Heart Lamp is the winner of the International Booker Prize for 2025. It is a collection of short stories published between 1990 and 2023. Reading the stories is a fascinating glimpse into the lives and concerns of Indian women. It is also entertaining. Some of the stories are funny, or deliver a twist in their tale, leaving you to look back at what you have already read and wonder how you didn’t see that coming. But Mushtaq’s writing also has a serious purpose. She began writing while suffering postpartum depression, and her work reflects the experiences of Muslim women, particularly of lower castes who, in the past, have not had a public voice. Mushtaq is a writer associated with Bandaya Sahitya, a literary movement in India that emerged in the 1970s to highlight social inequality and to question existing power structures and traditions which support them. Mushtaq is a feminist advocate for the right of Muslim girls to wear hijab in schools, the right for women to enter mosques, and she has supported social justice causes throughout her career as a journalist and lawyer.

Mushtaq is from Karnataka, a large region bordering the Indian Ocean in the south west of India where Kannada is spoken. Heart Lamp was the first book written in the Kannada language ever to be nominated for the International Booker Prize. While many Western readers may be unfamiliar with Kannada, over 54 million people were reported to speak it as their native tongue in 2021 (Deepa Bhasthi, Mushtaq’s translator now estimates it to be 65 million) and a further 25 million are estimated to speak it as a second language. Even so, this is still a minority voice in a country with a population to rival China’s. Bhasthi identifies the Kannada language as traditionally representing lower-caste Indians. Mushtaq, was educated to write Kannada rather than Urdu, despite her Muslim upbringing and Urdu’s association with India’s Muslim population. In India, Urdu, it is felt by many, is an imported language. The British promoted its use during the Raj, and it is seen as a scholarly language of the elite and upwardly mobile. Mushtaq’s choice to write in Kannada is therefore also an acknowledgement of class and her position as an activist writer.

Deepa Basthi’s translation is excellent, but Western readers unfamiliar with some Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words left untranslated may find themselves occasionally Googling for clarification. Bhasthi is unapologetic for this in her translator’s afterword, refusing neither to italicise words unfamiliar to English readers nor to provide footnotes. Rather than ‘exoticising’ words in this way, they are imbedded in the narrative and they help form a rich linguistic texture that captures the voice and place of its subjects. An example is a word which may be more familiar to Western readers – ‘mutawalli’ – for which I cannot think of an equivalent English word, at least from my understanding from Mushtaq’s writing and an explanation I have found online. The very act of translation might evoke associations with Western laws and practices that the author could not have intended. The English word ‘trustee’, for example, has too many cultural associations with Western institutions and laws, to render the Arabic word accurately. The mutawalli, Usman, from Mushtaq’s second story, ‘Fire and Rain’, does not conform to an English language speaker’s expectation of a trustee. He is a man who is withholding money from female relatives for his own benefit: a man who also wishes to enhance his standing and reputation in the community, and so he is willing to take up a cause that ultimately blows up comically in his face in such a public and embarrassing way that not even his supporters can acknowledge what has happened.

Mushtaq’s social concerns are apparent throughout the collection. Her stories reflect issues around faith, marriage, around the roles and rights of women in marriage and the expectations placed on daughters in their roles as caregivers and as future wives. But Mushtaq’s brand of feminism may seem unfamiliar to Western readers who see feminism as an extension of Western values. In France, for instance, the burqa and niqab was banned in 2010 because it was considered antithetical to French ideals of equality and the integration of women into French society. The common Western assumption that claustration is a repression of women and their rights in Islam is not advocated by Mushtaq. Instead, equality under Islamic law, fairness and stability for women in marriage, and the right to be treated with humanity are the driving factors in Mushtaq’s advocacy. In the third story in the collection, ‘Black Cobras’, it is Aashraf’s decision to sit in the mosque with her daughter, Hasina, waiting for her case to be heard, that is shocking, rather than the terrible circumstances of her abandonment by her husband who has found a younger woman to marry. For a woman to enter a mosque in this way is unsettling while under sharia law, as it is interpreted, men may have up to four wives – a fact often highlighted in Mushtaq’s stories – leaving older wives in a vulnerable position, while husbands can divorce as easily as announcing talaq. Aashraf has failed to produce a son for Yakub, and Yakub, as a man, is not held to his responsibilities:

‘Yakub is not in town, he has moved away from here’ Isn’t he a man? Whether he is there, or not there, whether he carries responsibilities, whether he neglects them, who’s going to ask? Who does he have to answer to? He is langoti yaar [carefree and careless], after all, a man, everybody’s best friend. His past does not rise up to dance in public. The present doesn’t touch him. [50]

So often the situations in stories speak of the unfairness of the system, although occasionally Mushtaq uses a mouthpiece to explicitly articulate her ideological position. In ‘Black Cobras’, Zulekha Begum, a rare educated woman enjoying a marriage of equality in these stories, tells Aashraf:

Why don’t scholars tell women about the rights available to them? Because they only want to restrict women. The whole world is at a stage where everyone is saying something must be done for women and girl children. But these people, they have taken over the Qur’an and the Hadiths. Let them behave as per these texts at least! Let them educate girls, not just a madrasa education, but also in schools and colleges. The choice of a husband should be hers. Let them give that. These eunuchs, let them give meher and get married instead of licking leftovers by taking dowry. Let a girl’s maternal family give her a share in property. Let them respect her right to get divorced if there is no compatibility between the man and woman. If she is divorced, let someone come forward to marry her again; if she is a widow, let her get a companion to share her life with.

