‘Heart Lamp’ lights up India with Booker
“This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky — brief, brilliant and utterly collective,” said Banu Mushtaq in her acceptance speech for the International Booker Prize for “Heart Lamp”.
With it, she has placed Kannada, a language she describes as a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom, firmly on the literary map. But it has offered the world a new literary star — a firebrand Muslim writer from a conservative Hassan.
Her win does feel like a burst of light in the sky. The win is special in many other ways. It is rare for a short-story collection to win. It is also the first time that an Indian translator, Deepa Bhasthi, has won for translation after the award changed its format in 2016. But more importantly, “Heart Lamp” is a collection that celebrates the quiet resilience of ordinary women.
Fierce, feminist, a firebrand as she is often described, Banu has defined her life by defiance. Her choice of language too was sparked by rebellion. Her mother tongue is Urdu. “They said Muslim girls won’t learn Kannada,” she said in an interview with The Tribune when she was shortlisted. “They gave me six months to learn or they would ask me to leave. I made history,” she said.
In a time of rising divisiveness, Banu’s win is a poignant reminder of the strength of India’s pluralism. “In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages,” said Banu in her acceptance speech.
“Hope”, Emily Dickinson said, was a thing with feathers. But it is also the quiet stories of Banu Mushtaq translated by the talented Deepa Bhasthi.
When she was young, she insisted on learning the bicycle and riding it through the lanes of Hassan. When she got older, this streak of rebellion turned to choosing her own partner. “I was attracted to her intelligence,” says Mushtaq Mohiyudin on the phone. He is in Hassan unable to travel. The house has been filled with people through the day. “She is very bold. In college, I used to go to listen to her debates. I am very very proud,” he says.
At the end of “Heart Lamp” is an alphabetic list of 3,339 people to be thanked to make the book possible. Their names come with the acknowledgement that it takes a village to bring out a book. But Banu thanks only one — her husband. He has been there each time there was an attempt on her life. He is the one who stopped her from lighting the match when she doused herself with kerosene in a fit of depression for being forced to stay at home and not work after she got married. Or the time a man came with a knife to kill her. It was he who burst out like Akshay Khanna when a man came with a knife. “She writes fiction,” he laughs. “Also advocacy, especially if it is me.”
Her choosing her own partner, refusal to stay at home after she got married, or advocating for women to be allowed to pray at mosques, for which she was excommunicated from her community, Banu has chosen the tougher path. “Women have to obey unquestioningly,” said Banu, adding that, “I started to question patriarchy.”
If her books are populated with women, her table was crowded with them. Banu sat with her two daughters — both lawyers following in her footsteps — flanking her. It was them that she hugged tightly as she took the stage and also Deepa, her translator, as well as Tara Tobler, Senior Editor at And Other Stories, a small independent publishing company that published “Heart Lamp” in Britain.
As in her stories where women find themselves centre stage, they are present. Her stories need to be heard. “It was a fitting speech,” said Stefan Tobler, translator and founder of And Other Stories. “It needs to be heard everywhere. We are living in difficult times. People need to hear the truth in times of rising racism and Islamophobia in the world.”
But this prize is equally a celebration — and the acknowledgement — of writers who are invisible in mainstream publishing — or in the social media world, where to be seen is to be read. Banu at 77 is on the older side of the spectrum of writers to have won the prize. Margaret Atwood won the Booker at 79.
Banu is relevant, she has a voice, it is loud and it is political. Like Geetanjali Shree, who won in 2022 for “Tomb of Sand” — where the protagonist is a an old woman —who refuses to participate the performative aspects of being a writer, these are women who have a conscious, who write, who rage into the night and are read for their ability to tell a story that matters.
“The story of the world, if you think about it, is the history of erasures,” said Deepa in her acceptance speech. “It is characterised by the effacement of women’s triumphs and the furtive rubbing away of collective memory of how women and those in the margins of the world live and love. This prize is a small win in a long-going battle of such violence.” And as Banu said in her speech, the prize is passing the torch.
