On May 20, 2025, at London’s Tate Modern, Banu Mushtaq made history as the first Kannada author and Indian Muslim woman to win the International Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi and published by And Other Stories, features 12 stories written over 30 years portraying the lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. She is the second Indian author to win the International Booker Prize, after Geetanjali Shree, in 2022.
This is the first book translated from Kannada—a language spoken by around 65 million people—to be nominated for the prize. Deepa Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win. The award also marks a first for Sheffield-based independent publisher And Other Stories.
Born in 1948 in Hassan, Karnataka, Mushtaq attended a Kannada-medium school in Shivamogga as a child, where she mastered the language.
Mushtaq’s literary career began in the 1970s within the Bandaya Sahitya (Rebel Literature) movement, which challenged caste, class, and patriarchal norms. Her writings, rooted in activism, focus on the lived experiences of Muslim and Dalit women in southern India. Dalit women belong to communities once labelled “untouchable” under the Hindu caste system—socially excluded, economically exploited, and politically silenced. They face the compounded oppression of caste and gender, often working in low-paid or unpaid labour, with little protection from caste-based violence.
In 2000, Mushtaq was targeted by a fatwa issued by clerics in Karnataka after she criticised the treatment of women within the Muslim community. Her name was denounced from pulpits. Threats followed. Libraries were told to pull her books. The intention was ominous: to shut her down. She kept writing and publishing where she could while working as a lawyer and teacher in Shivamogga.
This win felt personal to me. I studied Kannada in school in Bangalore. It was the compulsory state language, taught alongside Hindi, English and Sanskrit. In a country of 28 states, each with its own official language, Banu Mushtaq’s win breaks the dominance of English and Hindi, reaffirming Kannada’s place in a linguistic landscape now threatened by centralised, Hindi-first nationalism.
Mushtaq, a lawyer and a known voice in progressive Kannada writing came through her work as a lawyer—many of the women who came to her for legal help became the basis for her characters.
Bangalore (changed to Bengaluru after a Hindu ruler, Veera Ballala II) is my hometown in India. I went to school there. With this win, I had to unpack the wave that came over me, as I am sure it has over every woman in India whose survival depends on a plural India.
Banu Mushtaq’s win restored something in me. Of Bangalore before it was turned into Bengaluru, a convent, girls in uniform, a sunlit tree, patterned shadows on a white field, in a classroom bent heads, oiled plaits, tracing the script of Kannada.
We were taught by South Indian nuns that Kannada, with its rounded, almost ornamental shapes, evolved from Brahmi through Kadamba, designed for palm-leaf manuscripts that favoured curves over straight lines. Kannada is among the oldest of the Dravidian languages, with a literary history from the fifth century and an older spoken history.
Its cadence is soft, its structure syllabic, its stress even, with words ending in vowels.
I had learned to keep my South Indian past to myself. We weren’t native to Bangalore—my mother was a Muslim Khan with roots in Afghanistan, my father a Hindu from North India—but it was where I was socialised to love the languages spoken there: Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu.
That Banu Mushtaq, a Muslim woman writing in Kannada, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize is as political as it is literary. She writes in a language spoken by around 65 million people (By the 1980s, Kannada had been overtaken by English in urban life but remained in bureaucracy, state schools, and local media) in a country of 1.3 billion and at a time when Muslims—about 200 million—face growing marginalisation (Pew Research Center, 2021).
Since 2014, the Modi government has passed laws and policies that have stripped Muslims of protections: the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Muslim women in India remain at the bottom of the social ladder, with poorer access to education, healthcare, and legal support than any other group (Sachar Committee Report, 2006; All India Muslim Personal Law Board, 2023).
A campaign to erase or rename India’s diverse linguistic and cultural histories has gathered speed. Mughal-era road names have been replaced. Allahabad became Prayagraj. Aurangabad became Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar.
In Karnataka, there have been calls to rewrite textbooks to reflect a more “Indian”—that is, Hindu—view of history. The symbolic message is that to be Muslim or to speak a regional language is to be pushed outside the frame.
