Reading guide: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi

In the 12 stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions have garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards.

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. 

Heart Lamp was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.

Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India. Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 1980s: critical of the caste and class system, the Bandaya Sahitya movement gave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers, of whom Mushtaq was one of the few women. She is the author of six short story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. She writes in Kannada and has won major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards. Heart Lamp is the first book-length translation of her work into English, having been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam. One of the stories from Heart Lamp has been published in the Paris Review. 

Sayari Debnath, Scroll.in

‘In each story, Mushtaq builds the tension before it becomes unbearable for her characters and readers. The women are aware that there’s something missing in their lives, though they are not fully aware of the extent of their subjugation.’

Mahika Dhar, Asian Review of Books

‘The critical acclaim of Heart Lamp is deserved; Mushtaq is—and has been for decades—a writer with a noticeably powerful and profound voice. The potential recognition of her stories through the Bhasti’s translation of Heart Lamp will introduce her stories, already beloved in Kannada, to a wider and diversified audience. One only wishes the collection that earned her international fame was tighter and cleaner to accurately reflect Mushtaq’s talent.’

Shubhangi Shah, The Week

‘In fact, apart from everything else, what strikes the most is the vivid imagery Mushtaq creates throughout the book, which takes you deep into the women’s personal spaces. It reads as if one is inside the home, as a silent spectator, as events unfold.’

Areeb Ahmad, Words Without Borders

‘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.’

Lucy Popescu, Financial Times  

‘Mushtaq’s compassion and dark humour give texture to her stories. These deceptively simple tales decry the subjugation of women while celebrating their resilience. Bhasthi’s nuanced translation retains several Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words, eloquently conveying the language’s enduring tradition of oral storytelling’

Kanika Sharma, Vogue India

‘Though the International Booker Prize is not the first time Mushtaq’s work is up for celebration—’Kari Nagaragalu’, her story about a Muslim woman deserted by her husband, was adapted into a film in 2003 and earned the lead a National Film Award for Best Actress—recognition by a wider audience for this major literary voice is long overdue’.

John Self, The Guardian

‘The flexibility of the prize – it’s not just for novels – is exemplified in Banu Mushtaq’s collection of stories, Heart Lamp. This wonderful collection would be a worthy winner, though history is against it: stories have never taken the prize before’.

‘My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates. The daily incidents reported in media and the personal experiences I have endured have been my inspiration. The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write.’

Read the full interview here.

In the opening story, ‘Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,’ the characters are talking about death, specifically the death of a wife. One of the characters, Shaista says, ‘Yes, my grandmother used to say that when a wife dies, it’s like an elbow injury for the husband. Do you know Zeenat, if the elbow gets injured, the pain is extreme for one instant – it is intolerable. But it lasts only a few seconds, and after that one does not feel anything. There is no wound, no blood, no scar, no pain…’ (page 12). Why do you think Shaista says this, and is it an accurate characterisation of many of the male figures in the book?

Banu Mushtaq wrote the short stories that appear in Heart Lamp between 1990 and 2023, a period of 33 years. Did you have a sense while reading that there are differences in the writing style or subject matter, reflective of a body of work that has evolved over three decades?

In an interview with the Booker Prizes, Mushtaq said, ‘My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates.’ Despite this cruelty, did you feel that the women in the book possessed hope and strength to survive their circumstances?

In the Translator’s Note, Deepa Bhasthi said that she has retained specific cultural terms in the book, leaving them untranslated. She also avoided footnotes and did not italicise Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words, in order to avoid exoticising them. ‘By not italicising them, I hope the reader can come to these words without interference, and in the process of reading with the flow, perhaps even learn a new word or two in another language’ (214). Did you find it difficult to understand the untranslated words within the broader context of the sentence or story, or did they add something to the reading experience?

Banu Mushtaq has had a full career as a writer, journalist, lawyer, and activist in several protest literary circles. How might Mushtaq’s background in activism have contributed to the creation of the stories in Heart Lamp?

In the story ‘A Decision of the Heart’, Yusuf’s wife, Akhila, is extremely jealous of the close relationship that her husband has with his mother, referring to the old woman as a vulture, a plague and a whore. But after getting told off by her husband’s mother, Akhila cries and apologises for her actions, confusing both her husband and his mother. Why do you think Akhila showed such remorse? 

The short story ‘Heart Lamp’ is based on Mushtaq’s own experiences. As she told Vogue India, ‘“One day, I doused myself with white petrol kept in a can at home to clean watches since my in-laws had a watch-cum-spectacle shop,” she recalls. “With a matchbox in my hand and ready to strike, it was my husband, who I had married for love, who clung to me and kept our three-month-old daughter at my feet, telling me to stop.”’ Knowing the heartbreaking reality of this story, does it make you see the story in a new way?

In ‘A Taste of Heaven’, when the children gave Bi Dadi Pepsi to drink, Sana told Bi Dadi that she was having the drink of heaven and that she was now in heaven. Why do you think Bi Dadi had such a strong reaction to the Pepsi and blindly went along with what the children were saying?

In the story, ‘Red Lungi’, one group of boys gets circumcised by traditional methods, while another, more privileged group has the procedure done by medical intervention. It’s shown that a boy who underwent the traditional method, Arif, healed successfully in a short time, while a wealthier boy, Samad, took longer to heal and felt more pain. Samad’s mother Razia was visibly upset and said that ‘if there are people to help the rich, the poor have god’ (Page 98). Why do you think Arif’s wounds healed more quickly, and does Razia’s comment ring true, in this story and elsewhere in the book?

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Pyre by Perumal Murugan, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

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