Winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 and the first ever short story collection to scoop the award, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq consists of twelve quietly powerful tales centred around the everyday lives of Muslim women and girls in southern India. As a writer, lawyer, and activist, Mushtaq has had extraordinary insight into a world often typified by struggle and oppression. Here she garners the voices of those who shared their experiences and spins them into stories that, even when painful to read, glow with the love, hope and sacrifices of her female (often maternal) characters.
Set in a time of shifting societal attitudes, Mushtaq focuses on ordinary, working communities, places where women may envisage more fulfilling lives than their mothers and grandmothers but are stymied by the weight of tradition and male privilege (their husbands and sons not always so willing to relinquish this).
Most of the stories riff on this theme, one of the most stirring being Black Cobras, centred around a mutawalli and the women in his sphere. Mutawallis are those entrusted with the smooth running of Islamic charitable establishments, in this case a mosque, where Mutawalli Saheb dispenses wisdom and financial donations to the local population. The story opens with his wife, Amina, complaining to him that she is exhausted. She has borne him seven children in ten years and fears that one more may kill her. She wants an ‘operation’ but her husband will not countenance such a disreputable act, it will stain his reputation.
An embittered and disheartened Amina reminds him that he has a woman waiting for a consultation with him at the mosque. Later, she will eavesdrop on the meeting, the results of which the neighbourhood women have a keen interest in; Aashraf, a young housewife, has been abandoned by her husband. Her failing was to give birth to three daughters, when her husband wanted a son and heir for his auto-rickshaw business. Now she and her daughters are destitute, and the youngest desperately ill. Aashraf (aided by an educated local woman) is petitioning for justice, but she is well aware that the Mutawalli will be unsympathetic.
En route to his meeting with Aashraf, Mutawalli Saheb experiences a frisson of unease, realising that in the darkness surrounding the compound wall, there are ‘women-shaped lizards standing on their big toes and watching’. A pivotal moment is coming.
Although often shocking and sorrowful, Mushtaq’s stories are written with great tenderness and a welcome wry humour. Leading restricted lives, and often unaware of their rights, the women are nonetheless vivid, tenacious, lioness-hearted characters. Here they are dealing with abusive husbands, prickly in-law relationships, needy relatives, and poverty. Beyond their sphere, they see an increasingly consumerist world that calls to them.
‘A fridge had the capacity to change the life of a young bride. The different colours it came in could play Holi on her young dreams’.
A vital and insightful collection from an inspirational campaigning writer, with an acclaimed translation by Deepa Bhasthi.
Watch Ambika Mod reading from Heart Lamp at thebookerprizes.com.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq is published by And Other Stories, 192 pages.
