Meet Banu Mushtaq: Winner of 2025 Booker Prize
Journalist, Activist, Author and Lawyer, Banu Mushtaq, the winner of 2025 Booker Prize for Literature, is now also a History Maker
[Banu Mushtaq in conversation with Arfa Khanum Sherwani of The Wire at an event held at Jawahar Bhawan in New Delhi. (Image shared on X by senior journalist Seema Chishti.)
Journalist, Activist, Author and Lawyer, Banu Mushtaq is now also a History Maker. Banu Mushtaq is the winner of 2025 Booker Prize for Literature, a historic feat as her short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’, translated to English by Deepa Bhasthi, became the first Kannada title to win the coveted International Booker Prize.
The award amounting to £50,000 was announced at a ceremony held in London on May 20, 2025.
Banu Mushtaq was born into a Muslim family in Hassan, Karnataka, on April 03, 1948. As a child, she realised Muslim children had an aversion to studying Kannada, owing to the widespread view that Kannada was a ‘Hindu’ language, while Urdu was a ‘Muslim’ language.
Interestingly, Banu Mushtaq was enrolled in a Kannada-language missionary school in Shivamogga at the age of eight, on the condition that she must learn "to read and write Kannada in six months."
"I was the only Muslim girl in that school. The principal reluctantly admitted me to the school, but with the condition that if in six months I did not learn the Kannada alphabets, I would have to leave. I mastered the alphabets within a month, and so I was able to stay on. And, at the end of the year, I did so well in my studies that I was automatically promoted from the first to the fourth grade”, she said in one of her interviews.
Banu said she started writing the moment she learnt Kannada alphabets at the age of 8. Incidentally, the language which Muslims were so reluctant to learn, won Banu Mushtaq one of the world’s highest literary awards.
At the age of 26 and after graduating from a university, Banu Mushtaq went into a love-marriage which proved a turning point - for her personal life as well as for her writing. Talking to Kanika Sharma for Vogue India, Banu Mushtaq said tired of the dictates of her conservative in-laws who wanted her to wear burqa, confine her in home and limit to domestic works, she had almost committed suicide.
“One day, I doused myself with white petrol kept in a can at home to clean watches since my in-laws had a watch-cum-spectacle shop,” she recalls.
“With a matchbox in my hand and ready to strike, it was my husband, who I had married for love, clung me and kept our 3-month-old daughter at my feet, telling me to stop”, Banu said. She has depicted this incident with much more details in one of her essays in “Heart Lamp”.
Banu Mushtaq’s first story appeared in a periodical called Prajamatha in 1974. Later she joined Lankesh Patrike - a tabloid edited by poet and writer P. Lankesh - father of slain activist and journalist Gauri Lankesh, as a reporter.
During this tenure, Mushtaq was associated with Kannada literature’s Bandaya Movement . The movement, a clarion call for social and economic justice, was marked by a tradition of protest, while offering space for marginalised voices including Muslims and Dalits. In 1983, she was elected to Hassan City Municipal Council where she worked consecutively for two terms as a member. She left journalism in 1990, and began practising as a lawyer to support her family, according to The Hindu.
Simultaneously, she also continued writing. The short stories part of the ‘Heart Lamp’ (original title: "Hridaya Deepa") which won her the Booker Prize were published in Kannada between 1990 and 2023. In the 12 stories, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.
About her writings, Banu Mushtaq says, “I am capable of writing in an excessively ornate, wordy, and complex language, one that the ordinary person may not understand. But I choose not to. My writing is a dialogue with the masses. It is like sitting with them on a courtyard step, speaking heart-to-heart about the world’s happenings, the joys and sorrows of family life, with compassion and understanding.”
Banu Mushtaq’s stories and essays are critical of the caste and class system, and highlight the evils of the patriarchy embedded in the society in the name of religion. At the same time, Banu is a staunch opponent of fundamentalists – Hindus and Muslims both.
In 2000, she had survived a knife attack and a boycott call from her own community. Her fault? She was critical of the clergy who had closed the mosque doors on Muslim women, and Banu wanted this to be reversed.
In 2022, when the Hindu right-wing sparked a row over Muslim students wearing Hijab, Banu Mushtaq sided with the girls and said they have the right to wear as per their choice. She is of the belief that Hijab was advocated in Islam to protect the modesty of women. "And similar modesty practices are in other religions too", she said.
She slammed the Hindu right wing, exposing their real agenda, saying their main target is Muslim culture and identity.
“This saviour attitude of Sangh Parivar is only a tool for political gain and is actually being misused to demolish the identity of Muslims,” Banu said as quoted by Article 14.
Vidyadhar Date - Senior Journalist, Culture Critic and Author, in a recent article wrote, Banu Mushtaq’s winning the Booker Prize is very important from the point of view of the complex language issue in India. “It demolishes various myths and highlights the importance of regional languages”, Date wrote.
Banu Mushtaq’s work was acknowledged at the state and national level before she received applauds at the international forum. Kari Nagaragalu, her story about a Muslim woman deserted by her husband, was adapted into a film in 2003 and earned the lead a National Film Award for Best Actress—recognition by a wider audience for this major literary voice is long overdue.
Banu has also won major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards.
“Exploring the lives of those often on the periphery of society, these vivid stories hold immense emotional and moral weight”, the jury for the 2025 Booker Prize said about Heart Lamp which besides English, has also been translated into Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil and Punjabi.
[Aniqua Sabahat Faizee is Staff Writer at ummid.com]
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