From Tomb of Sand to Heart Lamp, Geetanjali Shree and Banu Mushtaq — along with their translators — are widening the door for Indian-language literature
“A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself. Even women on their own are enough. Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass,” writes Geetanjali Shree, who became the first Indian — and Hindi writer — to win International Booker Prize in 2022, in her novel, Ret Samadhi, translated by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand (Tilted Axis Press, 2021).
The novel, centred on an octogenarian matriarch, shows how a woman’s body, and voice, break free from the tombs history builds around them. The recognition for Geetanjali had come nine years after eminent Kannada writer UR Ananthamurthy was nominated for the £60,000 prize, which was awarded every two years for a writer’s overall achievement in fiction between 2005-2015.
Tomb of Sand pushed open a door for writing in Indian languages, translated into English to reach out to a wider audience, that had remained stubbornly shut for decades. And through that door has now walked Karnataka’s Banu Mushtaq, whose collection of Kannada short stories, Heart Lamp (And Other Stories/Penguin Random House India), translated by Deepa Bhasthi, won the prestigious prize on Tuesday (May 20).
Banu’s book, termed as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation of beautiful, busy, life-affirming” stories by Max Porter, author and jury chair, also chronicle the lives of women, mostly Muslim, living in South India and battling the many ways women break free from the chains of patriarchy. “In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the lost sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages,” Banu said in her acceptance speech.
Indian literature in translation
Until recently, if you asked a reader outside India — or even many within — what they thought Indian literature meant, they would probably name Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Vikram Seth. All of them are great writers who have taken Indian writing in English to the world. Most of their works spring from India’s multilingual soil, but they all write in a language that has always had more global reach, more publishing capital, more marketing muscle, and more literary clout.
But India, by and large, is not an English-speaking country, even though the number of English speakers is growing by leaps and bounds every year. It is a polyphonic, orally rich, and textually layered subcontinent, where literature is written in dozens of languages besides Hindi — including Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Assamese, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Manipuri, Kashmiri, and many others.
Therefore, when a Hindi or a Kannada writer wins the International Booker, it’s a moment of literary pride for all writers writing in Indian languages. And a recalibration of how Indian literature is imagined in the world.
Also read: Banu Mushtaq interview: ‘Muslim women are capable of fighting their own battles’
Writers like Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016) in Bengali, or MT Vasudevan Nair (who passed away last December) in Malayalam, have been towering figures at home but largely unknown to English-speaking readers worldwide. In recent years, translation has started acting as a robust bridge. But for too long, that bridge was too narrow—poorly funded, barely visible, and burdened with the impossible task of making a local world “relatable” to outsiders.
What we are witnessing now—through the victories of Geetanjali Shree, Banu Mushtaq, and their brilliant translators—is a widening of that bridge.
A translator as a co-creator
If the original authors are the architects of the many worlds they create, then the translators are the engineers who make them travel. Rockwell’s translation of Tomb of Sand was as playful, irreverent, and deeply rooted in Hindi’s rhythm as the original demanded. Bhasthi’s Heart Lamp keeps Kannada’s breath inside every sentence, allowing its cultural grain to remain intact. That’s a major shift from older translation practices, when regional Indian texts were often flattened into global clichés or overexplained. These new translators are both intermediaries and co-creators.
So what does this moment mean for Kannada literature, for regional Indian languages, for readers, writers, and translators? Well, the Kannada literary tradition stretches back over a thousand years. From Ponna, Pampa and Ranna to Kuvempu, UR Ananthamurthy, Vivek Shanbhag and Jayant Kaikini, it has so many registers. But the question worth asking is: outside of Karnataka, outside of certain academic or literary circles, how many people truly engage with Kannada writing?
And that’s where Banu Mushtaq’s win comes in like a long-overdue correction. Or perhaps — if I stick to the analogy I began with — like a door opening to a house that’s been lit from within for decades. Ten years ago, the world noticed its luminosity in Vivek Shanbhag's novella, Ghachar Ghochar (HarperCollins India), a psychological drama translated by Srinath Perur, that became a global sensation.
