Through 12 short stories, Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp unveils the resilience of Indian Muslim women living under patriarchy

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, dives into the often-relegated lives of Muslim women in southern India in twelve short stories.  

The stories depict vivid portraits of women — mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters — with an overt social commentary on their living conditions, encompassing the societal limitations and constraints they must face in their daily lives.  

In Stones Labs For Shasta Mahal, Mushtaq meditates on love, tradition and the role of women as life-bringers who must contend with the weight of social expectations.

A man publicly professes his love for his wife, going so far as to pledge an everlasting love worthy of a Taj Mahal symbolically. However, the wife dies post-partum, and, to a friend’s surprise, the man swiftly marries a much younger wife while sacrificing his eldest daughter’s education to take care of the remaining children.  

The image of the Taj Mahal here not only evokes the dissonance between the man’s public declaration and his actions (who would remarry after building such a lavish monument dedicated to his wife?). 

“If I were an emperor, I would have built a palace to put even the Taj Mahal to shame, and call it Shaista Mahal,” he pompously declares. Yet his interlocutor promptly reminds him that the Taj Mahal is a grave: "Oh ho ho! Stop, Iftikhar, you don’t know what blunder you are committing. The emperor built the Taj Mahal as a grave for his dead wife. May Allah give Bhabhi a long life.”

The image then portends as a curse for the wife who would die soon after, and as a cautionary tale for women more generally caught in a world that loves them less than they do. 

Patriarchy's grip on women's lives

The literary lives of Mushtaq’s women are a function of the patriarchal society in which they exist. As such, women’s living conditions communicate with men’s and how masculinity is incarnated in social functions and behind closed doors as a reverse mirror. Men’s agency only highlights women’s own lack. 

Women must rely on themselves or other women. The primacy of a husband over his wife often obscures and dissipates any forms of positive bonds and solidarity that other male relatives can extend towards their sister, niece, or aunt. Because of this, men’s conscious and involuntary foolishness acts as a device to question their abilities to run affairs.  

This disconnect between men’s social responsibilities and their emotional aloofness (and, sometimes, cruelty) is sometimes rendered theatrically, such as in Fire Rain.  

In this story, a mutawalli — the caretaker of a waqf — receives visitors who present their troubles to him for support, whether financial or otherwise. He listens to their stories and offers acts of charity. Still, he fails to see that his own child is sick (only after being annoyed at his wife’s absence), and he denies his own sister her religiously prescribed share of inheritance. Empathy is bestowed upon a select few, not upon all. 

A similar sense of gender-based injustice permeates other stories. In Black Cobras, a man abandons his wife after she gives birth to their third daughter. Left to fend for herself and the sick baby, she seeks refuge in a mosque, forcing passers-by to reckon with her presence and situation.  

The story explores how women are often kept in the dark about their own rights to marriage and divorce, and how religious scholars perpetuate dubious interpretations of religious law. At the same time, they do not always live up to religious prescriptions: “After becoming the mutawalli, does he do the namaz properly five times a day?”

The text also questions: “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."

Mushtaq also sheds light on the complex relationships between women, which are at once filled with sorority and at times marked by jealousy. This ambiguity is particularly pronounced in A Decision of the Heart, where a wife’s animosity towards her mother-in-law dissipates once her husband decides to marry off his mother to achieve peace at home. The wife immediately understands her wrong and sympathises with her former rival, as the impending arranged marriage looms. 

Empowering women 

Indian writer Banu Mushtaq broke several firsts when she won the International Booker Prize last May. Heart Lamp is the first Kannada-language book to win the prestigious award, and also the first time a collection of short stories is recognised by the selection committee.  

At 77 years old, it’s a late but deserved recognition for the writer and lawyer who has published stories since the 1980s (she’s the oldest writer to win the International Booker Prize). Heart Lamp is the first book-length translation of her work into English. 

The twelve stories included in the book are drawn from a much larger body of work, selected from 50 stories across six story collections, written between the 1990s and the present. 

The award will likely generate additional momentum for more English-language translations — welcome news as Deepa Bhasthi’s translation of Heart Lamp conveys colloquial ebullience and elevates the verve of a “people’s literature” designed to protest oppressive institutions.  

Mushtaq’s unwavering activism advocating for the rights of women — she was harassed in 2000 when defending women’s right to pray in mosques — gives power to these fictional accounts. Justice starts in the home and extends to all spheres of life.  

“My heart itself is my field of study,” said Mushtaq in a recent interview. Reflecting on her literary influences, she credits her most immediate surroundings and takes pride in giving voice to the voiceless.

“The social conditions of Karnataka shaped me,” she says.  

Farah Abdessamad is a New York City-based essayist/critic from France and Tunisia

Follow her on X: @farahstlouis