Interview of Banu Mushtaq by Phoebe Cannard-Higgins
Fat drops of rain hit my office windowpane; a thick band of cloud hangs in the sky. Something comes over me: a sweet mixture of boredom and the desire to make something happen.
I’ve been reading the International Booker Prize winning short story collection by the Southern Indian writer, Banu Mushtaq, and within a few clicks I find her agent and send her an email asking for an interview.
To my utter delight, within the hour she replies and lines an interview up for me the very next day.
‘No offense,’ my partner says, ‘But do they know who you are?’
As a little-known writer from Melbourne, the usual response to my requests for interviews are along the lines of no reply or out of office. I am pretty ecstatic.
As would become apparent, Mushtaq’s acceptance of my invitation was a demonstration of the generosity and kindness embedded within all aspects of her work as a writer, lawyer and activist.
In May this year, she won the 2025 International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp (2024), a collection of 12 short stories translated by Deepa Bhasthi. This win bears extra significance, because it is the first time a collection of short stories has taken out the illustrious prize.
I sit down to start my Zoom call with Mushtaq. I am nervous. I rearrange the plants on the shelf behind me, adjust the light, check that my daughter still has a smorgasbord of food in front of her and a never-ending cycle of Bluey playing on the TV.
When Mushtaq doesn’t join the call at exactly 2pm, I check my emails and find a sorry message from her agent saying she has been called away to more pressing matters. Disappointment overwhelms my body. I go into the loungeroom and start banging together a shelf I recently ordered.
Luckily, since deleting Instagram I’ve developed a habit of checking my emails multiple times an hour. Absent-mindedly, I flick my emails open to find one from Zoom saying Banu Mushtaq has just joined my call. What!? She is there!?
I cast the Allen-key aside and run back into the office. There she is fiddling with her camera, inserting her hearing aid, and joining me from Karnataka, India. She instructs me to speak slowly so she can make out the words hiding within my thick Australian accent.
‘I read an article,’ I say, ‘that declared you wouldn’t win the Booker because Heart Lamp is a book of short stories. You showed them!’
She gives me an intelligent smile exuding the knowledge and pleasure of having proved such commentators wrong. She tells me how the message from the media and those around her had been clear: be grateful for being shortlisted. Don’t get your hopes up. You will not win.
‘This is why I got so enraged,’ she says, ‘How could the most prestigious literary community (the Booker Prize) undermine short stories? They should respect them!’
Mushtaq has an extensive body of work, including six collections of short stories, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. She primarily publishes in Kannada, the official language of Karnataka with a rich literary history. Her work has been translated into Hindi, Urdu and other Indian languages, but Heart Lamp is her first book-length translation into English. ‘I completely believed in Deepa Bhasti,’ she says, ‘I surrendered her my treasure, now it is our shared legacy.’
I ask her why she felt she had to publish this book now, she says, ‘The struggle we are facing, it should cross borders; people should know us. They should feel us.’
To read Heart Lamp is to be dropped into the lives and communities of Muslim women in Southern India. Mushtaq is a passionate feminist, and her stories illuminate the systemic inequalities sewn into the fabric of local traditions and broader society.
Marriage emerges as a central theme throughout the collection, and Mushtaq highlights the dispensable nature of women in such unions.
In the story, “Stone Slab for Shaista Mahal”, newlywed Zeenat muses ‘No matter which religion one belongs to, it is accepted that the wife is the husband’s most obedient servant, his bonded labourer.’
Zeenat and her husband befriend another couple, Iftikhar and Shaista.
Complications in the aftermath of childbirth lead to the death of Shaista; her swift replacement with an eighteen-year-old girl from a poor family, echoes an earlier sentiment she shared with Zeenat:
‘My grandmother used to say that when a wife dies, it’s like an elbow injury for the husband. Do you know Zeenat, if the elbow gets injured, 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. There is no wound, no blood, no scar, no pain.’
Mushtaq echoes Zeenat’s attitude. ‘Marriage is a challenge all over the world,’ she says, ‘while the laws in India may seem relatively progressive, the values imposed upon women by society remain problematic.’
I ask Mushtaq if she thinks the world has changed for women, since she started writing in the 70’s.
‘Yes and no,’ she begins, ‘the world for women has changed – women are receiving double-degrees, enjoying satisfying careers, but the tradition and the traditional mindset remains the same.’
She advocates for marriage as an equal partnership, with true intimacy and deep friendship, a union, which she says, ‘Should be celebrated – not policed.’ There is still a lot of policing going on.