For too long, Indian writing in regional languages was ghettoised — even within India. These accolades force global and national literary institutions to widen their gaze. Second, it means redistribution. Attention, funding, publishing deals, and critical scholarship may now begin to flow more equitably. Perhaps now a young writer in Imphal or Gulbarga or Srinagar will believe that their language has the potential to take their voice beyond the borders of their state — or even their country.
Third, and most importantly, it means reimagination. We are being invited to rethink what we mean when we say “Indian literature.” Not just Rushdie’s magical realism or Roy’s lyrical polemic—but also the earthy/rural intensity of Perumal Murugan, the meditative sparseness of Vinod Kumar Shukla, the sharp gendered anger of Ambai or Bama, and the haunting melancholia of Naiyer Masud. India, those who are obsessed with the idea of dominance of a particular language must know, is not one story. And it cannot be told in one language.
The lives of women
Both Tomb of Sand and Heart Lamp are preoccupied with the lives of women—old women, Muslim women, rural women—who have long been marginalised in both national and literary histories. Their stories unfold around borders: between countries, between religions, between gender roles and social expectations. And yet these women, in the act of telling their lives, blur those lines. They move freely. They refuse to be pinned down. In that sense, the novel and the short story collection take a long hard look at our modern society and how it treats its women from the inside out.
There’s also a global context to this openness. Readers are tired of sameness. The Anglo-American publishing world has, in recent years, begun to look outward—to Korean, Arabic, Swahili, Filipino, and now, more robustly, Indian literatures in translation. The work of smaller, independent publishers who are committed to literature as an art form, and not just a product, has truly been exceptional and must be lauded. So must literary agents who keep pushing the envelope. The Booker Prize, by recognising translation alongside original English fiction, has played a key role in putting a spotlight on these voices.
But perhaps what’s changed most is not just the gatekeepers. It’s the readers. We are no longer satisfied with hordes of books that are part of the publishing calendar of most publishers. We hanker for something different. We want literature that smells of local kitchens, that bleeds with real memories, that walks through ruins and markets and inner lives we’ve never encountered before.
Also read: Deepa Bhasthi interview: ‘There’s nothing black and white in Banu Mushtaq’s stories’
Banu is a writer, but she’s also a lawyer, an activist, someone who has lived the lives she writes about. The women in Heart Lamp are mostly Muslim. They are often poor, silenced, observant, angry, funny, devout, disillusioned. They’re rarely ever ‘heard’ in mainstream Indian writing, let alone global literature. And in story after story, Banu holds a mirror up to patriarchy, class, caste, and religious orthodoxy.
In one story, women confront mosque authorities after the death of a child, asking questions that have never been allowed in that space before. In another, there’s a mass circumcision ceremony, where the dark comedy doesn’t take away from the brutality it reveals. Yet another story, ‘Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!’, is utterly gutting; the other stories may seem underwhelming to many of us, leaving us to wonder about their literary merit. But these stories are unapologetically rooted. The cadence is local. The dialects are regional. The pain is specific — and yet, because it’s told with such clarity, it becomes universal.
Pushing the door wider
Of course, one or two Booker wins won’t solve everything. Much of Indian-language literature still remains untranslated, underfunded, and hidden from national syllabi and bookstores. The infrastructure for literary translation — grants, fellowships, residencies, mentorship —needs urgent investment. But things are changing fast. And that matters. If Tomb of Sand cracked the door open, Heart Lamp has pushed it wider. The hope is that behind them will come an entire generation of Indian novels — written in Assamese, in Dogri, in Santali, in Maithili—that will no longer be seen as exotic or niche, but as central to understanding the many Indias that exist, and have always existed.
In the end, the tale will, after all, ‘tell itself’. But for too long, Indian tales have been interrupted, mistranslated, or ignored. Now, finally, they are being heard on their own terms. And the most powerful stories, it turns out, are the ones that cross borders — linguistic, national, emotional — and still remain entirely themselves. A story can write itself. Once you’ve got a good translator and a world willing to listen, that story can travel. We all must let it do so.
