Banu Mushtaq, Heart Lamp

July 2026

Heart Lamp is a strong collection, with only one mediocre tale, by my count — The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri, a story about a maulvi whose obsession with Gobi Manchurian leads him to commit domestic violence — a frankly ridiculous yarn which misses its comedic cues, and falls out of step with the rest of the collection. But that was the sole exception, every other story was excellent; my personal favourite was Fire Rain, which concerns the burial of a Muslim painter in a Hindu cemetery, and the ripples it sends through the local Muslim community. Disputes concerning burial rites are common in India, particularly for members of minority communities; the case of Ramesh Baghel, a third generation Christian of scheduled caste origin, who was refused the right to bury his father in the village's common cemetery, where his ancestors had been laid to rest thus far, comes to mind; this incident took place in early 2025, the same year Heart Lamp won the International Booker Prize. In many ways, each of these stories feel extremely contemporary, despite having been written over a period of three decades.

Broadly speaking, Heart Lamp is a collection of stories that centres Muslim women, and their daily struggles within the insular and patriarchal Muslim communities of Karnataka. I call them insular, because Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs (the other major religious communities across India) are conspicuously absent from these texts, a Hindu official may appear here and there, but the complexity of Hindu-Muslim relations is entirely absent from these stories. Instead, Mushtaq focusses on the intricate equations drawn between individuals within Muslim society, and despite her focus on women, both men and women are characterised with a degree of fine nuance, though the lion's share of sympathy is reserved for the women as they navigate life in lower middle class and working class families. It is quite possible that some of these stories originate from real life, Mushtaq worked as a journalist for a significant part of her career, and in this Heart Lamp is located squarely within the realist tradition of South Asian short stories.

For a reader of Hindi, Bengali, and English, the world of Kannada short stories is only accessible in translation, however, i am able to draw out certain resonances, as well as some divergences, between the work of Banu Mushtaq and Omprakash Valmiki, the latter being a luminary of Dalit literature in Hindi. The resonance, of course, is in how both writers weave stories drawn from journalistic material (Valmiki in particular has a penchant for writing characters who happen to be journalists) and endow their characters with rich, layered subjectivities. As for divergences, well, there is the matter of cause; Valmiki's principle characters usually hail from a lower caste or untouchable background, and face a hostile world intent on their demise. Valmiki's hostile world is not an impersonal thing, it is peopled by Savarna/upper caste men and women who are the cause of its hostility to the lower castes, and in this, Valmiki presents a searing critique of caste society and the Brahminism that undergirds it.

Mushtaq, on the other hand does not take up every facet of hostility Muslim women face in India; she focusses solely on Muslim men, class antagonisms within the Muslim community, and the politics of the Muslim family. This is probably why Fire Rain is my favourite story, because it briefly gestures towards the hostility of the Indian state towards Muslims, almost commenting on its Brahminical and Hindu Majoritarian character, but only in passing, the Bengali Brahmin government official in Fire Rain is merely snide, he exists for all of fourteen sentences and does not stand in the way of rectifying Nisar's improper burial, even the bureaucracy which delays the process for fifteen days is described in neutral terms. No, the subject of Mushtaq's critique in Heart Lamp is the patriarchy fostered by Muslim men within their own community. Now, as i've mentioned already, i only have access to Kannada literature in translation (and rectifying that would take at least a year), which means i cannot make any sweeping statements about Mushtaq's complete oeuvre thus far, it is quite possible that Mushtaq has penned her own searing critique of Hindu society in India and its shameful conduct towards its own Muslim citizens, accessible only to readers of Kannada, and in this, i wonder, would a collection of stories straightforwardly critical of the Hindu majoritarianism of the Indian state have garnered such international acclaim? Would it have been allowed to reach even a national audience?

You must understand, i am not criticizing Banu Mushtaq in any capacity, her work extrapolates on the experiences of Muslim women, allowing readers a glimpse of subjectivities that resonate deeply with their own, patriarchal violence within the family is a routine occurrence in India, regardless of religion, Mushtaq's work potentially lays the ground for imagining feminist solidarities both within and outside the Muslim community. What i am speaking of instead, is an absence of a particular subject in a small collection from an author whose body of work is undoubtedly extremely varied. What i mean to say is that literary works (often speciously) critical of the patriarchy within Islam have, in the past, been mobilised to garner support for U.S. imperialism in West Asia¹, and the warm reception that Heart Lamp has received in the West raises my suspicions. It is a well established fact that Muslim women bear the brunt of both Islamophobia and misogyny, but there is little trace of the former in Heart Lamp. Now, there may be a logical explanation for this, most of the women in Heart Lamp are confined to their homes, but even the narrator of The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri, who is a lawyer, makes no mention of any difficulties faced in the realm of her occupation, besides the pressure it exerts on her to perform the ideal of motherhood within her own community...

1. Muslim Women's Memoirs: Disclosing Violence or Reproducing Islamophobia? asserts this very thesis, however, it concerns memoirs written by Muslim women whose content is often spurious, an allegation i refuse to make against a work that is squarely located in the tradition of realist story-telling in the subcontinent.