Illuminating the shadows: Banu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp’ and the rebellion of the unseen

When Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp became the first Kannada work—and the first short story collection—to win the 2025 International Booker Prize, it marked more than a literary milestone. It represented a long-overdue recognition of India’s regional literatures and, more crucially, brought global attention to the silenced voices of Muslim women in Karnataka’s rural heartlands. Mushtaq’s winning collection, sensitively translated by Deepa Bhasthi—whose work preserves the linguistic texture and cultural specificity of the original—is a radical act of witnessing: twelve stories spanning three decades expose systemic oppression while offering Muslim women both a mirror to recognize their struggles and a voice to articulate their resistance.

Banu Mushtaq is a formidable voice in Karnataka’s Bandaya Sahitya (Rebel Literature) movement, rooted in anti-caste, feminist, and secular traditions. Mushtaq’s work challenges existing hierarchies by centring the struggles of Muslim women. In her home region, Karnataka, where Dalit-Muslim solidarity is strong, she is known for her unflinching critiques of triple talaq (a now-banned form of instant divorce which left women destitute) and hijab bans (policies barring headscarves, limiting Muslim girls’ access to education). Her essays and speeches, published in radical Kannada journals like Lankesh Patrike and Sahitya Sangama, expose how Hindutva dominance and conservative Muslim patriarchy collude to suppress women’s autonomy. Mushtaq uniquely bridges Bandaya’s class-caste revolt with Islamic feminism. She confronts both Hindu supremacist violence—such as hijab bans—and regressive elements within Muslim communities, from patriarchal control to caste-based discrimination among believers. By organizing with Dalit-Bahujan literary groups and Muslim women’s collectives, she has expanded the Rebel Literature movement to confront Islamophobia while demanding accountability from within—making her an important figure in Karnataka’s cultural resistance.

At the core of Heart Lamp lies Mushtaq’s identity as a Muslim woman who challenges patriarchal interpretations of her religion while remaining rooted in her community. This tension informs her writing, ensuring both its authenticity and great relevance. Her literary consciousness was forged in the 1970s Bandaya Sahitya movement, which rejected Kannada’s elite in favour of raw, protest-driven narratives centerd on Dalits, Muslims, and women. In this tradition, Mushtaq wields fiction as a tool for social scrutiny, but with a distinct focus: the intersecting oppressions of gender, class, caste, and religious dogma in Muslim communities.

Mushtaq’s stories expose how patriarchy operates through the collusion of religion and state power: Hindu women battle caste-bound “honour” systems (rooted in the Manu Smriti—a 2,000-year-old Hindu text that codified caste and gender hierarchies, now selectively revived by Hindu supremacists), while Muslim women face erasure enforced by groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and mosque mutawallis—clerics who distort scripture for control. This is poignantly expressed in Black Cobras, where the village women, denied justice by a hypocritical mutawalli, channel their fury into symbolic rebellion: They “spit venom” like cobras, curse him, and—in the story’s climax—his own wife rebels against him. Even if brief, this collective defiance lays bare the fragility of patriarchal authority when women unite. Mushtaq’s strength lies in her realism: the women don’t overthrow the system, but their act of resistance lingers like a black cobra’s venom, inescapable and deadly.

However, while Mushtaq’s stories critique Indian patriarchy, they never romanticize Western lifestyle; instead, they expose its absence of values and depth. Examples from this collection include The Shroud, where a wealthy woman in Mecca for hajj goes on a shopping spree and forgets about a poor widow who had entrusted her with money to bring back a burial shroud; the titular high-heeled shoe of another story, which is too small and unbearably uncomfortable for Nayaz Khan’s pregnant wife, Arifa; and a third story, A Taste of Heaven, where Pepsi Cola is used to callously deceive an elderly, propertyless aunt into believing this is the heavenly drink of paradise. For Mushtaq, emancipation must take root in local realities, challenging both regressive traditions and superficial Western ideals.

