Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi biography

 Banu Mushtaq, 77, a writer and activist from Karnataka, India, has become the first Kannada author to win the International Booker Prize in 2025. Her award-winning short story collection Heart Lamp, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, won the prize given at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London. This is only the second time that a book has been recognized with the International Booker Prize authored by an Indian impressive for the advance of regional Indian literature.

Let’s learn about the first Kannada author, Banu Mushtaq, Amy, and her story: 

About Banu Mushtaq

Banu Mushtaq grew up in a Muslim family in Hassan, Karnataka in 1948. After attending a Kannada-language missionary school in Shivamogga from the age of 8, she reached university level despite community expectations and married for perhaps the first time for love at the age of 26. Mushtaq is fluent in Kannada, Hindi, Dakhni Urdu, and English. 

Mushtaq began to write fiction, beginning in her late-20s and drawing on her experiences during a period of postpartum depression to work through them on the page, with a specific focus on women's issues. Over the span of her career, she has published six volumes of short stories, a novel, a volume of essays, and a volume of poetry. Her responses to her experiences have engaged with questions of caste, class, and gender hierarchies, and her ongoing social and political activism.

About Heart Lamp

Heart Lamp is the first collection of short stories by Banu Mushtaq, written in Kannada between 1990 and 2023 and translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. The collection's stories focus on the lives of Muslim women in southern India, and are centered around the issues of patriarchy, gender discrimination, and resilience. The titular story recounts an episode in the life of Mushtaq in which, wrestling with marriage, motherhood, and domesticity Mushtaq doused herself in kerosene. In the story, Mushtaq's character finds her children intervening by way of reminding the mother that she is loved and that her distress has made an indelible mark on them in ways that are still malleable. 

About Deepa Bhasthi

Deepa Bhasthi is an Indian translator and writer who translated Heart Lamp into English, Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp. At the time of Heart Lamp's publication, Bhasthi's translations of Mushtaq's selections have been praised for their sensibility and attention to the original text. Bhasthi wins the PEN English Translation Award for her translation of Mushtaq's story Haseena and Other Stories in 2024. 

The work of Mushtaq and Bhasthi brings this form of regional and Indian literature to a wider audience who will appreciate it as appealingly different literature, still observing the lessons and artifacts of others in life. The work of translation is absolutely vital in making sure a variety of voices are struck when possible, in this case, the world that surrounds Mushtaq and the vernacular Mehati Muslim women and marginal identity. 

Mushtaq's victory reminds the world that appreciable culture and emotional depth of Indian literature in regional languages, the sort most sustained by market pressures in this society, gets mostly left behind in 'national' conversations.  Banu's success confirms how stories from any angle of the world, irrespective of the local and understated may garner worldwide notoriety.

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