Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

Banu Mushtaq was born in 1948 to a progressive Muslim family residing in the present-day southern state of Karnataka. As a child, Mushtaq was brought up against expectations that she would only be educated in the Urdu language. When she was eight years old, her parents brought her to a Christian school to learn Kannada, which she demonstrated fluency in shortly after matriculation. 

The defiance of social norms became a recurring theme in Mushtaq’s life. Against expectations that she should have married as a teenager, Mushtaq attended university and married for love at age 26. She worked in broadcast radio and in print journalism as a reporter. However, at age 29, she became a new mother and experienced postpartum depression. This, along with the expectation that she was to commit herself to domestic work, fueled her resolve to reflect upon her experiences in fiction writing. 

Mushtaq’s writing does not restrict itself to women in a particular milieu, but tries to find the common experiences and issues that resonate with other women, regardless of status and geography. In some cases, Mushtaq drew from personal experience to inspire new work. For instance, the title story of her translated fiction collection, “Heart Lamp,” draws from Mushtaq’s personal experience of dousing herself in gasoline with the intention of dying by self-immolation. In real life, Mushtaq was saved by her husband’s intervention while he was carrying their child. In the story, however, Mushtaq uses the main character’s daughter to save her life, driving emotional truths about the gendered bonding between mother and daughter.

Mushtaq has written six story collections in Kannada, as well as a novel and collections of essays and poetry. She has cited Kannada activist-writer Devanur Mahadeva and Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky as influences on her style, which relies heavily on irony and dry humor to communicate her themes. In the 1970s, Mushtaq became a proponent of the Bandaya (meaning “dissent”) literary movement, which encouraged writers from Indian social minorities (i.e., women, Dalit, Muslim) to protest against economic and social injustice. Their decision to write in their local Kannada language was a reaction to the dominance of the educated Mysore dialect in popular culture. The Bandaya slogan, coined by movement founder D. R. Nagaraj, was, “Let poetry be a sword! The dear friend who responds to the pain of the people!” Many of Mushtaq’s stories highlight the injustices suffered by women in domestic settings, as well as the injustices of the caste system that ostracizes people like the Dalit.

Mushtaq has continued her activism over the years. Throughout the 1980s, she was frequently participating in activist movements in Karnataka, hoping to dismantle social injustice. She also began practicing law as an advocate, using the court as another venue to champion her political beliefs. In 2000, Mushtaq was famously the subject of a three-month social boycott protesting her advocacy to enable Muslim women to enter mosques. Despite threats to her life, Mushtaq has never faltered in her fight for the rights of women, the oppressed castes, and those who have been ostracized by their religion.