Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

by Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhasthi (Translator )

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, India, Literary Fiction, Indian Literature, Feminism, Short Story Collection

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 2024

About the author

Banu Mushtaq (ಬಾನು ಮುಷ್ತಾಕ್, born 1948) is an activist, lawyer and writer from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She writes in the Kannada language and her works have also been published in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and, most recently, English.

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 3 out of 5]

!! Now Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025
It is the 1st book to be nominated originally written in Kannada language and its translation was particularly difficult. Some thoughts on that in the review below. I think this is why it won, not necessary because it was the best book. While I understand that it is a translation prize and the reasons it was awarded to Heart Lamp, it was still my last choice. Oh well, at least the quality of the prize this year was miles better than the previous years.

Book 9/13 of the longlist

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 -Book 4/6

Translated from Kannada language by Deepa Bhasthi

Hear Lamp is a collection of short stories about the hardship of being a woman in the Kannada community in India. Some of the stories can be considered more universal than others.

I am trying to understand why I was not enthralled by the stories. I think the explanation is in the Translator's note which I read before starting the book.

"The Kannada language, as is the case with many languages that have been in use for over a thousand years, has a rich and vibrant tradition of oral storytelling. This lineage is visible in Banu’s stories as well, where she regularly mixes her tenses, trails off, interjects an observation or a soliloquy in the middle of a dialogue and so on, as if she is sitting across from you" I guess this style did not work too well for me in translation.

Also, in the same notes, I found this description of the book: "Writing during and in the aftermath of the Bandaya movement, her works consciously moved away from what she calls the boy-meets-girl tropes of romantic fiction, and instead sought out narratives that critiqued patriarchy and its hypocritical traditions and practices."

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 4 out of 5]

** WINNER of the 2025 Booker International Prize**

‘Do you know who gets justice?’ asks author Banu Mushtaq, ‘only those who demand it.’ The southern Indian author believes ‘that a writer’s task is to register injustices,’ and to ‘record them in an artistic way,’and the twelve stories collected in Heart Lamp profoundly and painfully rise to the challenge. Heart Lamp marks Mushtaq’s breakout into the English language, translated from the Kannada through Deepa Bhasthi’s wonderful work that have earned her and Mushtaq the honor as a finalist for the 2025 Booker International Prize. As she explains in her interview for the award, the stories ‘were chosen from around 50 stories in six story collections I wrote between 1990 and later’ making it a sort of “best of” in her tales that center around women and the inhumane treatment they experience under systemic oppressions of patriarchy in cahoots with caste and religion that force women into subordinate roles. ‘I was only his wife, that is, free labour,’ thinks one narrator that speaks as if for all the women who populate these stories of neglected or abused wives who feel their ‘only claim to importance was that she was the mother of his children.’ The twelve stories read like variations on the same themes and often repeat the same major plot points (a husband leaving for a much younger woman is in nearly every story) which, admittedly, can make them all blend together and leave you wanting a wider scope of stories, yet Mushtaq writes with such passionate eloquence illuminating these social ills wrought by oppressive social constructs and makes Heart Lamp a bold and beautiful collection.

‘When there was so much poverty and misery around, was there a need to be inhumane too?’

Banu Mushtaq dives into the domestic lives of women amidst the mundanities of daily living in order to illuminate the rot within society. Its a cast of mothers, grandmothers, and daughters beleaguered by the ill behaviors of men within their community as these stories are rife with mothers trying to raise a family as the father runs off with other women, mothers rejected when asking relatives or even religious leaders for aid, mothers wracked with shame, jealousy, and more often than not, rage. It gets to be a bit of the same in each story though there are a few oddballs such as the one about a food obsession, but the repetitiveness amalgamates to an undeniable portrait of women’s lives stifled at every turn by their own society that reflects just how constant and overwhelming it is. ‘[I]t is accepted that the wife is the husband’s most obedient servant, his bonded labourer,’ and to make matters worse, the men are completely ignorant to the struggles of the women having been socially reinforced to view their oppression as the norm. Pleas of justice or rage are often met with bewilderment, a very “but you are treated fairly” dismissal of ignorance that is usually followed by victim blaming.

‘All these rights are available for women in Islam. A girl can go to school, she can go to the shops, go to work. She can have a life outside. But there is clause too that she should not exhibit her body and her beauty…’

Mushtaq’s unflinching and direct stories all occur within fairly rigid Muslim communities and demonstrate how religious authority is often weaponized against women and becomes a rather aggressive branch of the larger patriarchal structures marginalizing them and keeping women oppressed. We also see how gender norms and rolls are also upheld in order to perpetuate gender inequality and limit access to autonomy, both bodily and financially. Stories such as The Shroud emphasize how poverty only compounds their marginalization and, coupled with the caste hierarchies, dehumanizes people.

’Material things had become priceless and human beings worthless. Behind those material possessions, people’s feelings were on sale.’

‘If there are people to help the rich, the poor have God,’ says one narrator, desperate for a God to even recognize her struggles.’Mushtaq uses the rigidness of caste structures as another example of institutional oppressions and the overarching threats of social structures

‘You gave me the strength to bear a lot of pain. But you should not have given him the cruelty to cause so much of it.’

Despite the overwhelming bleakness and brutality, Mushtaq’s stories inevitably rise to show the empowerment of collective rage and resistance. Women find ways of expressing autonomy, such as getting a medical procedure against a husband’s wishes or women throwing rocks at a man in the streets of the story Black Cobras. Most moving for me was the final story, Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!, which works almost as a collective outcry embodying the entire book when a woman writes a letter to Allah daring her god to try and survive as a woman. ‘You are just a detached director,’ she criticizes.

‘Women are a vital part of society, but society silences their voices,’ says Mushtaq. A journalist, lawyer, and women’s rights activist, Mushtaq has certainly honed her skills towards advocacy and her professional background certainly sharpens the social critiques of her stories and characters. ‘I want to scream and shout through them,’ she says, using their voices to challenge the communities she lives within. ‘I am a critical insider,’ she discussed in a recent interview with Outlook India, acknowledging that speaking out against a community while living within it is ‘the most dangerous position for a person to occupy.’ She stands strong, though it has not been without struggles.

‘I’ve been ostracised by many within my community because I express my views frankly. There have been threats. The physical assault I suffered left me traumatised. I couldn’t write anything for quite a while after that attack. But eventually, I got back to writing about people who misuse their power; leaders who mix religion and politics; and about women who are denied their rights and find the strength to fight for them.’

Making one’s voice heard, or the forces that try to silence it, is one of the central themes in Heart Stories and Mushtaq has seen firsthand how society often finds that ‘being outspoken is considered the greatest disqualification for a woman,’ while noticing that men are always encouraged to speak up. Mushtaq reminds women to use their voice even if society disagrees, telling women ‘if you see a way forward, mention it.’ Even if it is hard to do so. For me it calls to mind the end to Audre Lorde poem A Litany for Survival :

‘when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.’

Translating her book into English—Heart Stories is the first Kannada language book to be a finalist for the Booker—is a way to have her voice heard even louder across the world. ‘English carries a history of colonialism of course, but it has opened up many possibilities since it is considered the universal language now,’ Mushtaq says. Which is why translators are such an important role in the art world and deserve greater attention, such as this wonderful translation by Deepa Bhasthi. The translator, who came to be drawn to Arabic literature from reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, sees hope for a rise in readership of translated literature, theorizing that social media exposing people to global culture may play a part in a desire to read literature from different languages and culture. ‘Plus,’ she told the Booker, ‘like Anton Hur says, reading translated fiction makes you sexy!’ As a big Anton Hur fan, I can get behind this.

