Literature Must Awaken: Booker Hopeful Banu Mushtaq On Historic Nomination for Heart Lamp
As she prepares to attend the International Booker Prize ceremony in London, Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq says literature must awaken.
By Minal Rudra
Published : May 13, 2025 at 5:34 PM IST
The International Booker Prize will be announced on May 20, and all eyes in Kannada literary circles and beyond are on Banu Mushtaq, a lawyer, activist, former journalist, and acclaimed writer. At 77, she has made history with Heart Lamp (published by Penguin Random House India). It has become the first book by a Kannada-language author to be shortlisted for the esteemed international honour in literature. Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 short stories written over 33 years between 1990 and 2023.
Banu has six short story collections, a book of essays, a poetry collection, and a novel in Kannada to her credit. She is the recipient of the Karnataka Sahitya Akademy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe. Though she’s no stranger to recognition, the Booker nomination has filled her with a childlike excitement. “It feels like I'm living a dream I never even dared to dream,” she tells ETV Bharat before heading to the Booker ceremony in London.
“I felt it’s a miracle,” she says with a smile when asked about her initial reaction to being nominated. “My publisher was shouting with joy... my children were calling from abroad, and I...at first I didn’t quite understand what the ‘longlist’ meant. But when it finally sank in, I was certainly overwhelmed.”
The recognition has brought her voice to international attention with a spotlight on Kannada literature. But if you ask Mushtaq what she hopes people talk about, her answer is plain and powerful. “People are talking more about my life than my stories,” she says. “I wish they would talk about the stories. About the characters. About the social circumstances in which I wrote them and why I needed to write those stories.”
She says the real joy lies "not in the accolade itself but in what it might unlock."
Hailing from the small town of Hassan in Karnataka, Mushtaq’s roots are firmly planted in the Bandaya (Rebellion) literary movement of the 1970s. This wasn’t just a school of thought. For her, It was a way of life.
“Bandaya is a state of mind,” she says. “We weren’t sitting in rooms writing about struggle. We were marching in the sun, getting arrested, shouting slogans in the streets with Dalit Sangarsha Samiti, theatre activists, feminists. That’s where we formed ourselves.”
Her stories have always sought to be a voice for the voiceless. That conviction comes not from ideology but from lived experience. As a woman from a largely conservative community, Mushtaq says she knew early that the world wouldn’t easily accept her truths. But with her writing and the law, she has never hesitated to confront it, supported first by her father, and later by her husband after her father passed away.
Mushtaq’s path to literature wasn’t straightforward. She began writing in the 1970s but paused for years to raise her children and run a household. It wasn’t until the 1980s, amid the wave of social movements in Karnataka, that she returned to storytelling. This time, with a sharper pen and a clearer purpose.
“I have seen so many dark realities,” she says. “A mother once asked me how much I would charge to get her son killed. He was raping her. A father had fathered a child with his own daughter. These stories...I haven’t even written all of them. But they are in me.”
Her collection, Heart Lamp, bears witness to these realities. In story after story, her characters are battered but unbroken. They stand in protest, walk out of abusive marriages, demand dignity. Many are women navigating the harsh boundaries of faith, marriage, and motherhood. Yet, they never surrender.
“None of my protagonists are pessimistic,” she says. “They fight. That is how I see life. That is how I live it.”
Her refusal to compromise has often come at a cost. She has received death threats and once had a fatwa issued against her. Some community leaders even brought a document and demanded she sign and vow never to write again. “They brought a stamp paper and asked me to sign it,” she recalls. “I tore it and said, even if you hang me in the center of Hassan, I will not sign.”
But, standing up for herself hasn’t been easy. “That fear stays with me,” she admits. Today, I write with self-censorship. Without it, maybe my writing would have been even more radical, daring, and challenging."
Still, she writes. Because the stories refuse to remain buried. “My heart is a burial ground for naked truths,” she says. “To light the lamp, you must first endure the darkness.”
One of the most personal aspects of Heart Lamp's translation is that it allowed Mushtaq’s own grandchildren to read her work for the first time. “My mother tongue is Dakhni Urdu. I write in Kannada. The children don’t know it,” she says. “I was wondering: when will they know what their grandmother writes? Now that it is in English, they are reading.”
Deepa Bhasthi has translated Heart Lamp from Kannada, and Banu gives full credit to her for proposing to submit the translated volume to the Booker. “We didn’t know anything about submission deadlines or publishers in the UK,” Mushtaq laughs. “But we said, okay, go ahead. Suddenly it was longlisted. Then shortlisted. It all happened like a dream.”
Mushtaq is not merely a writer. She is a fierce public voice, especially for Muslim women. She’s stood for their right to enter mosques, for the hijab, and against domestic abuse. Her efforts at times drew the ire of both conservatives and liberals.
One of her most widely discussed stories, Black Cobra, features a Muslim woman confronting the entire Jamaat to claim maintenance from her estranged husband. The story was also made into an acclaimed film by Girish Kasaravalli, winning multiple National Awards.
But Mushtaq never pursued screenwriting herself. “They used my dialogues,” she says. “We had a few meetings. But after that, I was not invited.”
Asked what keeps her going in the face of threats, silencing, and systemic sexism, Mushtaq becomes intense. “You have to challenge,” she says. “You can’t accept things as they come. I’ve broken every stereotype in my path. I say this to every young woman: question, challenge, and break patriarchy.”
She tells the story of writing a public letter to a woman minister who wept in the Karnataka Assembly after a male politician hurled sexist slurs at her. “I said, why are you crying? You are our role model. Go file an FIR. Use your power. If you shed even one tear, you betray all of us.” That letter went viral. It’s this kind of unapologetic truth-telling that has made Mushtaq a symbol of resistance.
What does the Booker shortlisting mean to her?
“We never thought of crossing geographical boundaries. We wrote in Kannada, read it, analysed it, and that was enough. Now it’s like the whole state is celebrating. People I don’t even know are calling to say they’re doing pooja in my name.”
One woman even called from Chamundi Hill in Mysore, asking for Mushtaq’s parents’ names so she could pray for her success. “I’m a Muslim. She is a Hindu. There is so much communal hatred these days, and here she is, praying for me before her deity. What more can a writer ask?”
Now that her work is reaching new audiences, does she feel ready to share stories she once held back? “Of course. There are still raw, deep stories inside me. Stories I didn’t feel safe enough to write. Maybe now I can.”
She is still driven by one unshakable belief: that literature must awaken.
“There are some readers out there who will receive your story and gain awareness. They will pass it on. That is the duty of literature.”
In Heart Lamp, Mushtaq says she has only just begun to scratch the surface.
As the world watches the Booker stage on May 20, Banu Mushtaq stands not just for one book or one language, but for generations of women, rebels, and writers who refused to be silenced.
Perhaps Heart Lamp is not just the name of her book, but the guiding metaphor for her writing. These are stories that burn from within and Mushtaq stands not just for one book or one language, but for generations of women, rebels, and writers who refused to be silenced.
Does she ever allow herself to imagine what it would feel like to win Booker?
“Yes, of course,” she says with excitement. “It is such an Everest position in literature. But I also have gratitude for coming this far.”
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