too — within the final, a mom weary after giving delivery, appeals to god: ‘Be a woman once, Oh Lord!’

Like Sara Aboobacker, who wrote about Muslim ladies in coastal Kerala and Karnataka and was crucial of patriarchy and different points, Mushtaq too has been outspoken about ladies’s lack of selection in issues of religion and reproductive rights. Both writers confronted the wrath of fundamentalists.

For making Mushtaq’s tales achieve a worldwide readership, Bhasthi’s “radical translation” has are available in for reward. Bhasthi writes within the translator’s observe that between them they know greater than six languages. Bhasthi retains the rhythms of the numerous Kannadas spoken within the area. For occasion, Mushtaq speaks Dakhni at house, whose base is Urdu with mortgage phrases from Persian, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu — however her language at work and on the road is Kannada. Readers will break right into a smile on listening to the phrases moms usually spit out in shock — “thoo, thoo.”

Booker Jury Chair Max Porter stated the unconventional translation hits “viscerally.” Both author and translator harped on the richness of Kannada and hoped it could result in extra translations from different “magical” languages of South Asia.

Calling literature one of many “last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages,” Mushtaq hoped her win would “light the way for more stories that defy borders.” The most interesting of literature affords an sincere mirror, and certainly Mushtaq holds a luminous one.