‘Once in a while I scream and shout a little. It is a dog’s life, isn’t it, that’s why.’

Language is important to the stories in Heart Lamp and many of the key terms in the Kannada language are left untranslated in the text. It helps create a sense of specific place and culture to spotlight the struggles of Muslim women in her community but also lends itself to an understanding that language can also play a part in social oppression or resistance. This passage, for instance, from the first story Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal:

‘If I use the term yajamana and call him owner, then I will have to be a servant, as if I am an animal or a dog. I am a little educated. I have earned a degree. I do not like establishing these owner and servant roles. So then shall I say ‘ganda’ for husband? That also is too heavy a word, as if a gandantara, a big disaster, awaits me. But why go into all this trouble? You could suggest that I use the nice word ‘pati’ for husband – then again, no woman who comes to your house introduces her husband saying ‘This is my pati’ – right? This word is not very popular colloquially. It is a very bookish word. If one uses the word pati, there comes an urge to add devaru to it, a common practice, equating one’s husband with God. I am not willing to give Mujahid such elevated status.’

There is so much connotative meaning inherent in the terms here, which is quite well written. I enjoy that Mushtaq makes it specifically her own community in her criticisms on patriarchy, religion, and caste. The latter term is often used in the Western world as a sort of cross-cultural metaphor in examining social politics that can dilute or take attention away from those struggling under caste systems elsewhere. While an informative and bestselling book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson received a fair share of criticism over that aspect. Such as Charisse Burden-Stelly’s piece in the Boston Review where she criticizes how ‘In Wilkerson’s definition, race amounts to little more than the ascription of value to physical traits, yet she conflates caste and race throughout the text,’ which removes structural analysis of both while also presenting a fairly reductionist look at caste and the historic trajectories of caste systems in India. Mushtaq writes in a way that keeps things central and avoids universalization of her subjects.

Shortlisted for the Booker International and a heartfelt if occasionally bland as a whole collection, Heart Lamp is a searing portrait of women’s struggles in India and the importance of collective rage and voices. Wonderfully written and full of sharp social insights and criticisms, Mushtaq speaks up for women’s agency and thanks to the translation from Deepa Bhasthi her decades worth of work is now available to the English speaking public. A short but meaningful collection.

4/5

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize and well deserved for a brilliant feat of translation.

Instead of trying to contort the source language to fit the English idiom, look for ways to stretch English so that it too can speak somewhat with the accent of the original language.

Interview with the translator at Pen Tranmissions, titled To Translate With An Accent

Heart Lamp: Selected Stories is Deepa Bhasthi's translation from Kannada (the first time the language has featured in the International Booker) of twelve stories by Banu Mushtaq, originally published between 1990 and 2023, the collection selected by Bhasti from Mushtaq's work over the period. It is published by the wonderful And Other Stories (see below).

Banu Mushtaq is a writer, mainly of short-stories but also poetry, lawyer and social activist from Karnataka - a 2022 interview showcases her activism both for the rights of the Muslim minority but equally for the rights of women within Islamic tradition.

A sample translation of her stories by Deepa Bhasthi was one of the first six selected and commissioned for the PEN Presents program, designed to 'showcase sample translations, funding the often-unpaid work of creating samples, giving UK publishers access to titles from underrepresented languages and regions, and helping diversify the translated literature landscape'. The program is now, for its third round of submission run in conjunction with the International Booker.

Deepa Bhasthi's take on her work is featured both here in a recent interview, and in a highly informative Translator's note which explains the background to the stories and the language in which they are written, her own relationship to the author and to her culture, religion and language (it still felt important to me to acknowledge our differences, our respective positions and priviliges, and use this information to be more responsible and sensitive in my translation).

She has chosen to eschew footnotes, italics and over-flattening of words e.g. the rich set of suffixes for names are transliterated into Roman script but not translated, rather than say using the generic 'Aunty' or 'Uncle'.

Setting aside the futile debate of what is lost and found in translation, I am delighted that here, in this collection, the Kannada language has found new readers. I was very deliberate in my choice to not use italics for the Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words that remain untranslated in English. 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. Same goes for footnotes - there are none.

Which makes for a rich and immersive read, particularly when combined with the short-story form, the reader plunged immediately into different situations, but, by going with the flow, quickly able to orientate themselves.

The first paragraphs of the first story, Stone Steps for Shaista Mahal, a good example:

From the concrete jungle, from the flamboyant apartment buildings stacked like matchboxes to the sky, from the smoke-spewing, hornblaring vehicles that were always moving, day and night, as if constant movement was the only goal in life, then from people, people, people – people with no love for one another, no mutual trust, no harmony, no smiles of recognition even – I had desperately wanted to be free from such a suffocating environment. So, when Mujahid came with news of his transfer, I was very happy, truly.

Arey, I forgot. I should tell you all about Mujahid, no? Mujahid is my home person. Oh. That sounds odd. A wife is usually the one who stays at home, so that makes her the home person. Perhaps then Mujahid is my office person. Che! I have made a mistake again. The office is not mine, after all. How else can I say this? If I use the term yajamana and call him owner, then I will have to be a servant, as if I am an animal or a dog. I am a little educated. I have earned a degree. I do not like establishing these owner and servant roles. So then shall I say ‘ganda’ for husband? That also is too heavy a word, as if a gandantara, a big disaster, awaits me. But why go into all this trouble? You could suggest that I use the nice word ‘pati’ for husband – then again, no woman who comes to your house introduces her husband saying ‘This is my pati’ – right? This word is not very popular colloquially. It is a very bookish word. If one uses the word pati, there comes an urge to add devaru to it, a common practice, equating one’s husband with God. I am not willing to give Mujahid such elevated status.

(from a longer extract here)

Many of the stories revolve around the rights of women, the burden of bearing several children in quick succession, caring for them, and then often finding their husbands want to take a younger wife, a running theme. Religious tradition is often invoked to justify certain behaviours but, as with the author's own activism, one religiously educated woman points out the one-sided nature of the interpretations:

Why don't scholars tell women about the rights available to them? Because they only want to restrict women. The whole world is at a stage where everyone is saying something must be done for women and girl children. But these people, they have taken over the Quran and the Hadiths.
Let them behave as per these texts at least! Let them educate girls, not just a madrasa education, but also in schools and colleges. The choice of a husband should be hers. Let them give that. These eunuchs, let them give meher and get married instead of licking leftovers by taking dowry. Let a girl's maternal family give her a share in the property. Let them respect her right to get divorced if there is no compatibility between the man and woman. If she is divorced, let someone come forward to marry her again; if she is a widow, let her get a companion to share her life with.

'Apa, Apa, what are you saying?' Aashraf felt like she had lost her senses.

'What I am saying is correct, ashraf. All these rights are available for women in Islam. A girl can go to school, she can go to the shops, go to work. She can have a life outside. But there is clause too that she should not exhibit her body and her beauty...'.

But the stories, are told with a lightness of touch, compelling and often humourous. Perhaps my favourite was A Taste of Heaven. Saadat, a high-school Urdu language teacher, is disturbed by the ill-temper of his wife Shameem to his family. Being the modern-minded man he is does some research and decides Shameem must be going through the menopause. But the actual explanation is rather simpler - she is tired of shouldering the burden of being the wife of the eldest son:

Shameem had come into that house of three sons and three daughters as the eldest daughter-in-law, with the sky of limitless expectations in her eyes. When she dipped her hennaed palms in sandalwood paste and made an imprint on the western wall of the house, she was surprised to see small-small hands make imprints next to hers. She turned round to see her sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, their expenses, food, clothing, a mother-in-law who was always sick and the prescribed diet she had to be cooked, her father-in-law's countless relatives and friends. Her own dreams withered away. She initially managed everything with a smile on her face, as they say. But as days passed by, her own pregnancies, and having to raise her little children in the middle of all the other weddings, pregnancies, deliveries and confinements of her husband's sisters, illnesses, and eventual deaths of her parents-in-law, brought her much irritation.

