Stories of resilience and quiet revolt

Stories of resilience and quiet revolt

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangaluru, May 22, 2025: Writer Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi winning this year’s International Booker Prize for their short-story collection Heart Lamp is no doubt a luminous moment for Karnataka, the Kannada language, and India’s regional voices. But the real cause for celebration ought to be the stories themselves, which the chair of judges Max Porter described as “beautiful, busy and life-affirming” and “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation.”

With these 12 stories chosen from around 50 written over three decades, Banu gently nudges the lives of Muslim and Dalit women into the spotlight. These women not only navigate a world that casually treats them as footnotes but also find inventive ways to resist the religious, patriarchal, and political inequities they face every day, both inside and outside their homes.

This too is Bandaya – a quiet rebellion born out of lived experiences. Banu writes, as she says, like she is chatting with a woman lounging in a courtyard. Deepa’s empathetic translation retains this colloquiality, giving the tales a fierce rootednes in Karnataka’s ethos. The award is an assertion that provincial narratives matter and that unheard, unfamiliar voices can and do resonate globally. It underlines the transformative power of stories well told.

Even with their “deliberate Kannada hum”, as the judges put it, the stories hold the power to spark greater empathy and understanding across nations and cultures. When it comes to translations from the rich repository of Kannada literature, a lamp has now certainly been lit. With State and public support, this prize has the potential to galvanise English translations of Kannada works lagging far behind, in both quality and quantity, translations of works in other regional Indian languages such as Malayalam, Bengali, and Tamil.

At this juncture in the nation’s politics, where divisiveness seems to be easily defeating diversity and the Muslim identity is too often vilified, Heart Lamp is a powerful reminder of our plurality. It is a call to listen to the silences of those left behind at the far edges of our society. So, it should not be enough to merely celebrate Banu and Deepa’s victory. We should be ready to reflect upon and confront all the uncomfortable questions Banu has raised with her stories. As the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously said, “Are we all collectively falling for the danger of a single story?” Whose voices are we amplifying? What are we hushing up? Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp is, in essence, urging us to find the light within our hearts as well.

Courtesy: Deccan Herald