Opinion Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi’s International Booker win: Affirmation of personal grit; stories from the margins

Banu Mushtaq has rarely been short of spirit. Encouraged by her father, she studied Kannada, besides the Dakhni Urdu and Arabic that were her inheritance. When her female friends and cousins were getting married, she opted for a university degree. When she decided to marry, it was to a man of her choice. And yet, at 29, having just given birth, she found herself in despair. Less than a month into her marriage, she was forced to give up her job, instructed to wear a burqa and stay indoors. The anger and bitterness spiralled into crippling postpartum depression: She doused herself with petrol one day, ready to set herself on fire when her husband rushed in with their infant daughter. Mushtaq would then reclaim the life she had once dreamed of.

There is no indication that the 77-year-old writer, lawyer and activist remembered that pivotal moment as she received this year’s International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 short stories translated into English from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi. But it is unlikely that the hidden, bruised, and defiant lives of Muslim women in south India that have made their way into her work were far from her mind: “This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small; that in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole,” she said in her acceptance speech. Only the second Indian work to win the £60,000 award — after Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell’s Tomb of Sand in 2022 — Mushtaq and Bhasthi’s win is both political and deeply personal. Emerging from the post-Emergency Bandaya (rebel) tradition in Kannada literature, Mushtaq’s writing is infused with the spirit of dissent but carves its own space within the tradition. As one of the few Muslim women in that circle, she turns her lens towards inner lives shaped by patriarchal and religious constraints. She expands the moral and emotional compass by insisting that rebellion also makes room for the quiet, often invisible battles.

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In ‘Heart Lamp’, the eponymous short story in the collection, Mehrun, the protagonist, too, douses herself in petrol. Like Mushtaq, she is pulled back from the brink, not by a miracle, but by love. It is a quiet, incandescent salvation. At a time when the narratives around minorities in India, and the world, are often shaped by fear, suspicion and prejudice, Mushtaq’s win is a luminous affirmation of literature’s power to heal. Or, as she puts it, “In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages.”