Book Review | Heart Lamp By Banu Mushtaq: Of Woman And Her Agonies In A Man's World

In Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, these words beat like a heartbeat: If you were to build the world again, to create males and females again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman, Prabhu! Be a woman once, oh lord! It is a prayer laced with complaints as the woman recalls her life while living and struggling under patriarchy.

Translated by Deepa Bhasthi, Heart Lamp won the International Booker Prize in 2025. Originally written in Kannada and comprising 12 stories, it brought Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi into the global limelight after winning the international prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the award. The stories in this collection were published originally in Kannada between 1990 and 2023.

The book begins with a description of the surroundings, hinting at an environmentally induced emotional strain. It deals with the tides and terrors within the recesses of the mind and body of women and girls. It captures the everyday lives of women and Muslim communities under patriarchal power.

Banu Mushtaq, a writer, activist and lawyer, has chronicled stories and characters which reflect the realities of a hypocritical society. She emerges as a silent observer of human nature amidst societal constructions of gender expectations in a patriarchal and religious framework.

Banu Mushtaq, author of 'Heart Lamp' holds her book as she poses for photographers upon arrival for the International Booker Prize, in London, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP)

The focus is primarily on the injustices against women. The characters in Banu Mushtaq’s stories are mostly confined to four walls whose purpose in life is predefined: marriage, producing and taking care of babies. Their lives revolve around their husbands and children while relegating their wishes, rights, dreams and desires to the background. Or bury them or their own individualities silently.

The women are aware of the missing element of emancipation over their bodies and souls in their lives; however, the societal, religious, economic, and political shackles bind them and define them. The characters, though resilient, are enduring patriarchal and societal subjugation.

They continue to muffle their screams.

Mehrun, in the eponymous story, ‘Heart Lamp’ is a mother of three. She decides to end her life after her husband acquires a second wife. The “lamp in Mehrun’s heart had been extinguished a long time ago,” as she has endured a lot.

She stared into the darkness and made sure she thought of how she had nobody, how no one wanted her, as she poured the kerosene on herself. She was in the grip of a force beyond her control. She looked around, and no sounds reached her, and she could feel no touch, no memories were left, no relationships could pierce her.

In Banu Mushtaq’s stories, a woman’s identity and individuality are never hers alone. She is owned and abandoned at will. Her life revolves around father to brother to husband to sons, to kids. No home or house belongs to her.

The stories highlight women’s domestic burdens, especially in large joint families. There should be no objection to pregnancy as long as a man can provide for the family. For a man, women are a tool to satiate sexual appetite. This has been reflected when a character who often swears loyalty to his wife, ends up quickly remarrying and forgetting his dead wife and also abandoning his own kids.

Cover page of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq. (Special Arrangement)

But is this how every Muslim man is: polygamous and perfidious? The book sharply critiques male hypocrisy. It highlights gendered economic inequality and the difficulty women face in claiming rightful inheritance. Further, the book examines women’s limited autonomy, early marriage, and curtailed education.

Banu has deftly used satire on political opportunism — as macho male characters have an enthusiasm for symbolic societal, religious causes, while their personal life is sordid. Even the sacred space of the mosque, which signifies symbolic space supposedly the house of God and justice, is dominated by dual standards, hypocritical men. From the sacred public space, which offers hope of justice to women, to personal spaces in homes, scriptures are used to justify neglect and abuse of women.

The men in the book control resources, interpret religious law to suit themselves, and escape accountability. On the contrary, the women have limited control over bodies, souls, scriptures and even their decisions and dreams.

It also highlights class contrast during religious ritual, which becomes a social spectacle. The women, through Banu's stories, often become victims of vanity, status competition, patriarchal and materialist expectations of men. She exposes the deep-rooted structures that allow men to control women’s bodies, movements, finances, and identities.

The book was described by judges as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories,” however, the stories reinforce the tropes around Muslim men, women and Muslim communities. The author has used diluted, contested interpretations of Islam to develop the thinking of its characters. These interpretations reinforce patriarchal norms. This, in turn, peddles the narrative of regressive Muslim communities and subjugated women at the hands of their conservative, hypocritical, polygamous, perfidious Muslim men.

As the women characters invoke compassion and empathy in the reader because of the physical, psychological, and biological injustices inflicted on them and societal complicity in abuse, the men in Banu Musthaq’s world are evil in nature and subjugators who are blind and oblivious to the agonies of women.

The author has introduced a single male character also who is wedged between the female rivalry of mother and wife. As stories lack diversity despite coming from a diverse country, the twelve have all the Muslim characters in Muslim communities. But one wonders if this is the Muslim world, communities? Are these Muslim men and women? Is this how a specific religion empowers men and disempowers women? It, of course, is not. It is not even Banu Mushtaq’s world. But then whose?

Banu's prose is lucid, laced with metaphoric language and retaining cultural nuances in most places with layered narratives. As regional languages in literature are asserting their essence globally, this is a first for a Kannada title. In 2022, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand won the coveted prize. Next year, in 2023, Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, was longlisted.

Banu Mushtaq’s writing has roots in the Bandaya Sahitya movement of the 1970s and 80s, which started as a protest against the hegemony of the upper caste and mostly male-led writing. It urged minorities, especially women, Dalits, to tell stories from within their own lived experiences in their own language.

The book leaves the reader with stories which reflect how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from women and, in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates. There are unforgettable characters, vivid dialogues and titles and tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn.

After finishing reading the book, maybe there is a surprise waiting within you as well, especially as a male reader who has been oblivious to a woman's agonies. Maybe you also lit any heart lamp which is enduring silent storms.