‘If a Muslim girl wants to marry a Hindu boy,’ she says, ‘her father and brothers will strangulate her.’
In the title story of the collection, “Heart Lamp,” the protagonist Mehrun finds herself trapped by her marriage. Her husband becomes increasingly absent from the familial home until one day she sees him with another woman. With no food or money for her five children, Mehrun returns to her maternal home for help. Instead, her brothers declare, ‘If you had the sense to uphold our family honour, you would have set yourself on fire and died. You should not have come here.’
Forced to return home against her will, she falls into a deep well of depression. Mehrun douses herself in kerosene and goes into the yard. With a stroke of luck, the baby wakes and in turn, wakes her eldest daughter, Salma, who rushes into the yard and clings to her mother’s legs.
‘Mehrun looked at them and she fought to be free of the strange force that had enveloped her, and the matchbox fell from her hand.’
In an interview for Vogue India, Mushtaq says this story was born from her experience of post-natal depression, a time when she, too, doused herself in petrol and nearly set herself alight.
In her life, it had been her husband clinging to her and keeping their three-month-old baby at her feet, which had brought her back from the brink of suicide. In “Heart Lamp”, it is Salma, who convinces her mother, ‘We want you’ and manages to get her to see an alternative way forward. ‘She spoke to her, ‘Forgive me, my darling,’ as the darkness of the night was thawing.’
As a reader, I felt held during Heart Lamp. Although the stories detail cruelty and loneliness, they are not hopeless. Importantly, they are distinct from a certain kind of popular literature (not without its merits) subjecting readers to a tireless succession of unresolvable traumas. They are unique.
Of her protagonist in “Heart Lamp” Mushtaq says, ‘She is wounded, but not defeated.’ A statement that could be applied to every story in the collection.
Importantly, threads of humour and light spark amongst the brutality. In the story, “Fire Rain” the caretaker of the Mosque, the mutawalli, throws himself into a fifteen-day plight to find the body of a man he’d had beaten and killed and return it to the mosque so it can have the appropriate burial – a plight he knows will bring him money and great standing within the community.
After finally locating the body, the funeral procession passes through the city on its way to the cemetery, where the mutawalli sees the man alive and walking down the street.
‘He turns deathly pale, whose corpse had they excavated? ‘Was it a Hindu corpse? Was it a Muslim corpse? The body was too rotten to be identified. Should it rot here, should it rot there?’
When he returns home that evening, he learns that his son has been taken to the hospital with meningitis. He had ignored all the obvious symptoms before him, being too fixated on performing tradition to lengths bordering on absurdity. Mushtaq highlights how under patriarchy everyone suffers, a satisfying irony bolstering the reader onwards.
I ask Mushtaq how she manages to get the balance of humour right, and she tells me it’s not about balance at all. ‘The darkest stories need the sharpest humour,’ she says, ‘not to soften the blow, but to make it strike harder.’ A statement as revelatory as it is now obvious. This is the kind of writerly wisdom Mushtaq radiates, as well as a generosity of spirit in sharing it.
Mushtaq says her writing practice has evolved over the years, she started writing in the Indian protest literary tradition ‘Bandaya Sahitya’ – where she gave voice to the emerging Dalit, Farmer and Feminist equality movements.
For the last ten years or so, she’s used a speech-to-text app on her phone, verbally narrating the whole first draft of a story. ‘All the scenes will be playing before my eyes,’ she says, letting her fingers dance from one side of the screen to the other, ‘It’s not writing, it’s storytelling.’
Mushtaq is adamant that references and research have no place in her work. ‘I don’t use them; I don’t need them,’ she implores. Instead, she says her creativity is informed by her emotional response to the real-world stories and situations she encounters in her work as a lawyer and social justice advocate.
‘When a seed is sown in my mind and in my heart, it starts growing – day by day, by day. That is my reference. Then the seed blooms to its final version and I simply sit here and start dictating.’
Mushtaq has no regular writing routine; she writes only when she is greatly affected by something. ‘When I start writing, I know fully what I am going to write, how I am going to write it, and what I want to convey to my readers.’
‘When I write, I write with intensity!’
And so, when numerous people told Mushtaq that she would not win the 2025 International Booker Prize for a collection of short stories, she decided to prove them wrong. ‘I manifested it.’ she says.
One week before she flew to London to attend the ceremony, she took herself to her room and sat down to dictate her acceptance speech.
‘And in that speech,’ she says, holding a finger in the air, ‘I said that: No Story is Small.’
