The roots of Banu Mushtaq’s literary rebellion

LITERATURE NEEDS TO justify its existence from time to time. This is my strong belief, and for years I went in search of some proof of life in Kannada literature. I was woefully limited to translations into English because my grasp over the diglossic language was much better spoken than read. But in English, I only found a slim list of translated texts that never seemed to grow in number. 

The majority of well-known Kannada translated literature today centres on dominant-caste and male voices – a disservice to the language’s long, syncretic, fought-over literary history, centred in the state of Karnataka in southern India. This lack of diversity has, in many ways, contributed to the monolithic Hindutva project that has taken hold of much of the state.

The problem wasn’t as simple as who was writing. If I judged Kannada literature by its translations, it seemed like it was unable to give name to the myriad ways of life that took place in the language.

A recent translation has changed my perspective – the lawyer, activist and author Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. The collection of twelve stories – the first-ever original Kannada text to win the International Booker Prize, as well as the first-ever short-story collection – wrenches at the heart. Frank, intricate and powerful, the stories involve Muslim communities across Karnataka: women who live severe, isolated lives, Muslims who grapple with their faith as it is threatened by money, power and prejudice, and the class differences that chip away at their connections with each other. 

The translated text is vivid, but what is imported are not merely Mushtaq’s stories. Heart Lamp also takes us to the time in which Mushtaq’s writerly ambitions were emerging, in the 1970s and 1980s. Kannada literature, once again, was asked to prove itself. As one politician put it at the time, it had become “bhusa”: as good as cowfeed for its fading relevance to human society and for the little it offered to women and marginalised communities.

Mushtaq emerged as part of the Bandaya Sahitya movement in the 1970s, which allowed a small number of Dalit writers to change the Kannada literary landscape by introducing protest writing into an otherwise buttoned-up literature. Mushtaq was radical not just in what she wrote about – often working-class, Muslim women and their conservative partners – but also in how she wrote it. Hers was a direct, confrontational writing, rather than one reliant on allegory and myth, in a rejection of the otherwise Sanskritised literary forms then predominant in Kannada.

The Navya writers of the modernist Kannada movement that emerged in the 1950s, who were still popular at the time, often kept art and literature separate. When they did write about society’s inequalities, they could not understand them well enough to write them with the wholeness they deserved. And even when Dalit writers managed to publish, there was little about their craft that interrogated Dalit consciousness. For example, how could one use realism as a device when reality wasn’t afforded to whole swathes of the population? The answer, which Mushtaq helped to find, was the Bandaya Sahitya movement – or the “rebel” literary movement.

The stories that emerged out of Bandaya Sahitya were radical. Narratives moved away from an obsession with the self and now involved sprawling communities. They often embraced magic and the unreal. Prose sounded like how people spoke: protest words, frank polemics on shame and dignity, honest retellings of what happens in communities, and complex characters who were neither fully diminished by their positions in society nor entirely innocent because of them. With time, this writing developed form and the scene produced a handful of literary stars. 

Mushtaq’s stories would only begin to take shape later, after time spent at the now-defunct weekly Lankesh Patrike and an education as a lawyer. But they contain the spirit of the Bandaya movement within them. Their primary concern is with choice – specifically, how it is a right that everyone deserves. Choice is woven into the language that Mushtaq chooses to write in. As a young girl, she was moved from an Urdu Muslim school to a Kannada Christian one. It was only in Kannada’s secular offices that she could find a wider audience of women.

As Bhasthi writes in her epilogue to Heart Lamp, Mushtaq “does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community … women everywhere face similar, if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues that she writes about. The particulars may be different, but at the core is a resistance to being controlled, ‘tamed’, or disallowed the exploration of our full potential.”

THE STORIES IN Heart Lamp are set within a series of distinct Muslim communities across Karnataka. They are primarily occupied with the fate of women, especially those whose lives must depend on others because they don’t work.

To have money is to have independence, and without it the women in Mushtaq’s stories grapple with the notion that a husband is like God. “Come to think of it,” writes the first-person narrator and protagonist of ‘Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord’, “for us, that is, for us Muslims, it is said that, other than Allah above, our pati [husband] is God on earth.”

The comparison to God, however, reveals the foolishness of some men. In ‘A Decision of the Heart’, Yusuf is torn between his mother and his wife, Akhila. They don’t get along and he lives between their two homes. Akhila is often upset with Yusuf’s decision to spend time and money on his mother, but remains loyal to her husband. But as readers, we see that Yusuf is bumbling, nervous and unsure of himself.

At other times, the situation is more dire. In ‘Heart Lamp’, a woman named Mehrun learns that her husband is cheating on her. Mehrun returns home to tell her family about his adultery, but they reject her pleas to let her leave him. They tell Mehrun that it is better to stay and send her back. She douses herself with kerosene, ready to self-immolate, before she’s saved by her child. When a husband is like God and yet betrays you, life does too. 

Across interviews, Mushtaq has talked about her own life as the inspiration behind this story. Unlike her peers, who married in their teens, she married at the age of 26 after falling in love. After some years, her husband’s family forced her to wear a burqa and stay at home. Her life became dull and living hard to manage. She went to douse herself in kerosene, but was stopped at the last minute by her husband. 

For Mushtaq, this is realism – even if it doesn’t seem very real to others. “Even at its best, realism can only, in our context, reflect and accommodate the rationalist and empirical worldviews of the modern middle class,” writes the cultural critic and commentator D R Nagaraj in The Flaming Feet and Other Essays. But what of those whose lives do not fit into rationalist or empirical worldviews?

