No story is too small to be told Banu Mushtaq’s Kannada short stories reveal human nature in its myriad minute manifestations with wit, warmth and vivid detail, all of which come alive in Deepa Bhasthi’s English rendering.
Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi have been in the news after being awarded the International Booker Prize 2025 for the short story collection, Heart Lamp. This is the second Booker for a work originally in an Indian language, the first being Ret Samadhi / Tomb of Sand in 2022, by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell. What makes this year’s award so special is that it recognises a language that is not a dominant bhasha of India; it is the official language of the state of Karnataka.
In the process it evokes a much bigger picture by drawing attention to the less-known, the less-obvious, the less-heralded, the less-bandied about, the less-projected, and the less-lionised. In a world that appears to be falling apart under the dead weight of political power-play and authoritarianism, such validation is a nod to democratic principles. Add to this Deepa’s observation that Banu’s career as journalist, lawyer, writer and activist exemplify the word bandaya, which means dissent, rebellion, protest, resistance, revolution… You realise that this is no mean feat; it’s a towering achievement. No wonder there is so much discussion around it and, by extension, on the importance of translation — and all that it implies — in the world.
No one worded it better than Banu Mushtaq herself in her acceptance speech. “This is more than a personal achievement,” she said in a steady, quiet voice. “It is an affirmation that we, as individuals and as a global community, can thrive when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences, and uplift one another. Together, we create a world where every voice is heard, every story matters, and every person belongs.” She went on to add: “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.”
And that is exactly how the reader experiences the short stories in this collection: by being invited to live inside the minds of individuals such as Shaista, Mutawalli Saheb, Yakub, Mehaboob Bi, Akhila, Razia, Mehrun, and a host of chikkappas, doddammas, ajjis, maulvis and dadimas, with a throbbing intensity that makes us laugh, cry, exclaim, bemoan, plot, seethe… and identify with them.
They are real people, caught up in the minutiae of life and living, and they reveal themselves in many hues. When they speak, we hear for we discover they speak much like ourselves. There is no artifice in the narration, the world of these stories emerges with a directness that is both disarming and disturbing. It’s not just literary skill, the work appears to be a triumph of humanity despite tragedy, despite foolishness, despite rage, despite jealousy, despite hypocrisy, and sometimes, despite the ridiculous.
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.
– Banu Mushtaq
In her afterword headlined ‘Against Italics’, Deepa Bhasthi points out that ‘Banu grew up in a progressive family and was educated in Kannada and not, as was common for Muslims then, in Urdu.’ She goes on to talk about the Bandaya movement in Kannada literature which ‘started as an act of protest against the hegemony of upper caste and mostly male-led writing’ prevalent at the time Banu Mushtaq was growing up and which is clearly reflected in each of the 12 stories in Heart Lamp. In Red Lungi, for instance, a harried Razia takes a practical approach to containing the energies of a bunch of visiting children: ‘Seeing a summer of continuous torture before her and no other way out, in the end she decided that she’d have to engineer bed rest for some of them somehow. Circumcisions, she decided. She would get khatna done.’ While on the one hand there is wit and irony in the telling of this story, there is also the heart-wrenching instance of a woman so desperate for the gift of a food packet that she holds out her one-month-old baby, begging that sunnat (circumcision) be done for him too.
The Shroud takes on an almost ominous tone for the manner in which Shaziya, who had promised a loyal Yaseen Bua that she would bring back a kafan (shroud) from her Hajj pilgrimage, tries to make excuses for failing to keep her promise. When, upon his mother’s demise, Yaseen Bua’s son Farman comes asking for the kafan, Shaziya’s mind is in a whirl, twisting and turning between remorse and justification: “Even in her wildest dreams, she had not thought that Bua would haunt her after death. She collapsed under the weight of sudden anguish. What must she do? What must she not do? Even if Bua asked for a kafan costing one lakh rupees, Shaziya was ready to give it to her, but a kafan from Mecca that had been soaked in holy Zamzam water, ya Allah, what to do?”
The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri offers a different kind of spin on the expectations of a young man seeking a bride. Saleema Jaan is pleased to find a suitable boy, a maulvi at that, for her daughter. But the proposal falls through because, as Saleema Jaan explains: “He didn’t ask about what we would give or take during the wedding. He waited for the girl to leave the house, stopped her in the middle of the road and asked whether she knows how to make gube manchari, whatever that is! What sort of a man is he?!” An odd sort, indeed!
The writing resonates with moments that actively engage the reader. It is typical of some women in the Kannadiga culture to address their husbands as ‘Riii’. Each time a ‘Riii’ popped up in the book, I was reminded of my cousin’s ear-piercing imitation of an aunt’s ‘Rrrrrriiiiii!’!
There is a casual, easy and natural tone to the English freely interspersed with words in regular Kannada, the Kannada dialect of Hassan which is Banu’s home, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Dakhni. “Banu speaks Dakhni, often wrongly identified as a dialect of Urdu, but which in fact is a mix of Persian, Dehlavi, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu. Kannada is Banu’s language at work and what she encounters on the street,” Deepa writes.
This kind of code switching happens in many homes in India, including mine, where, in the course of one conversation, you are likely to hear Marathi, Tamil, English, Hindi, Kannada with the occasional Punjabi and Bengali.
As for the business of italics, mentioned in the chapter heading, typically, books published in English italicise words that are ‘foreign’, words such as de rigueur, schadenfreude, and so on. But yaanai, ghar, chikkamma, adda? These are not ‘foreign’ to Indian languages, are they? And if you believe that English is as much an Indian language as Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Bengali, there the matter ends. Deepa Bhasthi explains her position. Italics “serve to not only distract visually, but more importantly, they announce words as imported from another language, exoticising them and keeping them alien to English. 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.”
Well said, Deepa. Sabash, Banu.
The columnist is a children’s writer and senior journalist
