Less than a week ago, on May 20, at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, Kannada author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories rooted in the lived realities of Muslim women in Karnataka. For Indian readers and writers, especially those whose mother tongues have long lived in the shadows of English and Hindi, this win feels less like a solitary triumph and more like a rising tide that, in upcoming days, has the potential to lift the boats of many.
Sitting in Calcutta and reading the news as it broke, I found myself strangely moved. Heart Lamp is not a book I had heard much about until the longlist was announced. It did not dominate the lit-fest circuit in this city or the many book influencer feeds I follow on Instagram. And yet, here it was, shining on the world stage, translated from a language spoken by over 40 million people, but rarely exported with this kind of acclaim.
Banu Mushtaq has been quietly writing for decades: First for Kannada weeklies, then as a practising lawyer who turned real-life cases into the spine of her stories. Heart Lamp is a culmination of that life: A deeply local, unpretentious, yet politically fierce book. Its women are funny, furious, trapped, and stubbornly free — some flee their marriages, others outwit the caste system with humour, and still others simply sit and watch the world turn while holding onto their own simple truths.
Much of the credit for Heart Lamp’s global success goes to Deepa Bhasthi, whose translation takes care not to erase the Kannada-ness of the stories. She lets the texture of the original language bleed into the English, retaining words, rhythms, even grammar that might not feel ‘clean’ in the traditional literary sense. And thank goodness for that. In a year when artificial intelligence is increasingly mimicking the sheen of literature, Heart Lamp — and perhaps especially Bhasthi’s contribution to it — reminds us of the universal glorious mess of lived experience, and the translator’s very human touch.
Bookstores in Bengaluru, according to reports, haven’t been able to keep up. There have been several reports of copies selling out within hours of the announcement. Social media has lately been flooded with photos of handwritten signs, readers holding both Kannada and English editions, and students queueing outside libraries for copies. For a regional language book, this level of retail enthusiasm is almost unheard of.
This might just be the quiet revolution this win triggers. When Geetanjali Shree won the same prize in 2022 for Tomb of Sand — the first novel translated from an Indian language to win the International Booker — it was seen as a breakthrough moment for the Hindi language. Heart Lamp pushes that boundary further, because this win isn’t just about one major Indian language being recognised. Instead, it celebrates an ‘underdog’ language, often excluded even from national conversations, and helps it claim a seat at the global high table.
And what a book to make that claim. Mushtaq doesn’t flatten her stories for a foreign gaze, doesn’t translate India into something digestible for the West. Instead, she stays stubbornly rooted in local soil. The women in her stories, far from offering life lessons, offer life the way it is — often unfair, sometimes hilarious and always human.
In a country like India, where multilingualism is both a treasure and a challenge, Heart Lamp makes the strongest case yet for what literary translation can do. Beyond being a bridge, the book has become a form of advocacy, for it tells the world how important that diversity in language actually is. Moreover, it becomes a sign that our languages matter, our silences matter, and our women’s voices, even in the smallest courtrooms and kitchen corners, deserve to be heard.
Heart Lamp is written for truth, and in that truth, it has found a readership far beyond its borders. And perhaps that is the real legacy of this win; not the trophy, but the invitation. For readers to listen more closely, for publishers to take more risks. And for regional stories to travel, not by changing who they are, but by standing taller in their very own light.