Lawyer, activist, winner of several literary awards including the 2025 International Booker prize for this collection of short stories, Banu Mushtaq is a powerful writer who emerged during the progressive literary movement in the Kannada language in the 1970s and ’80s.
All the stories in Heart Lamp are on the lives of women from conservative Muslim families in Karnataka. The protagonists are a mix of middle-class housewives, domestic help and working women who also have to submit to the conservative norms of the family they are married into.
It’s a man’s world where maulvis, waqf board mutawallis and husbands have the last word on everything. As a posh lady tells her domestic help who has been abandoned by her husband for a new bride, don’t beg but demand the rights given to women in Islam. “Give a petition to the masjid, gather a panchayat around and call me. I will tell your man, and that mutawalli, what the sharia is, what justice is. Twisting the Qur’an and Hadiths the way they want in front of a helpless woman is not justice.”
While the threat of another wife may be specific to their religion, most of the other problems these women face are pan-Indian and across most faiths and classes. Like husbands demanding money from their in-laws, refusing to let their wives meet their families, scorning wives who only bear daughters, deciding what their wives wear from modest attire to uncomfortable stilettos, not educating daughters after a certain age, not allowing birth control with a warning that “those who get an operation done to stop getting pregnant will not reach jannat”, etc.
But all is not gloom and doom — there are a few stories that make you snort with laughter, like ‘A Taste of Heaven’ where naughty teenagers make their grand aunt believe she’s in heaven because she drank Pepsi, or the story about the Arabic teacher who only wants to marry a woman who can make “Gobi Manchuri”. Not all the wives are crushed souls — there are hen-pecked husbands, one of whom is convinced that menopause has made his wife a holy terror. There are feisty heroines too like newly-married Zeenat who refuses to call her husband “pati devaru” — she is not willing to equate him with god. When they fraternise with an older married couple, she is touched by the way Iftikhar pampers his wife Shaista. “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 says grandly. But how true is his love for Shaista really?
The subjects of most of these stories may be heavy and grim, but the manner in which they are written is satirical. There are witty asides from other characters, and other little leavening devices that make you smile. Some of the women, helpless though they may be, have excellent coping devices. Exposing hypocrisy is Mushtaq’s thing, something she does very well indeed.
Heart Lamp
By Banu Mushtaq
Tr. by Deepa Bhasthi
Penguin
pp. 214; Rs 399
