I recently completed reading the Booker Prize-winning book for this year, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq. The book is exceptional in more ways than one. Firstly, she is a fiery and gutsy writer who’s penned stories – there are twelve – that talk of taboo topics, rituals and practices of a society where women in general, remain oppressed and under veil. The Booker Prize is as much a worldwide recognition for the writer as it is for the translator, Deepa Bhasthi. As a translator, Deepa has kept the nuances and cadences of certain words – as they are – verbatim, which help the readers to get the actual feel of the book.

Heart Lamp is an euphoric celebration of the Kannada language as it is of the marginalized women and their tales of struggle and pain, living in a predominantly male-dominated society. Banu Mushtaq, by her very writing process, has deeply empathized with, experienced and eulogized what women go through in a patriarchal, polygamous society. The book also won the English Pen Translates Award last year. This is an even greater achievement for the duo – the writer and the translator – because a literary translation worthy of merit and mention requires that the two work in tandem, unison and complete understanding. The first line in the Translator’s Acknowledgement, on the last page, states, “It takes a village to make a book.” To my personal judgement, a book is the realization of a dream. So whether it’s a village or city life, the air the writer breathes in or the cultural milieu the writer belongs to, is bound to surface in his or her work.

The first story in this collection, “Stone Slabs for Shaistha Mahal”, ends with, for lack of a proper expression, a memorable and unforgettable ending. The fact that women are the ones who become the meat for male consumption and domination, is prevalent in almost all socio-cultural societies across the length and breadth of our country. Except perhaps the matrilineal societies, where women become the rightful inheritors of family lineage and property. But generally, in a patriarchal, polygamous culture, women possess absolutely no voice. Shaistha, at the end of the story, proves to be a woman for whom the oppression becomes too much to bear.

In ALL the stories, the main protagonist is a woman. Although the male voice is present everywhere… For example, in the title story, placed right in the middle of the book, the protagonist is Mehrun. She asks her mother, “Amma, don’t I have something called a heart? Don’t I have feelings?” She is juxtaposed against her husband, who says, “What happiness did I get from you?... I am with a woman who makes me happy.” Infidelity runs supreme in a polygamous culture. Mehrun resorts to self- immolation at the end of the story. What puzzles some readers, which definitely include my humble self, is the fact that all the stories in this collection end with death OR at most, with a clincher that sears the heart. I do believe that LIFE – deliberate capital letters – is positive and has more to offer than just death and pessimism.

There are twelve short stories in this collection with titles such as “Red Lungi”, “Fire Rain”, “Black Cobras”, “High-Heeled Shoe”, and the last story has a quite deliberate, enigmatic title that sets the readers’ minds into the thinking mode, once again – “Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord!” The translator, Deepa Bhasthi, has refrained from the usage of italics in the book. She writes, “Kannada is Banu’s language at work and what she encounters on the street. Her Kannada, however, and the Kannada I grew up speaking, one heavily influenced by coastal inflections and Havyaka, a dialect of the caste I was born into, are both very different.” The “multilingualism” used in the original stories of Banu Mushtaq which included, along with the Kannada language, Arabic and Urdu, fascinated Deepa. She writes further, “While of course a translator need not be from the same background as the writer, it still felt important to me to acknowledge our differences, our respective positions and privileges and use this awareness to be more responsible and sensitive in my translation.” Further, “This sisterhood to which those of us who identify as women belong is the cushion I place my translation on.”

What I personally liked about the book, is that the reader community gets to know about the subtle nuances, nimble cadences of breaths of households that provide an umbilical chord to the voices of protest from women, who’ve so l-o-n-g remained oppressed, silenced and trodden upon by a far-superior male domination. Banu Mushtaq has voiced the unspeakable, exhibited courage where the same is prohibited. Being a woman writer, she has empathized with her characters, lived out their lives, shared the harrowing experiences they’d had to deal with, and finally come out with a book that has touched, moved and tugged at the heart strings of millions of readers worldwide. The international Booker Prize is just another laurel on the cap of this writer, who has previously won the Karnataka Sahitya Akademy and Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Awards. I was left intrigued by the stories on the one hand, and the cultural practices that they disclosed in the open for readers’ eyes on the other. Hats Off to this gutsy, fiery and unstoppable writer for whom the Pen has literally proved to be Much Much Mightier than the Sword!! We hope her courage and achievement help the readers to bring changes in both Dalit literature and ways of living.

Right from the social activist, Arundhati Roy’s book The God of Small Things winning the Booker in the year 1997, to Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children being adjudged the Booker of Bookers, before the same book won the Booker Prize in 1981, it has been a long and continuous celebration for the literature of the Indian subcontinent. Let us hope more of such literary recognitions come our way in the coming years, also.

Can those of us who write, or try to write well, dream big? So that SOME – ANY – recognition comes our way as well?

Let us also – keep fingers crossed till that day arrives.

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