How Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker Prize Win has Rekindled the Global Gaze towards India’s Regional Literatures

On 20 May 2025, in London, the literary world turned its gaze eastward as Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq was awarded the 2025 International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp, a meticulously woven collection of short stories that has redefined the global understanding of Indian literature. In a moment both poignant and overdue, the accolade marked multiple firsts: the first time a book originally written in Kannada—a South Indian Dravidian language with a rich yet often marginalised literary heritage—was awarded the prize, and more strikingly, the first time a Muslim woman, from India or elsewhere, held the golden-tipped trophy.

Mushtaq, now 76, did not ascend through the predictable channels of literary stardom. A trained lawyer, an educator, and a lifelong feminist-social activist, she wrote quietly and persistently for over five decades, often in the margins of her other roles. Her stories were not manufactured in the studios of cosmopolitan privilege but composed in the living rooms of small-town Karnataka, amidst legal case files, domestic noise, and community meetings. That her voice, once largely confined to Kannada literary circles, has now reached global ears is nothing short of extraordinary—and long overdue.

A Flame from Karnataka: Banu Mushtaq’s Historic Triumph

Mushtaq's win cannot be viewed in isolation from the politics of representation. At a time when Islamophobia, caste hierarchies, and gendered exclusions continue to shape both the literary and socio-political landscapes in India and abroad, Mushtaq’s victory is a quiet revolution. As the first Muslim woman to receive the International Booker, her recognition strikes at the heart of a global publishing world that has, until now, largely reserved its most prestigious accolades for the dominant tongues, dominant cultures, and dominant narratives.

Mushtaq’s ascent also dismantles the monolithic portrayal of Muslim women in literature, often objectified, othered, or reduced to tropes of victimhood or rebellion. Her stories neither seek to explain nor sanitise their Muslimness for an outsider gaze. Instead, they inhabit the everyday textures of Muslim lives in Karnataka—interweaving faith, folklore, domesticity, and dissent with deft intimacy. Her protagonists are not symbols; they are deeply felt presences, full of contradiction, agency, and fierce interiority.

Her win is historic not simply because she “made it” into a global canon, but because she pulled that canon closer to the margins—and in doing so, redrew its boundaries. It opens a door not just for Kannada literature but for India’s 21 other recognised regional languages, for stories still buried under linguistic inequity and institutional neglect.

That evening at the Tate Modern, as she stood beside her translator Deepa Bhasthi—herself an acclaimed essayist and archivist of South Indian culture—Mushtaq was a figure of quiet authority. Clad in an unassuming saree, she exuded none of the celebrity posturing that has come to define many literary events. Yet her presence held the weight of history. A woman from a linguistic, cultural, religious, and gendered minority standing on the most global of literary stages—not as a token, but as a torchbearer.

In Mushtaq’s win, there is a message for the next generation of writers and readers: that literature which emerges from the intersecting peripheries can, and must, take centre stage. That no language, no identity, no woman from any village or inner city, needs to apologise for the size or shape of her story.

Stories from the Shadows: The Literary Politics of Heart Lamp

At its core, Heart Lamp is not a romanticised evocation of identity. It is a piercing confrontation with the lived realities of caste, gender, religion, and memory. The stories do not flinch from the brutality that many of its characters endure—whether it be the suffocating norms imposed upon widows, the double marginalisation of Dalit Muslim women, or the subtler violences of love and longing in deeply patriarchal spaces.

What makes the book extraordinary is its moral clarity paired with literary restraint. Mushtaq never pities her characters, nor does she elevate them to martyrdom. Instead, she insists on their complexity. A young girl yearning for education is not merely a symbol of progress; she is also capable of cruelty. A devout woman questioning her faith is not a vessel for political commentary; she is, first and foremost, a human being grasping for coherence in a dissonant world.

In story after story, the heart lamp—a metaphor drawn from Sufi philosophy—flickers amidst suffering. Its light is never fully extinguished, though it often dims. This notion of resilience—not as triumph, but as quiet endurance—is what lends the collection its emotional gravitas.

