Book Review - Heart Lamp
Banu Mushtaq has been writing in southwestern India since the 1970s, yet Heart Lamp — which has been shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize — is the first full book of her work to be translated into English.
Originally published in Kannada (the official language of Mushtaq’s home state of Karnakata) between 1990 and 2023, these 12 stories, selected by her translator Deepa Bhasthi, offer affecting portraits of family and community. Specifically, they illuminate the lives of Muslim and Dalit women and children in southern India. An activist and lawyer, Mushtaq trains her keen eye on the daily injustices and religious oppression that her characters endure in a patriarchal society.
In “Black Cobras”, Aashraf begs the mutawalli (custodian) of the mosque to compel her husband Yakub to provide medical expenses for her sick child, but he ignores her pleas and petitions. When tragedy strikes, the neighbourhood women unite in their rage, forcing the mutawalli to confront the part he played. Metaphors and aphorisms enrich Mushtaq’s domestic worlds “After laying the egg of light at dawn, the black hen of ignorance exited, rushing into the darkness to peck at grains and sticks.”
She also explores questions of honour, and the price women pay for motherhood and unequal marriages. In the titular story, Mehrun makes an unwelcome visit to her family home with her baby. Her husband is having an affair with a younger woman and she pleads for permission to escape her humiliating situation: “Rather than burn in that living hell, I will take my children and work as a coolie somewhere.”
Her brothers, concerned for their family’s reputation, return Mehrun to her husband’s home where she contemplates taking her own life by dousing herself in kerosene. “Heart Lamp” was inspired by Mushtaq’s own experience while suffering from post-partum depression. Her loving husband rescued her from despair; here, her character finds peace “as the darkness of the night was thawing.”
In “Red Lungi”, which first appeared in The Paris Review, Mushtaq describes societal inequality with wry humour cut through with pathos. Razia, a woman from a wealthy family, tired of caring for numerous children during the summer holidays, decides to have the boys circumcised in a bid “to engineer bed rest for some of them.”
A celebratory event is organised where the villagers’ sons are circumcised for free: “a collective exercise in which children look forward to an event but end up screaming loudly together.” Those from poor families undergo the traditional method with Ibrahim the barber. Razia pays for her relatives to be treated by the surgeon with a local anaesthetic. While Samad, Razia’s son, suffers a nasty infection, Arif, a village boy, recovers without mishap, leaving Razia to conclude “if there are people to help the rich, the poor have God.”
The final tale, “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!” ends with a rallying cry. The female narrator rails at God: “If you were to . . . create males and females again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman, Prabhu!”
While some themes are repeated, 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.
Originally published by The Financial Times
* On 20 May, Banu Mushtaq and her translator went on
to win the International Booker Prize 2025 for Heart Lamp, the first collection
of short stories to win the prize.