The only family member she hasn't driven out is Saadat's aunt, who was betrothed as a child bride, her intended died a month after their marriage, bitten by a snake, and has, per family tradition, not been permitted to remarry, leaving her an almost life-long widow. She lives happily with her nephew and his family, doing much of the household work, but one-day the children mistake her old and much loved ja-namaz (prayer mat) for a rag and use it to clean the grease from a bicycle. His tips her over the edge, causing her to lose her mind, but in her delusion when she drinks some pepsi that one of the children brings home she mistakes it for aab-e-kausar, the water from paradise, and is convinced she has passed and gone to heaven, meaning the young girl of the family has to dress up as a houri to humour her.

A wonderfully crafted set of stories that immerse the reader in a different world and language.

The stories

Haseena Mathu Ithara Kathegalu (Abhiruchi Prakashana, 2013)

“Stone Steps for Shaista Mahal” first published as “Shaista Mahalna Kallu Chappadigalu” in 1990
“Fire Rain” first published as “Benki Maley” in 1999
“Black Cobras” first published as “Kari Nagaragalu” in 1999
“A Decision of the Heart” first published as “Hrdayada Teerpu” in 1999
“Red Lungi” first published as “Kempu Lungi” in 1999
“Heart Lamp” first published as “Yedeya Hanate” in 2004
“High Heeled Shoe” first published as “High Heeled Shoe” in 2004
“Soft Whispers” first published as “Meludanigalu” in 2007
“A Taste of Heaven” first published as “Swargavendare” in 2012

Hennu Haddina Swayamara (Abhiruchi Prakashana, 2023)

“The Shroud” first published as “Kafan” in 2023
“The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri” first published as “Arabbi Meshtru Mathu Gobi Manchuri” in 2023

The judges’ citation as winner

Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation.

‘These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.

The judges' verdict at longlist stage

In a dozen stories – written across three decades – Banu Mushtaq, a major voice within progressive Kannada literature – portrays the lives of those often on the periphery of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, violence. Yet, at its heart, Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn. Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper.

The press

And Other Stories publishes mainly contemporary writing, including many translations. We select carefully and hope you will agree that the books are good, make you think and able to last the test of time. We aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing. And we want to open up publishing so that from the outside it doesn’t look like some posh freemasonry. For example, as we said in this piece in The Guardian, we think more of the English publishing industry should move out of London, Oxford and their environs. In 2017 we moved our main office out of the South-East to Sheffield and found such a warm welcome.

And Other Stories is readers, editors, writers, translators and subscribers. While our books are distributed widely through bookshops, it’s our subscribers’ support that give us the confidence to publish what we do.

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025!
Written in Kannada, a language in India spoken by 65 million people, Heart Lamp brings women lives to life. Dependency on men and the restraints of the family structure are unifying themes
No matter which religion one belongs to, it is accepted that the wife is the husband’s most obedient servant, his bonded labourer.

This penultimate read for me from the International Booker Prize longlist was at times didactic but also brings to live the tribulations women face on a daily basis. At times there is also understated humour and irony in the writing by Banu Mushtaq and the book brings to life the experiences of the muslim minority in India, and especially the challenges females, both daughters and mothers, face everyday.

Stone slabs for Shaista Mahal
No matter which religion one belongs to, it is accepted that the wife is the husband’s most obedient servant, his bonded labourer.

A slice of life about marriage, death, birth. The central nexus of family is very apparent. Does feel a bit didactic.

Fire Rain
A religious muslim man thinks inciting the community around a burial will solve all his problems, but family life catches up with him. Liked this one much better than the first story, even though the themes of female exploitation are similar.

Black Cobras
In this day, in this age, are there still people like this, she wondered.

Women being shorthanded because they only birth girls (or seven kids in ten years). They only have soft power to get a semblance of justice. Feels almost Les Miserables like in societal commentary.

Do you know who get justice?
Only those who demand it.

A Decision of the Heart
You mind your business, I mind my business, once in a while I scream and shout a little. It is a dog’s life, isn’t it, that’s why.

This time we have a more trope like jealous wife and saintly widowed mother in law, with a man in between. Given the precarious position of women in society, as illustrated in A Decision of the Heart, Akhila her behaviour and jealousy in respect to the sole love of her husband, feels less irrational than it would seem stand-alone.

Red Lungi
Razia has to deal with 18 kids between three and twelve during summer vacation. Collective, non-anaesthesia circumcisions for the poor and the rituals around it offer a relief. Yet the old ways in a sense seem the best ways, at least in terms of resilience shown by people.

When there was so much poverty and misery around, was there a need to be inhumane too?

If there are people to help the rich, the poor have God.

Heart Lamp
Those who want to die don’t walk around talking about it.

Her only claim to importance was that she was the mother of his children.

A desperate woman ask her family for help but is rebuffed, leading her to contemplate an ultimate act of agency left to her.

High-heeled shoe
Material things had become priceless and human beings worthless. Behind those material possessions, people’s feelings were on sale. Things decided the relationships between small people with bog shadows.

An older brother returns home from Saudi, leading to an arms race involving the footwear of the spouses.

Soft whispers
When she got married to me, she must have been eleven years old. When Safiya was born, she had turned twelve, isn’t it?

A girl thinks back of her childhood rebellion against her mother, her love for her grandmother and a fling that has present day relevance.
Don’t think the voice of the kid was done well/distinctly enough.

A taste of heaven
People being overlooked and scorned becoming veritable forces of nature seems a theme in the bundle, with here only Pepsi being a placating factor that seems to work to bring a woman back to her family life.

The Shroud
A promise to a poor woman is ignored with callousness, Great Gatsby style, by a rich woman. There are moral consequences

The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri
A lawyer discovers a strange obsession her daughter's religious teacher has for a cauliflower dish.

Be a woman once, of lord!
A familiar tale of a woman being confronted with an unhappy marriage, in dialogue with god.

I was only his wife, that is, free labour.

You gave me the strength to bear a lot of pain. But you should not have given him the cruelty to cause so much of it.

Longlisted International Booker Prize 2025 ranking
1 Under the Eye of the Big Bird - 4.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2 On the Calculation of Volume I - 4.5 stars rounded down, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
3 The Book of Disappearance - 4 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
4 Eurotrash - 4 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
5 Perfection - 3.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
6 A Leopard-Skin Hat - 3.5 stars rounded down, review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
7 Reservoir Bitches - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
8 Heart Lamp: Selected Stories - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
9 Solenoid - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
10 Hunchback - 3 stars, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
11 On a Woman's Madness - 2.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
12 Small Boat - 2.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
13 There's a Monster Behind the Door - 2.5 stars rounded up, review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Maxwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2.5 stars]

Sadly I found this collection of stories to be lackluster. They all started to feel very similar by the end, both in what they were saying and how they were written. It’s cool to see a book written in Kannada get translated and recognized for a major prize, I just wish I had connected with the stories a bit more. Not bad but not my type of story collection.

[Kartik]

Never in my life did I think a book originally in my mother tongue (Kannada) would ever achieve global recognition, guess this means I’m obligated to read it now :)

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the low ratings and generally negative reaction to this book is more of a reflection of the western and or European audience who have picked this up, likely expecting something different from what it is. I myself am one of them, but I think how I approached this book, and just my own reading preferences, played a big part in why I loved this as much as I did.

