Why Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi's International Booker Is a Seminal Moment

Words bring us worlds. Words hewn in written and spoken tongues specific to a cultural-geographic entity when moulded into an anglophonic written artefact, cause the mouldy tree-trunk of our samely shrunken global cosmopolitan worlds to explode with a rich, laburnum-like exuberance, exotic from a distance yet intimately familiar, hundred percent Indian in texture. 

The International Booker is richly deserved for Banu Mushtaq’s quietly assertive feminist short story collection Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. Three significant things about this win are:

• This is the first time that a short story collection from India (as against a novel) has won the International Booker.
• This is the first time that a book translated from Kannada has won the prize.
• This is the first time stories of ordinary, domestic tragedies of modern Muslim women’s life have found the literary spotlight.

In recent decades, the Indian Muslims, the women to an even greater extent than men, have been stuffed into a narrow box made of simplistic prejudices. In this violently majoritarian imagination, all two hundred million Indian Muslims are a homogenous entity who can be singled out by dress, behaviour and a common way of speaking. In it, the diverse regional heritages of Indian Muslims from various parts of India: their uniquely local life practices and ways of speaking; their daily concerns no different from other locals whatever be their religion; are of no consequence because they constitute proof of the organic nature of Muslim belongingness. The Muslim woman is merely a burqa clad creature subject to triple talaq, polygamy and purdah who never had, nor can have a voice of her own.

Banu Mushtaq’s women are not noble Muslim women fallen on bad days reminiscing the good days, the kind that often figure in Quratulain Haider’s and Chugtai’s predominantly North Indian narratives (Haider’s Fireflies in Mist is set in pre-independent East Pakistan but again, a novel about the downfall of elites, of dreams gone sour.) Mushtaq’s Muslim identity is quite specifically a Kannada woman’s.

These are modern, middle class Muslim women who speak delightful Dakkani-inflected Kannada that can be heard in Deepa Bhashti’s excellent translation. In her translator’s note Bhasthi explains why she eschews italics for Kannada words and why she retains spellings that reflect Kannada pronunciations.

‘Italics serve to not only distract visually, but more importantly, they announce words as imported from another language, exoticising them and keeping them alien to English. By not italicising them, I hope the reader can come to these words without interference, and in the process of reading with the flow, perhaps even learn a new word or two in another language. Same goes for footnotes - there are none.’

And thus it is that Mushtaq’s wear the burqah with an ‘h’ as often as they wear sarees, spout everyday local proverbs and common myths from Hinduism when they argue, and eat Kannada food. All this is as much a part of their being as the fact that they pray to a different God and are oppressed by ceaseless domestic and procreative labour and abusive husbands who give talaq threats. They ask why a wife’s destiny is to be the husband’s ‘most obedient servant, his bonded labour.’ In their casual misogyny, petty cruelties and utter ordinary-ness, the men in Banu Mushtaq's stories, though Muslim, are like most other Indian men.  In their marital status as silent, unpaid, long suffering slaves, saddled with constant burden of  care, cooking and child-birth; the women of her stories can stand in for most Indian women. Yet their differently-talking Kannadiga Muslim world brought alive in translation has a touch of magic in it.

Mushtaq’s stories bring alive a richly diverse yet palpably Indian world. Like ordinary Indian women, Mushtaq’s women in their specific corner of the world, grapple with same strains of domestic patriarchy. In the short span of a story, the questions bursting within the protagonists about the endless Sisyphean burdens of marital set up, the misogyny, the lack of parental support, the constraints that prevent any escape, come alive.

In her translator’s note Deepa Bhasthi tells us that these stories were written 'in the aftermath of the Bandaya movement, her works consciously moved away from what she calls the boy-meets-girl tropes of romantic fiction, and instead sought out narratives that critiqued patriarchy and its hypocritical traditions and practices.' Bandaya means rebellion and was a progressive literary movement in 1970’s Karnataka which believed that literature must show social commitment. These stories truly beat with quiet rebellion. The protagonist in her story Black Cobras asks, ‘Do you know who gets justice?’ Only those who demand it.’

Home is where all politics begins.

Mushtaq’s stories are so powerful because alongside their Kannada heritage, are the wounds of cultural misogyny. Her women unflinchingly hold to light the psyche and soul scarred by the rigidly patriarchal set up. Their hearts cannot stop questioning the inequalities and injustices that cannot be questioned because they are part of the custom, duty or religion. By voicing the terrible and immersing the reader in the experience of women’s lives within four walls, Mushtaq fills in the blanks of all that is normalised. They alter the lens through which the world looks at Muslim women and tell that the persistence of misogyny cuts across religious divides, only its garb changes

As a translator and a non-Kannada knowing reader I derived immense pleasure from the extraordinary particularity Bhasthi has carried over into English, thereby pushing what Homi J. Bhabha calls, ‘the boundaries of difference’ between languages. 

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.