Mushtaq’s use of language is both precise and musical. The Kannada original carries idioms rooted in the textures of rural Karnataka, and even the syntax evokes oral storytelling traditions passed down through matrilineal lines. The prose is deceptively simple, never ornate. Yet within that sparseness lies its strength: it invites rather than dictates, it reveals rather than declares.

Deepa Bhasthi’s Translation as Literary Stewardship

No discussion of Heart Lamp can be complete without acknowledging the singular labour of Deepa Bhasthi, the translator who brought Mushtaq’s stories into English with startling clarity and care. It is no small feat to carry over the nuances of Kannada, a Dravidian language steeped in regional histories and local registers, into English without sacrificing texture or tone. Bhasthi’s achievement lies in how she preserves the cadence of Mushtaq’s prose, rendering it legible to international readers without flattening its regional specificity.

Bhasthi, herself an essayist and cultural critic, has long advocated for translation as an act of radical documentation. In her hands, translation is not a mere literary exercise but a political intervention—an act of resisting the erasure of subnational voices. The Booker judges acknowledged this symbiotic relationship when they awarded the prize jointly, stating that “the alchemy between author and translator has produced a work that radiates emotional brilliance and narrative daring".

The international recognition is also a timely rebuttal to the assumptions often made in Anglophone publishing—that stories in English, or those translated from European tongues, speak more universally. Heart Lamp makes it evident that universality is not a function of language, but of emotional truth.

Beyond the Prize: Reimagining the Place of Regional Literatures

The implications of Mushtaq’s win stretch far beyond the literary. In Karnataka, the news was met with jubilation and introspection. Bookshops in Bengaluru reported a tenfold increase in sales of Kannada titles. Educational boards initiated conversations on incorporating Heart Lamp into school curricula. The state government, in a gesture of both pride and politics, announced its decision to allot a G-category site to Mushtaq—typically reserved for eminent persons in the field of arts and literature.

Yet, as many literary scholars have pointed out, one win—however historic—does not absolve the systemic neglect of regional language publishing in India. Kannada, despite its rich literary history including eight Jnanpith awardees, still grapples with limited state support, shrinking readerships, and inadequate infrastructure for translation and archiving. Mushtaq’s win forces a reckoning: what stories have we failed to read because they never crossed linguistic borders? Who are the writers still labouring in obscurity because the system does not deem their tongues profitable?

Moreover, the international validation of Heart Lamp also opens new possibilities for South Asian diasporic literature. For decades, the global idea of Indian writing has been narrowly tethered to elite English-educated authors writing about middle-class urban lives. Mushtaq’s work offers a stark counterpoint: a deeply interior, grounded, and politically charged narrative voice that demands different reading practices and critical frameworks.

In that sense, Heart Lamp is not merely a win for Kannada literature; it is a manifesto for the decentralisation of literary power. It asserts, with quiet audacity, that the heart of storytelling need not beat in metropolitan English—it can pulse through the dialects of coastal Karnataka, the oral idioms of village women, the syntax of survival.

A Lamp That Refuses to Dim

Mushtaq’s own life, now firmly entwined with the legacy of Heart Lamp, resists easy mythologising. She continues to live in Karnataka, away from the spotlight, refusing to commodify her success. “The stories were never for prizes,” she said in an interview following the win. “They were for those who saw no reflection of themselves in any mirror.”

And yet, her prize is not without symbolic weight. It arrives at a moment of political unrest, at a time when the rights of minorities and the sanctity of regional identities are being contested across India. It arrives, too, at a time when translation is being increasingly recognised as the future of literature—a bridge between the local and the global, between the spoken and the silenced.

In the afterglow of Mushtaq’s win, one cannot help but be reminded of the Sufi metaphor from which the collection takes its name. The heart, like a lamp, must be lit from within. Banu Mushtaq has not just lit her own lamp—she has lit the way for countless others, who now know that their voices, in whatever language they may come, are worthy of being heard across the world.