If you aren't familiar with the community of Indian Muslims here, or Islamic religious practices, beliefs, customs, or laws, then this book will be VERY difficult to understand, especially as the translation itself, while masterfully done, doesn't give the reader much in the way of easy explanations for many words or references. If you want to understand what's going on, you need to be actively interested in learning more about the society being portrayed here, and you need to be curious in googling what things mean. For people completely unaware, this book forces the reader to actively engage with the text and learn to piece together the pieces in each of the stories that often go unsaid, but with context give each story so much more flavor and meaning.

It's a beautiful book, not perfect per se, it doesn't read like it was ever meant to be a cohesive collection together, and a couple of stories dragged for me, but for the most part this is an incredible read, and one that is highly worthy of its Booker Prize victory. An important milestone in literature- outstanding.

[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Realistic reflection of the patriarchal society we are still living in. Most stories reflect this and are quite disturbing to read getting to see how women/girls are still suffering today despite everyone’s belief that everything is better today.

I would have loved the collection more if the stories showcased characters belonging to different backgrounds/faith.

A good collection living up to the hype!

[Amit · Rating 4 out of 5]

HEART LAMP : SELECTED STORIES BY BANU MUSHTAQ, DEEPA BHASTHI.

4.25 ⭐

GENRE - FICTION

PAGES - 216

This year I wanted to read more works of Indian writers and since I recently got to know that this book won The International Booker Prize 2025 it directly made an entry into my To be reading list of books.

Banu Mushtaq is a writer from the Indias southern state of Karnataka who writes in her native language of Kannada. The book consists of short stories of women from rural society of the South Indian region. Most of the stories speak about the struggles women have to endure especially in the Muslim community in India. The stories are well written, emotions like sadness, heartbreak, disdain, pain and disappointment are very well portrayed however, I felt a few short stories ended abruptly and they could have had a more clear end.

I loved reading the book and recommend others to read this book as well especially women young and old will absolutely love this book. The translation is well done by Deepa Bhasthi and she deserves to be mentioned.

Happy Reading 💚🙏✌️

[Darryl Suite · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this, but I didn’t. I’m normally a huge fan of short stories, but this collection didn’t hit. The prose was dry, the stories left little impact. The collection had the same lackluster vibe throughout, not one story leaped off the page. It came to a point where everything seemed to blend into one another — I tended to forget what each story was about the moment I finished them.

Religion, caste, oppression, patriarchy, family life of Muslim women —all worthy and important themes, but sadly, I didn’t love the author’s execution of said themes. Bummer.

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Translating from Indian languages is no mean feat, especially considering the fluid syncretism of our linguistic cultures. The 12 stories in Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, for instance – selected by translator Deepa Bhasthi from a mammoth ouevre spanning 33 years – were originally written in a people's Kannada, colloquial and full of idioms and inflections from Urdu, Dakhni and Arabic, in literature as it is in life. Bhasthi translates the original into English 'with an accent,' without flattening either word or syntax, without the exoticisation of italics, and with attention to the hum and idiosyncracies of the culture from which it stems. No wonder, then, that the judges of this year's International Booker Prize thought that it 'ruffles language', 'create(s) new textures in a plurality of Englishes' and both 'challenges and expands our understanding of translation'. It does: the reader, particularly the Western anglophone reader, is always aware of the fact and act of translation; the text demands their active attention and interest in learning about a culture rather than drip-feed simplifying it for their edification.

The stories are themselves as impactful as the storyteller: Mushtaq happens to be one of the few women writers who emerged from Bandaya Sahitya, a progressive protest literary movement from 1970s Southwestern India. Her writing here is a distillate of Indian Muslim women's experiences under a patriarchy coloured by caste, class and religious orthodoxy; of the strictures and injustices that circumscribe their lives. Every character – from the poor woman willing to have her son circumcised twice for a morsel to eat and another who passes without the dignity of her dying wish, to the many inept and corrupt men and even the Arabic teacher obsessed with gobi manchurian – is rendered with empathy, humour and bite. Short stories are nothing without tension, and here it layers and mounts until almost unbearable for the characters and readers alike. There is something powerful in the way Mushtaq is able to portray the inner lives of women who are aware of something amiss in their lives even when they may not understand the full extent of their subjugation.

I do wish the selection was a bit more varied, but perhaps that comes from my familiarity with this mode of Indian writing. Familiarity did, however, allow me to note that though Mushtaq writes about Muslim women in Muslim communities, the casual syncretism of day-to-say speech remains – the most obvious if also tame example would be how characters quote from the Qur'an and refer to the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the same breath. While some readers in the subcontinent are wont to uncritically weaponising Mushtaq's focus against the community she writes about, the reason why the stories have the force they do is because the oppression they name is as pervasive elsewhere.

a more solid criticism of this collection is that it focuses almost entirely on these women's suffering without really exploring their agency within or without their circumstances. This is of course true for many women, millions, but doesn't account for the varied responses that come from these circumstances. Still, I appreciate that this unlikely and un-commercial prizewinner (short stories? about Muslim women? translated from a non-European language?) could go a long way in opening the market up to more diverse, exciting, uncomfortable and discomfiting narratives from the global majority. Here's hoping!

[Deedlina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of course it won the Booker Prize! What could be more award-worthy than a story that checks every box on the Western fantasy list about Muslim lives���violent men, voiceless women, polygamy thrown in for good measure, and endless procreation to really seal the stereotype. We—Muslims—have hijacked our own literature, expertly tailoring our stories to fit exactly what Tom, Dick, and Harry want to hear: tragic, exotic, and just backward enough to make them feel enlightened.

Rebecca Kuang has an interesting line in her YELLOWFACE “Unfortunately, you can still be orientalist even if you are Asian,” page 99.

This book claims to represent Muslim communities in Karnataka—but instead, women in these stories are voiceless, choice-less, and crushed under the boots of violent, lecherous Muslim men. Muslim men are reduced to predators and patriarchs, parroting a corrupted understanding of Islam that serves only their appetites. Every story in Heartlamp circles the same tired orbit: marriage, childbirth, submission.
⁠
Literature must not shy away from pain. What provokes my anger is that in Heartlamp, suffering becomes the sole currency of Muslim identity. Domestic violence exists, yes—but it’s not unique to Muslims, it’s universal, damn it! Oppressive men exist everywhere, damn it! Not only in the Muslim world.

When literature becomes a mouthpiece for hegemonic assumptions, it ceases to liberate—it participates in a new kind of oppression.

Mushtaq’s characters seem frozen in suffering. Agency, education, religious complexity—hallmarks of real-life Muslim societies, especially since the 1980s—are nowhere to be found. Where are the Muslim women who are lawyers, poets, journalists, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers? Where are the families negotiating between tradition and modernity with compassion? Where is the humor, the strength, the sisterhood, the ordinary dignity? The answer is: not in Heartlamp.

Heartlamp is not brave; it is compliant after complaint!

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a huge disappointment.

After being so much feted, I had expected something out of the ordinary from the author. What I got, instead, were a bunch of hackneyed and predictable stories written in extremely melodramatic prose. True, they tackle important social issues: but for me, literature means the impact of the tale as a work of art, and I could not find it here at all.

The translator says in the afterword that the author was a part of the Bandaya Sahitya movement.

Bandaya Sahitya started as an act of protest against the hegemony of upper caste and mostly male-led writing that was then being published and celebrated. The movement urged women, Dalits and other social and religious minorities to tell stories from within their own lived experiences and in the Kannada they spoke.