THE BANDAYA MOVEMENT was impactful but short-lived. Some of its influences are clear in Heart Lamp. 

For one, it comes through in how the collection’s characters live their lives in relation to others. Most have no other choice. One of the chief criticisms levelled at writers of the earlier Navya movement had to do with the limits of their individualist writing. “For all their social concern, the modernist writers stayed in the main with the individual; they did not explore their own central concerns of alienation, anxiety, and bewilderment with the world,” writes Ashis Nandy, in the foreword to The Flaming Feet.

Another influence is evident in the casual and direct nature of the prose. Bandaya writers used words that would appear in everyday language, the type of thing that would have been sneered at in the Navya tradition. Mushtaq’s is a patchwork language, her stories penned in a frank, casual combination of Kannada, Urdu and Dhakni – itself a mix of Persian, Dehlavi, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu.

In her translation, Bhasthi has gone to lengths to preserve this mix. I spoke to her late last year, when she was still finalising the translations and had just finished selecting the stories for Heart Lamp. She said she felt an immense responsibility to ensure that what she produced could introduce a new reader who encountered Mushtaq in English to some of the literary, linguistic, cultural and religious traditions that lurked behind her stories, without having to state things outright. 

And so, the text is littered with Kannada phrases. Numbers are approximate, like “four-five”. Sounds become words; “pichak” is spitting, “lata lata” is how bones sound as they age. “Abbabba”, say a handful of characters whenever there is something to tsk-tsk at or express annoyance or disapproval of. Bhasthi also retains the specificities of Dhakni and Urdu. She maintains the glottal stop in ja’namaz, as is proper in Urdu. In the story ‘Red Lungi’, a mother watches how a poorer child than her own has healed quickly from a circumcision; suddenly, Dhakni appears, as if her realisation could not be articulated in any other language. “Khar ku khuda ka yaar, gareeb ku parvardigaar” – If there are people to help the rich, the poor have God.

IN OTHER WAYS, Mushtaq moves away from the typical expectations of the Bandaya-influenced writer. She never enters the explicitly unreal. For example, the modern classic Kusumabale, written in 1988 by the Kannada literary giant Devanuru Mahadeva, features a cot speaking about the poor family it serves. The cot tells us about its overuse, and it is the only voice that can speak about the shame that had otherwise been buried by the family.

Instead, Mushtaq’s work feels more similar to that of Ismat Chughtai, a pioneer of modern Urdu feminist literature. She renders objects as protagonists, just as Chughtai does in her short story ‘The Quilt’. These objects are often women’s closest relations outside of their families, and know them so well that they even reveal their vices. It’s as if the limitations imposed on women’s mobility mean that the objects around them become people.

In Mushtaq’s ‘The Shroud’, Shaziya is planning to go to Mecca. The poorer and older Yaseen Bua asks her to pick up a kafan – a burial shroud – dipped in holy Zamzam water. But when Shaziya gets to Saudi Arabia, she’s distracted by beautiful prayer rugs and household items that she buys and stores in her limited luggage space. She decides not to buy the kafan, and comforts herself with the thought that it’s not a big deal.

By rejecting Yaseen, Shaziya exercises the little bit of agency that is given to her. But when Yaseen Bua dies, Shaziya realizes her grave mistake. She never gave this poor woman the small gift that would have meant so much to her. Shaziya’s pride in her higher class leads to guilt and worry about her own afterlife. The kafan knows all of this best.

At times, the collection is uneven: a snapshot of a writer’s growth over time, tracing her start in an explosive protest movement and progress into deeper and more assured forms of writing. As Mushtaq advances in her life, so do her women. 

A lawyer appears in ‘The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri’. She is worried whether she will be able to give her children a proper Islamic education despite working all the time. She discusses the problem with her brother and references Shakuni, a figure from the Hindu epic Mahabharata. No other woman would have interacted with Indian society enough in all its breadth to have known to deploy the reference.

IN A SENSE, it would be wrong to say that Heart Lamp is merely a volume of translations from Kannada. The text reflects the language’s true form: It is a meeting-place of several languages. Heart Lamp’s achievement is in how it dips back into history and produces something new. It expands Kannada’s potential.

If there are two paths for language – to shrink or to widen – Mushtaq’s choice is to take the more difficult one. Decades after she penned the first stories in Heart Lamp, her commitment to honouring Kannada remains undiminished. It is a privilege, she seems to be saying, to choose to write in a language that can reach such a broad group of readers. 

Otherwise, the language begins to “lata lata” – to creak like aging bones. The creaking gets loud enough that it overshadows the achievements that have come before in the language, until all that is left is a skinny, fragile monolith.

Recently, there was some hubbub at a major literary festival organised by the Kannada Sahitya Parishat: No Muslim writers had been invited to speak, despite the Muslim community’s longstanding presence in the Kannada literary sphere and contributions of award-winning Muslim writers like Bolwar Mahamad Kunhi, the late Sarah Aboobacker and Mushtaq herself. A writer less committed to Kannada might have let it go. But Mushtaq took it upon herself, alongside some other writers, to organise an alternative literature festival. 

Despite having faced death threats and a fatwa from her own community, Mushtaq has continued to write. Heart Lamp’s stories were radical at the time they were written, and they are radical even today. It is an irony that a historical document is what gives Kannada literature new life, opening its doors for many new readers coming to the language from English.