Heart Lamp (Penguin Random House India, ₹399), a collection of short stories by Banu Mushtaq which has been translated from Kannada to English by Deepa Bhasthi, was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, 2025. The writer-translator duo delighted a full house on Friday at Champaca Bookstore, Vasanth Nagar, with a heartfelt session on the book.
The heart of Heart Lamp is one that beats for 30 years – the three decades Mushtaq took to write the stories. She reveals that the blood that the heart pumps is familiar and personally drawn. “I am giving a glimpse of who I am. During the ’80s, there were a lot of social movements in Karnataka, dalit and feminist movements; I am a product of those.” While the anti-caste imperative was tangible in the literary scene back then, Islamophobia remained unchecked. Doubly ushered to the margins due to her gender and religion, Mushtaq had little choice but to give voice to her being. Moreover, just starting out, she would often be plagued with questions of what to write about – whose stories to document. When she asked the literary fraternity around, their responses allowed her to look inward. “Interestingly, until then, Muslim characters were depicted in black and white terms, especially by Hindu writers. I was asked to write about my contexts; and so I did. But at the same time, I didn’t want to be confined within the identity of the ‘Muslim woman’,” she says.
Heart Lamp is almost tactile in its representation of the terrain. Sensorily robust, the book presents the sights, smells, and stories of Karnataka in all their lilts and cadences. Bhasthi, whose work in translating deserves its own praise, keeps polyphony and linguistic dialogue alive in the retention of Kannada elements in the final book. As she reveals, “We don’t understand how polyphonic our languages are. The moment you step out of Bengaluru, you exist within multiple languages and dialects (outside of English) within Karnataka. It was important to keep multiple languages within the text, because none of us speaks ‘proper English’. I was translating for Indian readers. I wanted them to understand the deliberate Kannada ‘hum’ behind it.”