This has resulted in big challenges for the translator, as she openly confesses. Indian languages vary across regions, so it is impossible to catch all their nuances in translation: that must have happened with these stories too, I reckon. Much of the original beauty of writing could have been lost in translation. But unfortunately, as non-Kannadiga, reading translations is the only option I have.

But leaving the language part aside, there was nothing special about the content also. The author is a social activist, and her activism seems to have infected her fiction. Patriarchy in conservative Islam is obviously Banu Mushtaq's personal bugbear.

Come to think of it, for us, that is, for us Muslims, it is said that, other than Allah above, our pati is God on earth. Suppose there comes a situation where the husband’s body is full of sores, with pus and blood oozing out from them, it is said that even if the wife uses her tongue to lick these wounds clean, she will still not be able to completely repay the debt she owes him. If he is a drunkard, or a womaniser, or if he harasses her for dowry every day – even if all these ‘ifs’ are true, he is still the husband. No matter which religion one belongs to, it is accepted that the wife is the husband’s most obedient servant, his bonded labourer.

***

‘Che, che! You must not misunderstand me. God’s law says get married not just to one woman, but four. Should women give up their honour and dignity and come to the mosque? I waited for not one, but ten years. Did she give birth to even one boy? And the way she runs her mouth! Abbabbaa! Is that a sign of a woman from a respectable family? So I married another woman. So what? Should I not have? Didn’t I go visit her every time I felt like it? The other day, I was driving on the road when I saw Hasina. I dropped her off near the house in my auto itself, and placed ten rupees in her hands. Are we not humans? As a woman, if she can’t even adjust this much, then …’ Yakub said.

These are some samples of her rantings against patriarchy - there are many more. All valid, of course, but when such statements appear again and again, one starts to feel a bit bored.

The author does not condemn the religion as such, but rather, the men who have appropriated and corrupted it.

'...Why don’t scholars tell women about the rights available to them? Because they only want to restrict women. The whole world is at a stage where everyone is saying something must be done for women and girl children. But these people, they have taken over the Qur’an and the Hadiths. Let them behave as per these texts at least! Let them educate girls, not just a madrasa education, but also in schools and colleges. The choice of a husband should be hers. Let them give that. These eunuchs, let them give meher and get married instead of licking leftovers by taking dowry. Let a girl’s maternal family give her a share in the property. Let them respect her right to get divorced if there is no compatibility between the man and woman. If she is divorced, let someone come forward to marry her again; if she is a widow, let her get a companion to share her life with.’

‘Apa, Apa, what are you saying?’ Aashraf felt like she had lost her senses.

‘What I am saying is correct, Aashraf. All these rights are available for women in Islam...'

I agree with all of these. But when a piece of literature is used as a pulpit for pontification, it loses its charm.

There are some stories I liked. The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri was hilarious with its underplayed humour. Fire Rain, about a Muslim corpse mistakenly buried in a Hindu cemetery, enchanted with its biting satire. Another story I liked was The Shroud about the casual cruelties of the moneyed class towards the have-nots. But the rest were pretty much forgettable. And the title story, with its over-the-top melodrama, resembled an Indian movie from the sixties.

I have a feeling that this book won the Booker because it caters to West's Orientalist image of India and Islam. Reading this, privileged liberals in the West can lean back in their chairs and feel sympathy for the poor, backward citizens of the Third World and say to themselves: "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

WiT 2025 #2

As a collection of short stories set in the patriarchal context of a Muslim community in India I found most of these tales quite similar, even if the specific events were varied. However, what I very much enjoyed is the translation from Kannada: not just does it leave some words untranslated as a tribute to their original language and as a marker to their 'untranslatability', but the English is alight with the cadences, rhythms and figurative lexicon of non-English.

Sentences like 'his mother had spat fire on anyone suggesting she remarry', 'he became like hot coal', 'applying salt and chili on the whole thing', 'enough to make even stomach water melt' are as indicative of a different culture as the more obvious 'she would get katna done', especially when the latter explains in-text that this means male circumcision. It's this gesture towards a different thought world that I greatly appreciated, one that asserts itself without either fanfare or apology.

For me 'High-Heeled Shoe' was the stand-out story in the book because it did something unexpected and figurative. There's a quiet humour in some of the tales, such as the crazy war between wife and mother-in-law in 'A Decision of the Heart' that leads to a house being split into halves to keep the two women apart, but there is also so much casual verbal and physical attack throughout, from women as well as men.

These are overwhelmingly domestic tales of strife and tension such as the woman who gets eighteen children dumped on her by her extended family, and many of the stories blurred into each other in my head.

Well worth a read, though, for the translation choices which won this the International Booker 2025.

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally written in the Kannada language, this collection of short stories focuses on the experiences of girls and women in Muslim communities in India. I recommend this book to fans of translated literature who really want to be immersed in another culture. The translator made the deliberate choice not to include footnotes or italicize non-English words, and to retain family titles from the original language rather than converting them to terms like “mom” or “aunt.” This creates an immersive effect similar to travelling to another country and learning about bits of the language and culture along the way. Though the translation is of course English, it doesn’t feel Anglicized in the same way translated works sometimes do.

Because it takes place in a culture very different than my own, some of the characters’ choices were baffling to me, and I had to deeply consider why they were making them. Other moments felt totally universal and were easily relatable. Unfortunately, dealing the patriarchy is something most women will be very familiar with.

I really enjoyed this part of the translator’s note, which I think gets at the universal themes underlying the specific stories:

“That said, I choose to attribute my gustakhi, my imprudence, to translate Banu to something she once said to me. She said that she does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community, that women everywhere face similar, if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues that she writes about. This sisterhood to which those of us who identify as women belong is the cushion I place my translation on. The coping mechanisms we devise, the solutions we find and the adjustments we make around men are survival strategies nurtured across generations. The particulars may be different, but at the core is a resistance to being controlled, 'tamed', or disallowed the exploration of our full potential. These experiences, both Banu and I believe, can be found anywhere in the world.”

[Rendezvouswithbooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heart lamp written by Banu Mushtaq Translated by Deepa Bhasthi
*Winner of Booker Prize 2025*

When Heart Lamp got longlisted, I felt proud to be a part of Kannadiga lineage. My Kannadiga househelp 'Khatija' saw me beaming & quietly inquired. I blatantly hugged her & told her that how Banu mushtaq with her stories has created a niche in society

She wanted to hear those stories but couldn't go past the 1st one coz it reminded her the brunts of Patriarchy she has faced

To her the silent abuse faced by Shaista in *Stone slabs for Shaista Mahal* or Hasina's in *Black Cobra* felt like her own, where sex & procreation is duty

"As evening started to lose its light, lamps were lit around the house. But the lamp in Mehrun's heart had been extinguished long time ago"

*Red lungi* beautifully braided humour with anguish while *High Heeled shoe* explored fetishes & sinister desires

Much like the titular story, all the other stories are bordered by distress, frustrations, glum but also offer a lens into varied forms of abuse - whether through religion, of religion, of women, reproductive rights, oppression

"Material things had become priceless, and human beings worthless"

Collection of 12 stories has been chosen from 50 stories written by Banu over the span of 30 years

I understand the collective revulsion by majority readers over how the stories are repetitive, indianised & highlight a certain religion, which has constantly fought archetypal representation

But much like how even now, we write & read about abuse faced across world on the basis of race, caste, war, how we still write about age old notions on Motherhood, we should be reading & writing about gender based maltreatment coz they are very much prevalent

Banu Mushtaq herself fought many shackles to educate herself in rich languages like Dakhani, Kannada, Hindi, Urdu & English. To come out of the crevices from where she was, to fly wrapped in the stories she writes, would definitely give wings to so many women like her

For me her stories are not about agony but about the raging fire

Translation by Deepa Bhasthi was a standout where she wasn't worried about how to make it work for western audiences but more focused on bringing out the real essence

Key Takeaways from Translator's note

- "Banu Mushtaq's entire career, be it as a writer or as a journalist, lawyer and activist, can be summed up in one Kannada word Bandaya meaning dissent, rebellion, protest, resistance to authority, revolution and its adjacent ideas; combine it with sah-itya, meaning literature, and we get the name of a short-lived but highly influential literary movement in the Kannada language Bandaya Sahitya."

