Tome & Plume: ‘Heart Lamp’ Is The Lamp Of Heart

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The past does not rise up to dance in public. The present does not touch him. The future doesn’t move him… Banu Mushtaq

Four women— Wing Commander Vyomika Singh, Colonel Sofia Qureshi, author Banu Mushtaq, and Deepa Bhashisth— have made the country proud. Social activist and author Bano Mushtaq is the fourth Indian woman to receive the Booker Prize after Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, and Geetanjali Shree.

More important is the fact that the book, Heart Lamp, which received this year’s International Booker Prize, is a collection of short stories originally written in Kannada. Deepa Bhashisth rendered the book into English. She has shared the prize with Mushtaq. The work comes under the category of translated fiction. The judges described the oeuvre as “something genuinely new for English readers”.

Heart Lamp consists of 12 portraits about the lives of women in southern India. Bhashisth selected the stories as well as translated them.

Heart Lamp embraces the diversity of India and celebrates it. Mushtaq has become the first author of the Kannada language to win the International Booker Prize. The characters of her stories, like their creator Mushtaq, weather all sufferings and remain unruffled. These are stories that paint survival and strength of women.

Mushtaq has written the stories from 1990 to 2023. The style of writing is lucid, vivacious, and witty. Yet the real elegance of her writing lies in her spoken style.

Her characters include lively children, wise grandmothers, bullying brothers, serious mothers, and star-crossed husbands. Mushtaq appreciates and portrays her characters as they are, igniting the reader’s heart.

There is a character in one of her stories, Shaziya, who fails to wake up for dawn Namaz. She blames it on the medicines that she has to take at night for high blood pressure. But her mother says, “All this is Shaitan’s game.”

A reader comes across the ways of the daily lives of the people of Karnataka. Mushtaq says, “In a world that divides us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside others' minds, if only for a few pages.”

The book lovers are already acquainted with Mushtaq’s works. But the International Booker Prize has provided her with global recognition and focuses on her life and works.

Heart Lamp scripts a surrealist saga of the daily lives of women in a patriarchal society.

A story, ‘Black Cobras', delineates the condition that women are living in. The protagonist of the story is Aashraf, a woman. It portrays how her husband leaves and begins to live with another woman. All her efforts to get alimony for her and her children’s survival fall through. Ashraf then sits with her children outside a mosque only to bear physical and verbal abuse.

The closing story is “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!”

Struggle has always been part of Mushtaq’s life since her childhood, but she weathered every challenge.

The initial challenge was to learn Kannada, because in her tender age she learnt Urdu to recite the Quran.

Her father, a government employee, wanted her to do something else and sent her to a convent school, where the medium of instruction was Kannada, the state’s official language.

Mushtaq had to work her fingers to the bone to have a good command of the Kannada language. She gradually learnt literary expressions of the language.

She began to write short stories from her childhood and got her first story published in a magazine after many years.

She walked the aisles with a man of her choice. Yet her views clashed with her life partner, and she never hid it.

The female characters in her short stories embody this courage. She worked as a reporter in a local tabloid.

Mushtaq has spoken against social injustices through her works. She left journalism and began to work as a lawyer to help her family. Because of her liberal views, a fatwa was issued against her. A man tried to attack with a knife, but her husband shooed away the attacker.

Such incidents made her more courageous. Before winning the International Booker Prize, she received many awards, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award.

The stories in Heart Lamp are tight, clean and elegant. They manifest Mushtaq’s talent as a writer.

The name, Heart Lamp, is also symbolic. It otherwise means a heart-shaped lamp used as a decorative item that a tinge of romance. But Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp is the lamp of heart.