Mushtaq therefore distinguishes between Islam as a religion and the patriarchal control of Islamic teaching, which Zulekha claims is poorly understood by the mutawallis and selectively applied. Faith, God and religion remain essential aspects of women’s lives, while the tenets of religion are an ideal that remains separate from it use to control them.

In the titular story, ‘Heart Lamp’, Mehrun is forced into a marriage with Inayat by her family, despite her ongoing studies and her upcoming exams. Inayat cajoles her away from her ambitions with romantic epithets – ‘love’, ‘darling’, ‘my heart’ – and so she succumbs to the seduction of expectations placed on women. But he abandons her as she ages when he meets a younger woman. Rather than receiving sympathy from her family when she returns home, Mehrun is treated with contempt and is told she should have set herself alight. The story highlights the difference between the promises offered by marriage and the precarious reality women face in a society which interprets the Qur’an in favour of men.

Men may enjoy a greater level of freedom – may even flout religious observance with some impunity – but women must follow the rules and adhere to the social functions of a wife, since they are vulnerable to abandonment and the ruin of their reputations. The dangers exist even as children. In ‘The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri’, Hazrat, the titular teacher, is discovered by the narrator cooking with her daughters: “If relatives had seen them instead of me, it would have been a disaster. The incident would have grown wings and spread.” The vulnerability of women lies not only within marriage, but their reputation which can be ruined carelessly or purposely by men who suffer few, if any consequences.

In the first story of the collection, ‘Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal’, we see that for some men the bonds of marriage are utilitarian rather than emotional, no matter the romantic fictions that accompany marriage. The likely death of a wife is compared to an elbow injury: “the pain is extreme for one instant – it is intolerable. But it lasts only a few seconds, and after that one does not feel anything.” One wife is likely as good as another, and any wife is replaceable.

But it is important to understand that Mushtaq does not see Western ideals or Westernisation as a solution to women’s problems in Islam. Equality and fairness are not mutually exclusive Western ideals. Instead, these ideals are imagined in tandem with faith and devotion. Faith is central to the lives of women as much as anyone, and it is through a relationship with God that women also seek happiness and fulfilment. The tension between old traditional ways and Western temptations is reflected in ‘High-Heeled Shoe’, in which Nayaz becomes obsessed with the high heels worn by his sister-in-law, purchased in Saudi Arabia, which he desires to either steal or find a way of purchasing for his wife. For Nayaz, the high heels become a fetishistic obsession that represents status and desire. But the reality is that his heavily pregnant wife risks injury, the loss of her baby, or both, as she teeters about in the shoes. Nayaz’s obsession represents a foreign ideal of beauty and desire that has no practical place in their lives.

In ‘The Shroud’, Shaziya is torn between religious devotion and the desires that Western-style consumption evoke in her. Asked to buy a burial shroud for Yaseen Bua while attending Hajj with her husband, Subhan, in Mecca, Shaziya becomes obsessed with her own desires. Hoping for spiritual cleansing and enlightenment at Mecca, Shaziya loses sight of their niyyat, the spiritual purpose of their journey. Given the opportunity to buy the kafan – the shroud – for Yaseen Bua, she instead becomes distracted by a beautiful carpet she wishes to purchase, instead. The kafan is too heavy to transport, she tells her husband, yet he must face the humiliation of carrying the carpet back to their hotel while passing friends who know they are still on Hajj. Shaziya’s story is a moral tale about the spiritual danger represented by material desire and Western consumption.

Mushtaq understands the need for a balance between what we might call the past and the future. It is an understanding implicit in the journey between the old lives of women as daughters and the future prospects they face as wives: that a new life must be achieved but that old ties must still bind. It is a reality understood by the narrator of ‘Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!’, who is isolated from her family while being given no prospect of a viable future: “I was only his wife, that is, free labour.” Essentially, she is exploited like a slave. But Mushtaq does not advocate tearing down an edifice: rather she advocates a future predicated on the foundational ideals that Zulekha Begum argues already exists within their faith, if understood properly. Nayaz, that keen admirer of the high-heeled shoes, is not so insightful. He tears down an old mango tree that has been on his family’s property for generations in order to build cellars and shops. Nayaz does not understand the connection the tree represents to a shared past and the sense of identity it provides his family. He expects his brother will eagerly support his business venture, but Mehaboob is a “broken man” when he sees what has been done, for Nayaz has built “a tomb over his memories.” Nayaz’s greed has wiped away their shared past a sense of who they are.

Read together, Mushtaq’s collection of stories builds a picture of the lives of Indian women. Each story reflects a different facet of their experience. In one story we have a wife who feels in competition with her mother-in-law who is acting like a second wife. In another we see a woman burdened with the responsibilities of her extended family’s loud children, and so arranges for their circumcision to keep them quiet. Yet another story demonstrates the efficacy of faith when an old woman is made to believe that Pepsi is a heavenly elixir. Sometimes the subjects are funny or bathetic, sometimes tragic and shocking. Mushtaq’s writing seem to encompass the whole gamut of human experience. I read the stories as part of this website’s goal to read all Booker Prize winners, and I wondered before I started if I could relate to the stories, at all. But I found them charming, funny, dramatic and a whole host of other adjectives. What I related to in them was the human experience of the women Mushtaq writes about. Whether I could fully appreciate their lives or not is a question I cannot answer from my limited experience – actually, no, I’m sure I can’t – but Mushtaq and Bhasthi’s excellent translation at least made me feel I was given some insight. This book is well worth a look.