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.