Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

JOSH'S PICK

Originally written in Kannada, Heart Lamp explores feminism, gender, caste, class, religion, resistance, and the patriarchy in muslim communities in Southern India. In the titular story, a woman in the throes of postpartum depression douses herself in kerosene, and in an attempt to stop her self-immolation, her infant child is placed at her feet. These stories took Mustaq 33 years to write, and at 76 years old, she’s being collected in English for the first time. -JC

A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India’s highest literary honors.

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. 

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters—the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost—that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

Paperback | 192 pages | 5.10" x 7.80"