Heart Lamp Book Review | Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi deliver a fiery critique of patriarchy

The English translation of a Kannada short-story collection –Hasina Mattu Itara Kathegalu —Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the International Booker Prize for 2025, sparking global interest in Indian literature.

Heart Lampis a collection of twelve short stories detailing the lives of ordinary Muslim women living in Southern India. The stories tackle complex issues of inheritance, female sexual autonomy, divorce, marriage, love and desire in a country that is becoming increasingly restrictive.

Mushtaq, a lawyer and activist by profession, is known in the literary world for her sharp criticism of social structures and championing of social causes. The stories aptly reflect this struggle for a better world.

Here’s why the book is an absolute must-read:

Women written by women

The stories inHeart Lamp, like‘High Heeled Shoe’, ‘Stone-Slabs for Shaista Mahal” and‘Red Lungi, among others, have fully formed female characters and are a testament to the magic of women writing women, as they are devoid of any form of victimisation or demonisation of the gender. The only true villain in the book is patriarchy.

Sharp critique of male privilege

Mushtaq, in her story‘Black Cobras’, delivers witty and sarcastic criticism of male privilege and the different scale on which men and women are judged.

In a rather moving moment, Aashraf, a woman abandoned by her husband for not giving birth to a baby boy, laments that“A man is everybody’s best friend. His past does not rise up to dance in public. The present doesn’t touch him. The future doesn’t move him, nor is it a mystery. He does not have to remain shyly in the shadows. He does not have to say who he belongs to. He does not need to seek forgiveness, not ever at all, because nothing he does is a mistake.”

The skin-deep frustration felt in these words is emblematic of the privilege that many men enjoy, often at the cost of their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters.

Banu Mushtaq has aptly captured male hubris as well. Aashraf’s husband, angry with her demands for equal rights for her dying baby, says,“If you who squat to pee have this much arrogance, how much arrogance should I, who stand to piss, have?”

Unique translation

Books published in non-Western languages often lose their flavour when translated for Western audiences and especially to English. This is very noticeable in other acclaimed books likeOne Part Woman(Mathorupagan) by Perumal Murugan andTomb of Sand (Ret-Samadhi) by Geetanjali Shree.

But Heart Lamp does not suffer from this. In a refreshing take, the authors have chosen not to translate hyper-local words like the Kannada‘seragu’and the Hindi‘Muttawali’ into their bland English versions. No explanations have been offered, too, forcing the reader to go exploring to find the meaning from mere context and narrative itself. It almost feels like a rebellion of sorts by Mushtaq and Bhashti against the hegemony of the West in the literary world.

Acknowledgement of privilege

Deepa Bhasthi, in a fascinating chapter, explains her process of translation and how Mushtaq grew up with theBandaya Sahitya movement in Kannada literature and wrote to rebel against and demand accountability from a world that sees men and chooses to ignore women. Bhasthi also explains her choice of retaining certain linguistic elements from Kannada.

But most importantly, she acknowledges her own privilege as an upper-caste person belonging to a majority religion and how even literature, like all other things in the country, depends on one’s privilege, making Heart Lamp worthy of not just the Booker but also our immediate attention.