- "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. Her Kannada, however, and the Kannada I grew up speaking, one heavily influenced by coastal inflections and Havyaka, a dialect of the caste I was born into, are both very different."

- "While of course a translator need not be from the same background as the writer, it still felt important to me to acknowledge our differences, our respective positions and privileges, and use this awareness to be more responsible and sensitive in my translation."

This was one standout collection. Read it

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading about the lives of women from all over the world and despite their differing countries, cultures, religions, etc., I’m always astounded by the similarities between their experiences. The unrealistic expectations, the oppression from society, from within their own family, from within their own gender are almost always present and I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m a bit depressed by it all. Not that I’ll stop seeking these types of stories out, I think it’s important to bear witness to how other women live and have lived and the sacrifices they have had to make, but I think I need to be a bit more intentional with mixing in some more joyous stories now and then.

Mushtaq does balance some of the strife with humor and it’s not that these are all depressing stories, but they’re all fairly similar in their portrayal of stuck women. I really enjoyed these stories but have to say that it took me forever to read through the collection. I read it on my Kindle and was shocked when I saw it was less than 200 pages because it sure did not feel like it.

I always love a translator’s note and Bhasti has provided us with a great one that provides cultural context and explains her own positioning in society compared to the authors and how that affected her approach to the translation. While I never mind if a translator chooses to italicize or leave non-English words as is, I’m not sure I buy into her argument that italicizing or adding footnotes disrupts the flow of the reader, or at least not this reader. The translator says that she hopes her choice to provide neither will help the reader learn a few new words and I’m really not sure how that makes any sense—not italicizing a word doesn’t suddenly make me understand what it means.

All in all, I’m very glad to have read this collection and think it makes a fine addition to the International Booker longlist. edit: And now the winner!

[Korcan Derinsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heart Lamp iyi bir derleme hatta birçok açıdan oldukça önemli de ama etkilendin mi derseniz, pek etkilenemedim. Öykülerin neredeyse tamamı bana biraz eski geldi: meseleler hâlâ güncel olsa da anlatım dili ve yapıları örneğini defalarca okuduğumuz öykülerdeki gibi. Yine de Banu Mushtaq’ın kendine has, ince bir mizahı var; en dramatik durumun içinde bile o küçük alaycı cümleler olmasa fikrim daha da olumsuza kayardı kuşkusuz. Uluslararası Booker’ın sürpriz kotası her sene artıyor galiba. Yine oldukça şaşırtıcı(!) bir seçim çünkü bu.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Be a woman once, oh Lord!”

That finishing line, cried out in despair, encompasses so many things at once. It sums up the essence of the collection of short stories perfectly, and it is an urgent appeal to the reader as well. If God were to upgrade his faulty creation, the female of the species desperately wishes for ”him” to step into her shoes first and be a ”her” in body, heart and soul too. The injustice of religion could not be explained better than through the women who live within its rules and build their lives believing it to be true. The God of man (or more accurately: the man of god) sees women as disposable vessels and free labour, not as equal human beings.

That is true even when these ”objects” turn out to have strong opinions, acute emotions and highly developed intellects. In a society dedicated to the worship of a man-god, they have no rights.

For me, this collection was both strange and familiar. The cultural references, the language, the landscapes, the food and the everyday life details are far removed from my horizon. But still, I know the complexity of the struggle between individual and society. I know there are no simple paths to improval. Every change comes at a cost, I can relate to the challenges both men and women face in a rigid environment. I felt like a tourist in a foreign country, but also like a participant in the universal human condition. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players!

As a stage director, god should be able to see and play different parts, not just the one with the male lead act - that is the message of this collection as a whole.

For me, not believing in any supernatural stage directors, I’d be content if our human leaders showed some willingness to embrace the entire cast of humanity instead of focusing on putting questionable superheroes in the spotlight!

[Read By RodKelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories in Heart Lamp offer a powerful exploration of the complexities of life for Muslim women and girls in the Indian state of Karnataka, particularly within the confines of the patriarchal systems that limit and define their existence.

I very much enjoyed and appreciated the immersive, unapologetic rootedness of the stories within their specific cultural context. There is no trace of Western sensibility here, no explanatory notes, no italicized terms to guide outsiders. The collection reads as an authentic, unfiltered portrayal of a culture with its own codes and oppressions.

Banu Mushtaq’s writing is suffused with deep compassion for her characters, yet she doesn’t idealize them. The women are sometimes cruel, sometimes complicit, just as the men who rule over them are portrayed as fragile, egotistic, and often pitiably weak beneath their bluster.

Mushtaq captures the daily humiliations, the small victories, and the vast loneliness that comes with existing in a culture with strict gender roles. However, many of the themes that emerge from this collection feel far from being confined only to Muslim women in Karnataka; they speak to the universal strategies of endurance, defiance, and sorrow shared by women across the world.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m absolutely thrilled that a Kannada book has made it into the International Booker Longlist, but unfortunately I didn’t love it. Short story collections and books focused heavily on general life and family are never ones I’m particularly drawn to, and so I personally didn’t really enjoy this collection. I did really enjoy the translators note and reading about how Kannada has a very musical and oral quality and how this was reflected when being translated into English. But I also felt like this made it slightly harder for me to read as the writing felt like it was desperate to be spoken rather than read in a book. I’m sad I didn’t like this as much as others had but I’m still super happy that this has got global recognition and it’s always good to read and learn about different languages and how they feel when translated into English.

[EveStar91]

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025!

[Gorab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highlights: Patriarchy, gender bias, power packed

This collection of 12 stories are taken from day to day lives of Kannadiga Muslim community.
Each story focuses on an area of impact, highlighting oppression and extreme abuse!

What I loved:
Empathy. Every story is written in a way that could feel personal. Super smooth translation!
Details on rituals - marriage (nikaah), circumcision (khatna), shroud (kafan) soaked in zamzam water, home tutoring Arabic for girls.
Subtly narrating misplaced priorities - how the ones upholding the religion themselves are confused!
Each of the first few stories packed a powerful punch!
Had the daughter not stopped her mother doused in kerosene in the title story, the world wouldn't have read this beautiful book. As it is true story based on author's life! Gut wrenching!
The last story - "Be a woman once, oh Lord!" - heart wrenching! A letter written by a woman to God!

Overall:
Rooted in culture of a regional community, collectively portrays muted oppression in various forms.
Even the lighter stories depict a shade of associated cultural nuances. Wish it was purely fiction!
Much recommended.

