Mint Quick Edit | ‘Heart Lamp’: A Booker prize for empathy and light
This year’s International Booker Prize was awarded to Banu Mushtaq’s ‘Heart Lamp,’ a collection of short stories written in Kannada. As with Geetanjali Shree’s ‘Tomb of Sand,’ it lights up a path we should be glad literature is taking.
This year’s winner of the International Booker Prize, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, is the first ever short-story collection to have received this award. It is also the first Kannada title to do so. Translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, this work of fiction tells stories of everyday Muslim women in South India.
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The judges praised its characters as “astonishing portraits of survival and resilience." Her refusal to flatten her characters or force-fit them into moulds to suit an argument has also been noted.
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The last Indian to win this honour was Geetanjali Shree, who won in 2022 for her novel, Tomb of Sand, about an 80-year-old woman keen to visit Pakistan to confront unresolved trauma as a Partition survivor.
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Historically, women have been left out of the literary canon, not only as writers, but also as characters worthy of attention beyond their relationship with male characters. But literature seems to be evolving for the better. Both works explore the lives of ordinary women grappling with marginalization within patriarchal systems amid religious strife.
In times of highly polarized views, we need the art of empathy to come through. Booker prize juries are on to something.
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