Opinion Explained: Banu Mushtaq’s journey from Karnataka’s rebel movement to the Booker stage

The Booker jury described her writing as “at once witty, vivid, moving and excoriating, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. It’s in her characters — the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis [a learned teacher or doctor of Islamic law, Editor’s note] and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost — that she emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature.”

Writing of women, for women

Mushtaq was born in 1948 into a Muslim family in Karnataka. Mushtaq’s journey into literature began in the 1970s and 1980s.

Writing from within the Bandaya Sahitya (Rebel Literature) movement, she joined a chorus of Dalit and Muslim writers who were reshaping Kannada literature as one of the only women writers in the space. Her stories confront systems of caste, class, and patriarchy with unflinching honesty.

“My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them,” Mushtaq said during a Booker Prize interview. “The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write.”

With six short story collections, a novel, an essay collection, and a poetry collection to her name, Mushtaq’s oeuvre reflects her committed engagement. She is the recipient of several major literary honours, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award.

‘Heart Lamp’ curates stories from across her writing career, drawing from over fifty stories written since 1990. The process of selecting and refining them, Mushtaq notes, was intuitive rather than academic. “Usually, there will be a single draft, and the second one will be a final copy. I do not engage in extensive research; my heart itself is my field of study,” she says during the interview. “The more intensely the incidence affects me, the more deeply and emotionally I write.”

The varied literary influences

Her earliest literary influences defy easy categorisation. “Rather than naming a single book, I have been influenced by an immense number of books. Ever since I learned to write the alphabet as a child, I have been writing,” she reflects.

It was not a single title but a social movement that led Mushtaq to see herself as a writer. “The 1970s was a decade of movements in Karnataka,” she recalls. “The Dalit movement, farmers’ movement, language movement, rebellion movement, women’s struggles, environmental activism, and theatre – these had a profound impact on me. My direct engagement with the lives of marginalised communities, women, and the neglected… gave me the strength to write.”

When asked about the books that shaped her worldview, Mushtaq resists the myth of singular influence. “No single book has dictated my life and writing. Instead, numerous books and experiences have given me a renewed sense of life.”

In an interview with The Hindu, she spoke about the severe backlash she faced for advocating for Muslim women’s right to enter mosques in 2000.

One of the stories from ‘Heart Lamp’ has already found a place in the pages of ‘The Paris Review’, another sign that Mushtaq’s once-regionally rooted voice is resonating far beyond Karnataka. But her gaze remains firmly on the communities and lives she writes about — lives forged in struggle, rendered invisible, and brought into clarity by the lamp she continues to carry.