India’s Banu Mushtaq makes history with International Booker win 3 hours ago Cherylann Mollan BBC News, Mumbai Indian writer, lawyer and activist Banu Mushtaq has made history by becoming the first author writing in the Kannada language to win the International Booker prize with her short story anthology, Heart Lamp.
Featuring 12 short stories written by Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023, Heart Lamp poignantly captures the hardships of Muslim women living in southern India.
Who is Banu Mushtaq?
What does Banu Mushtaq write about?
“In mainstream Indian literature, Muslim women are often flattened into metaphors — silent sufferers or tropes in someone else’s moral argument.
Banu Mushtaq of India creates history by winning the International Booker.
3 hours prior.
Mollan Cherylann.
BBC News, Mumbai.
With her collection of short stories, Heart Lamp, Indian author, lawyer, and activist Banu Mushtaq became the first Kannada-language writer to win the International Booker Prize.
The first collection of short stories to receive the prestigious award is this one. “Astonishing portraits of survival and resilience” is how the judges described her characters.
Heart Lamp, which includes 12 short stories by Mushtaq from 1990 to 2023, powerfully depicts the struggles faced by Muslim women in southern India.
In order to share the £50,000 prize, Deepa Bhasthi chose and translated the stories from Kannada, which is spoken in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, into English.
Mushtaq thanked readers for allowing her words to linger in their hearts during her acceptance speech.
“This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small; that every thread in the tapestry of human experience holds the weight of the whole,” she stated.
She continued, “Literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages, in a world that often tries to divide us.”.
The first Indian translator to win an International Booker, Bhasthi expressed her hope that the recognition would inspire more translations into and out of Kannada and other South Asian languages.
The award was a major victory for regional literature, Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-chief of Penguin India, the book’s Indian publisher, told the BBC.
The victory of Heart Lamp this year serves as a potent reminder that literature in India’s numerous languages merits our undivided attention, especially in light of Tomb of Sand’s historic victory in 2022 [Daisy Rockwell translated Geetanjali Shree’s book from Hindi]. “We owe it to our ears,” Subramaniam stated.
Book lovers are familiar with Mushtaq’s body of work, but the Booker International prize has brought greater attention to her life and literary output, which reflects many of the struggles faced by the women in her stories due to religious conservatism and a strongly patriarchal culture.
Perhaps Mushtaq has been able to create some of the most complex characters and storylines because of this self-awareness.
Heart Lamp insists on the importance of attention—to marginalized lives, to unseen decisions, to the fortitude required to persevere—in a literary culture that prizes spectacle. According to an Indian Express newspaper review, “that is Banu Mushtaq’s quiet power.”.
Is Banu Mushtaq a person?
Mushtaq was raised in a Muslim neighborhood in a small town in the southern state of Karnataka. Like the majority of the girls in her immediate vicinity, she attended school and studied the Quran in Urdu.
However, her government-employed father wanted better for her, so when she was eight years old, he enrolled her in a convent school where Kannada, the official language of the state, was taught.
Mushtaq put a lot of effort into learning Kannada, but she would ultimately choose to express herself literaryly in this foreign language.
While her peers were getting married and starting families, she decided to attend college and started writing while still in school.
Mushtaq would not be published for several years, and when it was, it was during a very trying time in her life.
A year after she married a man of her choosing at the age of 26, her short story was published in a local magazine. However, she also openly discussed in multiple interviews how her early marriage was characterized by conflict and strife.
In a Vogue magazine interview, she stated: “I had always wanted to write, but I had nothing to write about because I was told to wear a burqa and devote myself to household chores after a love marriage. At 29, I became a mother and experienced postpartum depression.
She described how she was compelled to live her life inside her home’s four walls in a different interview with The Week magazine.
She was then released in a startling act of defiance.
“I once poured white gasoline on myself with the intention of burning myself alive in a moment of desperation. The husband, fortunately, caught on in time, gave me a hug, and removed the matchbox. “Please don’t leave us,” she told the magazine, “and he begged me, putting our baby at my feet.”.
On what subject does Banu Mushtaq write?
This spirit of defiance and tenacity is reflected in her female characters in Heart Lamp.
Muslim women in popular Indian literature are frequently reduced to metaphors, either as silent victims or as cliches in someone else’s moral discourse. Mushtaq declines both. A review of the book in The Indian Express newspaper states that her characters persevere, compromise, and sometimes fight back—not in ways that make headlines, but in ways that are significant to their lives.
Later, Mushtaq worked as a reporter for a well-known local tabloid and was involved with the Bandaya movement, which used activism and literature to address social and economic injustices.
Ten years later, in order to provide for her family, she left journalism to work as a lawyer.
She has published a novel, an essay collection, and six collections of short stories during her illustrious multi-decade career.
However, she has also become the object of hate because of her sharp writing.
She described how, in 2000, she received threatening phone calls after voicing her support for women’s right to pray in mosques in an interview with The Hindu newspaper.
After she was the target of a fatwa, which is a court order issued in accordance with Islamic law, a man attempted to stab her before her husband subdued him.
Nevertheless, Mushtaq remained unfazed by these events and kept writing with frankness.
I have continuously criticized religious interpretations that are chauvinistic. These topics continue to be important to my writing. Although society has undergone significant change, the fundamental problems have not changed. “Women and marginalized communities continue to face fundamental challenges, despite changing circumstances,” she told The Week magazine.
Many distinguished local and national honors, such as the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award and the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award, have been bestowed upon Mushtaq’s writings over the years.
The English translation of Mushtaq’s five collections of short stories, Haseena and Other Stories, which was published between 1990 and 2012, was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 2024.
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