Personal notes for each story:
(Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal) - Hollowness creeping in women's soul due to hollow promises. Insecure with mother-in-law, as the husband may replace wife, not mother!
(Fire Rain) - Issue of inheritance for mutawalli's sister, mob frenzy due to burial in non Muslim area! Misplaced priorities of mutawalli - problems coming from all directions.
(Black cobras) - Mutawalli ignoring the plights of a lady whose husband has abandoned her for another wife! Favors the man as the religious law promotes this practice!
(Decision of heart) - Clashes with mother in law. Husband treats them both equally. Harrowing ending with Mother remarried without consent!
(Red Lungi) - Khatna. Difference in treatment of rich and poor.
(Heart Lamp) - kerosene! Based on author's own life!
(High heeled shoe) - obsession, jealousy
(Soft Whispers) - childhood friend growing on to take a position in mosque
(Taste of heaven) - mediocre
(Shroud) - improtance of shroud from Mecca soaked in zamzam.
(Arabic teacher) - mediocre. Funny. Details on extreme carefulness with girls tutors. Dud ending - Gobhi manchurian!
(Be a woman once, oh Lord) - Raw and unfiltered. Kind of an open letter to God, unapologetic yet polite!

[victoria marie]

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize

such a feat of translation work! but this collection has been challenging for me to finish… gripping enough & powerful stories of women, but maybe the writing style / repetitions / something else I cannot put my finger on is not doing it for me… definitely deserving of the prize, but personally I think other books selected this year were much stronger & would’ve been better choices for crowning the winner than this work, as maybe would’ve started other important conversations around the world / simply championed translated fiction more… but just my two cents. the translator’s note at the end is so helpful, insightful, & fantastic.
_____

from the judges:
In a dozen stories - written across three decades - Banu Mushtaq, a major voice within progressive Kannada literature - portrays the lives of those often on the periphery of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, violence. Yet, at its heart, Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn. Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper.

[The Bookies' Favourite Bookclub · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Winner of The International Booker Prize 2025!!!

We have finished our final book on the shortlist! Opinions varied a lot on the writing style

Our aggregate star rating for Heart Lamp is 3.25 stars (rounded down to 3 stars for Goodreads)

Read our individual reviews below:

Lucy, Booker longlist devotee
4 stars

I find it extremely hard to rate a book of short stories. Especially when they are all written by the same person, it becomes difficult to detangle them, some stand out and others become a blur. When rating I try to imagine I am reading each story in a collection of short stories written by multiple authors and I ask myself would these stories stand out to me? Would they make me want to read more from the author?

With this method in mind there are four standout stories in Heart Lamp. ‘Fire Rain’, ‘Black Cobras’, ‘Heart Lamp’ and ‘Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!’ stuck with me long after I had closed the book. Mushtaq writes primarily about the muslim community in the Karnataka region in India. She highlights the difficulties of being a woman in a world that constantly maligns and isolates you. The women in these stories are at the complete mercy of the men in their lives and their negligence often leads to these women’s downfalls. It is difficult not to feel incredibly frustrated and horrified for the women involved as the stories unfold.

At times the men are to blame, but more often than not it is not intentional mistreatment of their wives, mothers or sisters that causes the most harm. They are so wrapped up in their own lives and dismiss the women in their lives as less important than their petty feuds or their own ego. I feel this is all summed up in one line in the story ‘High-Heeled Shoe’ - ‘Although Nayaz Khan noticed her condition, he did not give it a priority’, in this story Nayaz Khan’s wife is 5 months pregnant and ill but he is too involved in an argument with his brother to pay any attention to her.

In the story ‘Black Cobras’ there is a character who points out the provisions for women in Islamic law and is enraged at the fact the mutawalli is not upholding these tenants. There is little she can do, as a woman, to help her extremely impoverished friend get justice. There are all these safeguards for women in the Quran but they depend on the men in charge to actually take the issues seriously enough to enact them.

The titular story ‘Heart Lamp’ is claustrophobic and anxiety provoking, it deals with a woman who has realised even her family will not help her after her husband has left her and her five children. At the end the woman tries to end her life but is stopped by her daughter, because of how precarious her situation is you do not necessarily feel relief when she is stopped. You are left asking what will become of her family.

My main criticism of the book is that some of the stories feel too didactic in nature, you could see where they were going before they got there. Though I feel like Mushtaq wrote these stories to help empower women in her region so at times they have to be clear cut moral tales. I think these stories are relevant to all women, at least to some degree.


Aaron, radio journalist
3 stars

This collection of short stories had some high points & some low points. Not every story held my attention but the themes are impactful & raw.


Colin, publishing & creative writing expert
3 stars

Hannah, bookworm
3 stars

[Saadikah · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ★
A woman’s dream— to have her own home and to be a queen within it, the noor that lights up her man’s heart. Heartlamp slowly tears that dream asunder with unflinching claws.
Banu Mushtaq’s pen bleeds with the rage of silenced women, reminding us that this is a man’s world we live in— where even a child begs God to be reborn as a woman.

Themes Explored:
‣ Voice, Autonomy, & the Female Self
From the very beginning, Banu Mushtaq’s refusal to use the word ‘husband’ - cycling through descriptors such as ‘home person’, ‘office person’, ‘yajamana’, ‘ganda’, and settling on ‘life companion’- is more than semantics.
It lays bare her defiance, and is a rebellion against the god-like reverence culturally granted to men, resisting language as a tool of subjugation.
This is echoed again in the final story, completing a narrative circle- a young girl is taught that her husband is her god, that she owns nothing: not even her name or her roots. Her cry, both literal and symbolic, becomes a microcosm of all women in the book- trapped, silenced, yet aware.
Throughout these stories, the author portrays how deeply entrenched gender norms rob women of autonomy.
In one narrative, a woman’s pursuit to gain control over her own body is foregrounded when she supports a friend’s choice to undergo sterilization against her husband’s wishes. Another chapter explores how women, even as widowed mothers, are stripped of authority in domestic matters- shown vividly when a son arranges a second marriage for his aging mother without her consent.
The titular chapter ‘Heartlamp’ captures the raw ache of a woman caught in a loveless, abusive marriage, silenced by societal expectations of patience and sacrifice. It underscores the devastating effects of a culture obsessed with ‘saving face,’ even if it means setting themselves on fire to extinguish their suffering.
Banu’s ink passionately advocates daughters and married women for their rights to education, meher, inheritance, divorce, second marriages for widows.
Through her characters’ monologues the author inspires women to stop begging and start demanding for their rights and place as per the sunnah.

‣ Hypocrisy of Male Religious Authority
Here, Banu turns her lens toward male religious trustees- the mutawalli- whose moral posturing masks violent and unjust behavior.
The contrast between public piety and private abuse speaks to a systemic rot, where these men manipulate faith to maintain dominance, stripping women of inheritance, and silencing their voices.
Yet in another chapter, Banu flips this narrative and allows space for retaliation.
With a sharper edge, the women retaliate and in a surge of rage and righteous contempt demand justice. They are no longer passive recipients of cruelty but active challengers of hypocrisy, articulating their rights with a scriptural clarity often denied to them.

‣ Class Divide & Cultural Disconnection
Stylistically deviating, Banu takes on critiquing socioeconomic disparities using the metaphor of circumcision—how access, privilege, and care are unequally distributed. The rich access sterile procedures; while the poor are left to heal with ash, literally and metaphorically. The ash becomes not just a symbol of healing, but a residue of neglect and inequality.
Banu’s critiques are not just limited to overt patriarchy. She also turns her gaze toward the slow-burning transformations that take place within families over time, especially under the influence of migration and modernity.
In one story, cutting down a childhood mango tree symbolizes not just physical destruction but also a metaphorical severing of lineage, memory, and belonging. She seems to suggest that upward mobility, when untethered from compassion or tradition, can lead to the quiet death of one’s cultural grounding. Not blaming migration but what gets lost in the process- relationships, simplicity, and the deep ties that make a place feel like home.
It’s noteworthy that in this portrayal, Banu complicates the image of the ‘modern woman.’ Not all of them are victims. Some are flawed, shaped by class aspirations, and complicit in emotional destruction. In doing so, she shows that power can corrupt- regardless of gender.