Economic dependence forms another prison in Heart Lamp and affects most of the female protagonists, who are at the mercy of their husbands for their very physical survival. A second wife becomes an existential threat for more than one of the protagonists. Class is never far from the narrative either. Mushtaq indicts not just individual failings but a system where the wealthy perform piety while ignoring the material needs of the poor. At times, this is depicted humorously as in the story Red Lungis, where a prosperous Muslima organizes a mass circumcision. Several other stories similarly lampoon the shallowness and hypocrisy of the well-to-do. 

Mushtaq rarely presents happy endings, reflecting the constrained realities of her characters. However, resistance is felt throughout the collection—by individual characters, who manage to assert themselves and protest to various degrees. These frequently muted endings leave readers sensing the realities of systemic oppression. Nevertheless, Mushtaq plants seeds of resistance. A tubectomy in Black Cobras, a matchstick dropped in Heart Lamp—small or larger acts of rebellion—suggest that change is possible.

Mushtaq’s literary accomplishment manifests powerfully in her subversion of language itself. The hybrid Kannada-Urdu-Dakhni tapestry of Heart Lamp constitutes nothing less than a linguistic insurrection against decades of literary elitism. Bhasthi’s translation doesn’t merely render meaning—it fiercely preserves this vernacular specificity, evoking a sensory world and challenges the colonial hegemony of the Anglophone world. Local words that are self-explanatory in a given context are left untranslated. Bhasti rejects the usual use of italics and footnotes, and favours phonetically more appropriate spellings over “received” ones. In this way, both author and translator preserve cultural realities, ensuring that the sounds of rural Karnataka’s Muslim communities survive in literature exactly as they’re spoken in life—unvarnished, unapologetic, and alive. The collection’s multilingualism becomes political—refusing to let any single group monopolize the narrative. Furthermore, the translation also follows in the tradition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among others, who reject the dominance of Anglophone diktat as a remnant of colonization, and set free narratives in their communities’ vernacular.

In Mushtaq’s stories, inanimate objects frequently become witnesses to women’s suffering. The kerosene lamp in the titular story stands not just as a potential instrument of death, but as a silent accuser of the society that drives Mehrun to consider self-immolation. The forgotten burial shroud in The Shroud speaks volumes about class betrayal through its very absence, high-heeled shoes are lampooned for their inappropriateness for walking, Pepsi Cola is unmasked as Western fraud. Appearances trump substance. And in Black Cobras, the serpents never physically appear—their venom exists in the curses of the oppressed women. These things embody systemic violence in their different ways. A matchstick becomes the fragile line between life and death; a child’s school uniform represents impossible dreams of escape (as when Asifa is pulled out of school to take over her mother’s role at home in Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal); even something as mundane as a cooking pot carries the weight of domestic servitude. These silent witnesses ensure that even when voices are silenced, evidence of their oppression remains.

The very structure of Heart Lamp constitutes its own radical act of resistance, rejecting the conventions of traditional storytelling. Unlike typical short story collections, where the texts move towards the resolution of conflict, Mushtaq’s style mirrors the often unresolved crises of her characters. The stories leap between 1990s rural Karnataka and contemporary urban settings, creating a disconcerting echo effect, where the same struggles replay across generations and locations, with only superficial changes, consistently denying readers the comfort of closure. 

The spirit of Bandaya Sahitya makes itself felt throughout Heart Lamp, though Mushtaq transforms this inheritance into something uniquely her own. She demonstrates in narratives like Black Cobras that true resistance requires collective action—not solitary heroes but villages of women spitting venom at their oppressors. She also wields the language of faith against religious oppression, most daringly in Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!, where Allah’s name becomes a rhetorical weapon turned against patriarchal interpretations of Islam. 

As the Booker jury recognized, Heart Lamp transcends its regional roots not despite but because of its unflinching specificity. In giving voice to Karnataka’s most marginalized women, Mushtaq speaks truth to power everywhere. As Mushtaq said in her acceptance speech: “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. 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.”

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