RESTLESS HEART

Banu Mushtaq has consistently challenged chauvinistic religious interpretations

- R.S. SANTHOSH KUMAR

The nib of my red ink-filled heart has broken. My mouth can speak no more. No more letters to write. I do not know the meaning of patience. If you were to build the world again, to create males and females again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman, Prabhu! Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!

This is a plea from the last story in Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 stories, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. It's not just a plea, but an indictment of a world built without empathy for the feminine existence.

Mushtaq's voice is one of grit and fierce honesty. Her stories are simple narratives of complex circumstances in which women from the margins of society find themselves. They have a lyrical appeal, yet ask the toughest questions on freedom, choice and happiness. As an activist, lawyer, journalist and writer, her works are shaped by both experience and an unrelenting commitment to social justice. She confronts the structures that bind women—especially Muslim and dalit women—to lives of marginality, while illuminating their resilience with compassion and clarity.

Mushtaq, 77, always had the urge to write from her student days, but did not know how to go about it. Finally, it was in 1973, a year before her marriage to college senior and distant relative Mushtaq Mohiyuddin, that she wrote her first story 'Naanu Aparadhiye' (Am I the Culprit?). How-ever, there was a long break before she took up writing again, an interlude in her life marked by depression and hysteria post marriage. In the 1980s, she finally started writing again after her third daughter Ayesha was born, when she published an article in the Kannada magazine Lankesh Patrike protesting a Muslim woman being forbidden to go to the movies. Since then, she has authored six short story collections, a novel, an essay and a poetry collection.

The stories in