It is not a surprise that many of the stories in Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp draw on her own experiences. In a recent interview with Anitha Pailoor, she discusses the conviction needed to critically analyze the community to which one belongs:
When I started writing in the 1970s, Kannada literature depicted Muslim characters either as highly virtuous or shockingly vile. The black-and-white characters did not reflect the realities of the Muslim community. I wanted to fill the gap. I wanted to show, through my writings, that Muslims are like people from any other community. They have shades of the good and the bad.
Still, it would be a mistake to attempt to pigeonhole Mushtaq—while her narratives revolve around rural and semi-urban Kannadiga Muslim characters, their reach is not confined to this demographic. As her translator, Deepa Bhasthi, recounts, “[Banu] does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community. Women everywhere face similar, if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues that she writes about.”
Now seventy-seven years old, Banu Mushtaq was born into a Muslim family in Hassan—a city in the state of Karnataka in southern India—and continues to live there. A lawyer, activist, and journalist, she began her career as a writer in the 1970s and ’80s, when progressive politics was gaining momentum in literary spaces through the Bandaya Sahitya (literally, dissent or protest literature) movement that enabled Dalit and Muslim writers to emerge on a scene otherwise dominated by upper-caste Hindu men. Being a woman writer was still rare, and Mushtaq received flak for it both within and outside of her community. Nonetheless, she has written and published six collections of short stories, one each of poetry and essays, and a novel. Heart Lamp, a selection of stories from across her oeuvre, is her first book to appear in English and was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Mushtaq is delightfully multilingual. She is fluent in Kannada, both its standard and local registers. She speaks Dakhni at home and her stories, written in Kannada, often include Arabic and Urdu phrases. Bhasthi provides us a glimpse into Mushtaq’s code-switching in her translator’s note and through her superb translation. By retaining quirks such as hyperbole and repetition, and conveying cultural knowledge through phrasing, transliteration, the use of words from other languages, and phonetic spellings that are not north India–centric, Bhasthi ensures that the flavor of Mushtaq’s language comes through. She also chose to entirely eschew italics for all words that remain untranslated in English, and has not bothered with footnotes.
At the heart of Mushtaq’s narratives lie sustained struggles against patriarchy, distilled through the experiences of class, caste, and religion. The stories offer a sharp critique of orthodoxy, portraying how societal strictures and traditions circumscribe the lives of girls and women characters—their movements outside the house are restricted; they are rarely allowed to pursue higher education, let alone a professional career; they are quickly married off; they are expected to run the household and produce a string of children, while trapped in a suffocating life where they cannot even expect to be heard if their husbands run away with, or marry, other women. Protecting the family’s honor is solely their responsibility, and any perceived sense of shame is linked directly to their actions. Happiness and contentment are rare and fleeting; they have to fight hard to attain them.
Zeenat, the protagonist of the collection’s opening story, “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,” remarks acidly that husbands are deified: “No matter which religion one belongs to, it is accepted that the wife is the husband’s most obedient servant, his bonded laborer.” In the story, Zeenat and her husband become friends with another couple. The husband, Iftikhar, loves his wife, Shaista, and is perpetually singing paeans to their love. Yet, when she dies of complications after giving birth to her seventh child, he marries a young girl immediately after the mourning period, so that she can run the household. Throughout his marriage to Shaista, Iftikhar had not used contraception and prevented her from getting a tubal ligation. The mutawalli—the manager of waqf (charitable endowment) properties, a crucial designation under Muslim law—in “Black Cobras” does the same, declaring his logic: “I am the mutawalli; if people know that a woman in my own house [had the operation], I will have to be answerable to them.” While Shaista pays for Iftikhar’s decision with her life, the mutawalli’s wife, Amina, takes matters into her own hands and defiantly leaves home to have the operation. In this sense, the collection comes full circle, hinting at different endings for similar circumstances.
“Black Cobras” brings up a theme that runs through the collection: the conflation of sociocultural values with religion, which then justifies the curtailing of women’s freedoms and a permissiveness that allows men to get away with murder—sometimes literally. Yakub abandons his wife, Aashraf, because she has given birth to three daughters and he wants a son. He takes up with a nurse, using the acceptability of having four wives as an excuse to wash his hands of his family, and a reactive act of violence against Aashraf inadvertently leads to a grisly death for his infant daughter. Amina says, scathingly, of Yakub’s hypocrisy in using the scriptures to defend his actions: “For his own satisfaction, he will even bring down God. He will bring up the Qur’an, quote from the Hadith.” Usman, a mutawalli in “Fire Rain,” is loath to give his sisters a share of the family property, even though it is mandated in the Qur’an. His actions underscore a tendency that Zulekha Begum, a learned woman in “Black Cobras,” identifies in her criticism of the widespread misuse of religious law:
In a lot of our jama’at, the mutawallis don’t know the law themselves. Secondly, they don’t have the authority to implement the law. Thirdly, no one listens to them. And then they accept only the parts of the law that suit them. Where this Sharia law remains is in the laps of poor women like you . . . Why don’t scholars tell women about the rights available to them? Because they only want to restrict women. The whole world is at a stage where everyone is saying something must be done for women and girl children. But these people, they have taken over the Qur’an and the Hadiths. Let them behave as per these texts at least!
The question of education denied to girls is another significant theme the stories wrestle with. Iftikhar stops his eldest daughter’s studies so that she can help Shaista with the household and take care of her siblings: “Girls do not need much education. A high school certificate is enough . . . We can get her married off next year.” In the collection’s eponymous story, Mehrun is prevented from going to college even though she wants to study further, and is married off. Once married, she bears five children and becomes prematurely aged while her husband has an affair. Her family is not supportive when she asks for their help, and tells her that she should have died by immolation to uphold family honor instead of running away. In another story, education brings advantages but does not solve the problems of patriarchy. The protagonist of “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri” is an accomplished lawyer, but she is still expected to take care of the house as well as her daughters’ upbringing besides managing her career.
Yet the women are not frozen as eternal victims, nor do all the stories revolve around female oppression. “The Shroud,” for example, explores questions of class through the relationship between two women. The wealthy Shaziya is requested by a poor woman from her neighborhood to bring a Zamzam-soaked shroud from her Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Busy with religious obligations and preoccupied by her own shopping, Shaziya forgets, and the woman’s death many years later forces her to reckon with the consequences of her actions. Akhila in “A Decision of the Heart,” who is profoundly jealous of the attention her husband gives his widowed mother, is an example of characters that are hard to root for, and through them, Mushtaq portrays the emotional strife visible across families, from petty resentment to abuse. Although most of the stories are written in the third person, Mushtaq portrays her characters’ inner lives in a dramatic, emotive way—“She felt as if she had been struck by a thousand bolts of lightning”; “All day long she became a kite around the flames of desire”—that brings alive their thoughts, reactions, spirals, dreams, and fantasies.
In the final story, “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!” Mushtaq is at her sardonic best. Somewhat abstract, it is written as an everywoman’s plea to God, relaying her troubles, showing how the world has been made by and for men, and underscoring the constant belittling and disregard women face despite their achievements. Casting herself as a “creation unloved,” she calls God “a detached director” because of his maleness. For her, if the world is to be created again and divided along the same lines, then God must come to earth and experience life as a woman. Her account, she says, has been “written from the heart, a woman’s heart, a string of letters written with the heart’s sharp nib and the red ink inside”—a fitting description for Heart Lamp as a whole as Mushtaq and Bhasthi evoke and illuminate the inner worlds of women.
Copyright © 2025 by Areeb Ahmad. All rights reserved.