‣ Generational Trauma & The Disposability of Women
Banu Mushtaq’s prose is acutely aware of the traumas passed down through generations. In her story "Heartlamp," she sketches how societal expectations destroy not only the present lives of women, but bleed into the lives of their daughters. The child of a suffering woman learns the standards of what she must endure. Love becomes abuse; sacrifice becomes duty. The dream of being “queen of her own home” is shattered before it’s even dreamed.
This motif finds heartbreaking closure in the words of a young girl from the final story:
“You gave me the strength to bear a lot of pain. But you should not have given him the cruelty to cause so much of it.”
In stories reflecting polygamy and domestic neglect, women are seen as interchangeable. They are wives until they stop bearing sons. Their bodies are playgrounds. Even within national campaigns like “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” (save daughter, educate daughter), Banu critiques how the rhetoric of empowerment rings hollow when parents still hesitate to educate their daughters for fear of their freedom.

Contrasting Portraits
Banu writes of complex, assertive women, deeply aware of the societal structures caging them. Some are timid and obedient, worn down by tradition. Others are unhinged, fiercely independent, educated, and unafraid to raise their voices, even at personal cost. What binds them together is an inner fire- a quiet resistance that is never extinguished.
In contrast, the men- both domestic and religious figures- are mostly emotionally constipated and perpetuators of a system that devalues women, fatherhood, and religion itself. This recurring portrayal of men as volatile (though highlighting the presence of unchecked male anger in patriarchal settings) reinforces tropes it seeks to critique.

An arresting voice in simplistic prose.
While the translation at times felt disjointed, reading the translator’s note, “Against Italics”, alters that disconnect. Deliberately leaving words like kafan, ja-namaz, seragu, etc., untranslated preserves the soul of the language and honours its untranslatability, without pandering to Western readability.
Eminently, Banu Mushtaq’s work remains a searing call.

“The coping mechanisms we devise, the solutions we find and the adjustments we make around men are survival strategies nurtured across generations. Some of us step on the cindering balls of coal and carve a space for ourselves. Some of us learn to exist too close to the fire. None of us are left unscarred.”

These words from the translator’s note feel like an epitaph of every woman in the book.

heartlamp book review

[Resh (The Book Satchel)]

pretty cool that heart lamp, translated from kannada, won the international booker prize in 2025. this collection explores the lives of muslim women in south india (karnataka) through twelve stories. the stories that stayed with me are 'black cobra' (about multiple girl children, place of women in society) and 'matters of the heart' (a wife and a mother in law are at odds with one another. i enjoyed how this story shows than even the mother in law has no agency and simply exists as her son's mother. all decisions about her personal life are taken by the son. i also felt it villainized the wife, without showing us more of 'why' she behaves that way to compete for her husband's sole affection and to be mean to her mom-in-law. so by the end of the story, i wasn't sure what to make of the wife's behavior). in 'the arabic teacher and gobi manchuri', a lawyer discovers that his child's religious teacher has an obsession for cauliflower. the translation of all stories is done very well; also note the translation isn't watered down for a western audience, so if you are a reader unfamiliar with the terrains in the book, you might have to put in some effort.

i did not enjoy the fact that these stories felt too similar to one another, which is not something you are actually looking for in a short story collection. and the theme/similarity/style of writing wasn't memorable enough for me to want to read the same story in different forms.

my expectations were really high, call me biased, since the short story collection, the curse by salma, which explores muslim women's lives in tamil nadu/south india (Read my thoughts on the curse here) is one of my favorites.

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[Gregory Duke]

L o l.

A complete misfire of a translation for me. Mushtaq's prose, according to Bhasthi, assumes a musical register in the original Kannada. What we, as non-Kannada speakers, are left with is a batch of prose so wooden and stilted and tawdry that there must have been some sort of switch-up. Part of the difficulty her is Bhasthi's political insistence on translating without loss, bringing Kannada terminology transliterated into English. In an idealistic world, this would prove to be a utopian solution. In reality, a moment of solipsistic laziness.

In Bhasthi's International Booker-winning words:

"Setting aside the futile debate of what is lost and found in translation, I am delighted that here, in this collection, the Kannada language has found new readers. I was very deliberate in my choice to not use italics for the Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words that remain untranslated in English. 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. Same goes for footnotes - there are none."

O the horrors of naturalization. The politics of translation are the murkiest of murky waters. I appreciate a strong perspective, but, in this case, the chosen tact bodes poorly. By hewing too close to a perceived Kannada ideal, Bhasthi has left the anglophone sphere with a collection of botched stories bereft of much texture. These Kannada/Urdu/Arabic words have great nuance and heft and meaning and value. Not to me though, an English speaker without knowledge of those lexicons. I'm confronted by text that's confrontational with no reward or benefit. I can google words, gain meaning, but... I guess I actually ended up just translating it anyway! And Google's AI result probably proffers less insight than Bhasthi easily could. But now I'm reading Mushtaq alongside Google, not to deepen meaning, but to simply ascertain it. And the idea of "learn[ing] a word or two" via a translation... one must productively question what the role of translation is as a whole. Am I meant to read a Japanese novel and come out knowing new vocab each time? If anything, it further exoticizes Mushtaq's narratives as fundamentally unassimilable into the anglophone sphere, as beyond the pale of English; there is no hope of understanding. All the while, the narratives are redundant feminist dramas with far too many digressions and, apparently, a laughable sense of pace. I appreciate that Mushtaq writes the underrepresented (Muslim women, Dalit women, etc.), and she challenges patriarchal norms with great fervor and tenderness. But these are dreary stories rendered in the driest prose. Ayayay.

[alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

in my journey to become an enjoyer of short stories, this was a pretty good one!

so many stories of men being absolutely horrid and the women around them suffering because of it. this collection is drenched in emotions and will not leave you unaffected.

i did find it difficult to get into each story at first. however, once i was in, i was in. although this wasn’t the best short story collection i’ve ever read, i definitely understand why it won the 2025 international booker prize—it certainly has merit.

tl;dr: short stories to shed a tear to

[Girish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp is a searing collection that strikes at the soul of patriarchy cloaked in the name of tradition. As an activist and lawyer, Mushtaq doesn't just write fiction—she indicts. Her stories are blunt instruments of truth, holding up a mirror to the injustices that women face within the rigid confines of traditional Kannadiga Muslim families—though it's painfully clear that the same could be said of families across religions and regions. The oppression is not unique, only the setting changes.

This is not an even collection. Not all stories carry the same emotional weight and that inconsistency leaves you a bit ambivalent. Is it good that the book isn't relentlessly heavy? Or does that dilute the punch? Some stories are difficult to digest, not for lack of quality but for the rawness of the lives they depict.

But when the stories land, they shatter. Tales like "Heart Lamp", "Black Cobras", and "Be a Woman for Once" leave you feeling gutted. In contrast, chapters like Fire Rain or The Arabic Teacher, with their bumbling male characters, feel oddly light and even clumsy—almost a misstep when placed beside such visceral power.

Mushtaq’s win of the International Booker Prize feels like long-overdue recognition of the kind of stories that have for too long remained trapped in the margins. Yet, reading Heart Lamp also leaves you with a sense of loss for the countless voices like them buried in regional literature, untranslated and unread. How many such powerful books fade away without ever being heard? Thank god for translation and translators, truly.

It is not a comfort read and one can only hope that, a decade from now, the number of readers who can relate to the women and men in this book diminishes.