From the Editor’s Desk

In recognition of Banu Mushtaq's booker win for Heart Lamp, and TBR's constant endeavour to support translation, we invite Kamlakar Bhat, a reputed poet and translator from Kannada to pen an editorial on what this win means for translation in general and for Indian language writing in particular.

Banu Mushtaq and the Quiet Fire of Kannada Realism

At a time when world literature often arrives in translation, filtered, flattened, and fragranced for a cosmopolitan palate, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated into English with fierce clarity by Deepa Bhasthi, feels like the crack of dawn in a shuttered room. It does not pander, nor perform. Instead speaks in its own rhythm, wrapped in the textures of Kannada, Dakhni Urdu, of lives tethered by prayer, hunger, and a fragile but fierce hope.

Banu Mushtaq is not merely a writer. She is a voice that has, for decades, poured itself into the fault lines of Karnataka’s cultural psyche. A lawyer by training, a writer by compulsion, and an activist by instinct, Mushtaq belongs to that rare breed of Indian women writers whose literary vocation is inseparable from their political action. And yet, her fiction is not propagandist. From the wounds and whispers of women who are not permitted to speak, but who endure - and in enduring, resist.

As a major figure in the Kannada Bandaya (Dissident) literary movement that emerged in the 1970s and 80s, Banu Mushtaq’s contributions can no longer be read as footnotes to India’s regional modernities. Her work embodies a slow-cooking, often-overlooked revolution that took root in the margins and grew subterranean - until it surfaced, incandescent, in the stories of women carving meaning from the daily blazing realities.

Mushtaq’s realism is neither sentimental nor grim. What sets her work apart is how this realism strains at its own edges; how it allows glimpses of the surreal, the symbolic, the unspoken. Her women (mostly Muslim, poor, hemmed in by tradition and community surveillance) do not simply represent social types. They emerge as interior beings, possessed of a quiet depth. Banu Mushtaq doesn’t just make her characters speak, she lets the circumstances speak loud and clear. They speak not only from under the veil, but through it, beyond it, questioning the veil itself. They carry resistance like a hidden talisman, not in raised fists, but in the way their endurance of a husband’s indifference, a child’s death, a cleric’s decree raises unsettling questions.

Banu herself has spoken of this compulsion to tell the truth of lives veiled twice over: by patriarchy and by religious orthodoxy. Speaking of her creative process, she has said, “if someone somewhere is hurt, I too am hurt. And when that pain wells up, I cannot keep quiet.” This radical empathy, this refusal to domesticate grief or dilute anger, animates her fiction. And it is precisely this refusal that earned her not just literary acclaim but also threats and fatwas from conservative quarters. In the 1980s and 90s, for a Muslim woman to write so honestly was itself a form of activism. For Banu, storytelling became a kind of insurgency - against silence, against isolation, against the habitual boundaries of caste, faith, and gender.

That activism extended beyond the page. As a community lawyer, Mushtaq worked tirelessly to defend the vulnerable and speak truth to power, even as her stories found their way into the syllabi of Karnataka’s classrooms and the consciousness of a new generation. In doing so, she lit a path for other women writers across faiths, across regions, each mapping the interstices of their own complex cultural inheritances.

In Heart Lamp, we see the distilled force of this legacy. The translation by Deepa Bhasthi is an act of deep listening. Bhasthi does not tidy the stories for an imagined Western reader. She allows their cadences to remain tangled, their griefs untranslated in places, their metaphors resistant. The result is not a smoothing over but a thickening of meaning: a literature that must be read on its own terms, with the patience and humility of the outsider. This is not a bridge to cross, but a landscape that must be walked.

And it matters immensely that this translation has won the Booker. Not because awards are the highest measure of literary worth, but because such recognition yanks the gaze of the global literary world away from its well-worn centers. Because it proves, once again, that powerful fiction does not only emerge from the metropolitan core or the polished diaspora. It comes from Hassan and Hubballi, from rented rooms and courtroom benches, from a woman scribbling stories between clients, between court hearings, between cooking meals.

The victory of Heart Lamp is not Banu’s alone. It belongs to the polyphony of Indian languages - many of which, like Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, Malayalam, Konkani, Tulu and others - have long sustained literary cultures of astonishing complexity. Writers like Perumal Murugan, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Jayant Kaikini, Bama, Jacinta Kerketta, Ambai and Geetanjali Shree are only the beginning of what lies beneath the horizon of our national literary imagination. There are hundreds more, writing in dusty dialects, seaside rhythms, tribal poetics, waiting not to be discovered but to be heard.

This is why Banu Mushtaq’s moment must not be mistaken for a mere literary event. It is a reminder that great literature does not emerge from the top down but from the ground up. And that the stories we need most now (stories of plural lives, of interwoven identities, of conflict that does not resolve) are already being told, in voices rich with complexity and contradiction.

Let us not mistake the flame for the full fire. Let us read beyond this moment. Let us translate with courage. Let us edit with conviction. Let us teach these works not as exotic artefacts but as empathetic narratives. Let the lamp burn.

And let its light fall where we have refused to look.

Kamalakar Bhat