Before becoming the first-ever Kannada writer to be shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, Banu Mushtaq had a wide-ranging writing practice: she has published essays, investigative pieces, poems, and about fifty short stories, written between 1974 and 2023. In Karnataka, the south Indian state from which she hails, Mushtaq is not a professor of literature or a journalist, but a lawyer; in an interview with the Indian press, she shares that she has also been a translator of many law books into Kannada. But among all her forays into writing, Mushtaq has named the short story her “favourite” form.

The International Booker-shortlisted Heart Lamp is, in fact, Banu Mushtaq’s debut in English. A translated anthology featuring some of her short stories, it is remarkable for its unusual scope and perspective, and for its curious, cheeky tonality in rendering the grave aspects of its world. Unlike most Anglophone literature in South Asia, this is a fiction not bothered with defining and diagnosing the problems of the nation at large, but with the minutiae, with domestic squabbles, with very peculiar anxieties; for instance, that of leaving a Quran teacher at home with two adolescent daughters, or of managing a mother-in-law who can’t seem to die. Gone also is the gaze vigilant of dupattas and rickshaws, donkey-carts and traffic-jams; the reader’s attention is directed at far more specific details, such as the embroidery patterns of “Panjabi” dresses – apparently a tell for financial prosperity in these parts of Karnataka.

In this way, Heart Lamp has some of the refreshing pleasures of Zubair Ahmad’s Grieving for Pigeons, itself a translation (from Punjabi into English). Unlike Ahmad’s sentimental men however, Mushtaq’s women are not situated in professional, politically-charged Lahore, but in the sleepier small towns of Karnataka. There as well, the communal tensions of India simmer, but the antagonists of every story are all within the fold of the ummah – brothers who cheat out sisters from their rightful inheritance, curt and frigid husbands, indifferent mosque committees. In many, the home and the neighbourhood is the world, for its central characters are constrained in their duties as housewives; in only one of them does a woman like Mushtaq appear – the lawyer narrator of the delightful “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri”. Within this confined world, these women are characters not at all like the Muslim women of Kamila Shamsie’s cosmopolitan, English-speaking milieu; they are not even cut from the same cloth as the characters of Bano Qudsia or Ashfaq Ahmed, not being in any proximity to highly intellectualised strains of Islam. Instead, the religiosity that bears on Mushtaq’s women exhorts them to treat their husbands as next only to God (the Pakistani reader will practically hear the heavily implied “majaazi Khuda”, even as the term does not appear in text); that shames them for returning home after nights of humiliations and beatings; that asks them to be patient if a husband seeks a second wife, or if he begrudges them too much for birthing only daughters.

This is a humbling, critical treatment of certain patriarchal mores in southern India, drawing attention to how this kind of Muslim metaphysics grapples with these values. Of course, its victims are not only women as wives or daughters, or all its sources of violence, men. Mushtaq is, rather, highly sensitive to the wedges patriarchy creates between sons and mothers, between brothers, between sisters-in-law; in “Decision of the Heart”, she renders an all too familiar psychosis (among many in this anthology) engendered by the crippling domesticity this world exacts on young women, wherein the victim of one set of incoherent frustrations becomes the aged woman living next door.

In its scathing realism, one cannot help but wonder how Mushtaq’s own exposure in the courts of Hassan — the city she has spent most of her life — must have informed her choice in characters. I even suspect that her distance from university departments and schools has allowed Mushtaq to be less romantic, more razor-sharp about her observations. In these choices, Mushtaq’s work is in conversation with a broader literary material often characterised as “Muslim social”, in self-conscious opposition to the simple presentations of Muslim characters in other (often) non-Muslim Indian fictions, either relegated to the role of lecherous villains, or virtuous, benign minority characters; either the Persianate, couplet-spouting effete, or the paan-stained, kohl-rimmed militant. Some may question this thematic range in an India charged with varying degrees of Islamophobia. But just as it would have been distasteful to suggest that Toni Morrison or James Baldwin restrict their fictions to more flattering images of black Americans in a racist United States, so too Mushtaq cannot be censured for a fiction uninterested in making Muslim subjects palatable for a BJP-sympathising reader.

More specifically, Banu Mushtaq is a leading participant of a Kannada-based literary activism engaged with casteist and patriarchal prejudice. Yet she is nonetheless an imaginer, a dreamer: even within these traditional contexts, she is able to forge feminist comeuppances of startling intensity, as at the end of “Black Cobras”, when housewives rally together to shame and condemn a mutawalli’s inaction. And while this is a fiction that embodies a realism of older, socialist-proximate aesthetics – that centers characters out of fashion in contemporary fiction – much of it is rendered in a charmingly humorous style that feels light and innocent, that reads well, that triggers memories.

Similar to Urdu, it appears Kannada prose writing is much more flexible about points-of-view and time-jumps than is that in English. In Deepa Bhasthi's translation, these aspects of the Kannada are transposed directly on to the English translation.

This makes for an uncommon reading experience: I have limited familiarity with translations of Urdu into English, but of what I am familiar – from Muhammad Umar Memon, from Rakshanda Jalil – tenses and paragraphing are typically changed from the Urdu to make them more closely aligned with the expectations of English prose. In making these decisions, these translators convey – as Michael Katz might say for Russian – that they do not believe English can accommodate the particular grammar and diction of Urdu prose. To ensure their English-language reader is not encumbered by stylistic choices that might not make sense in English, such translators avoid reproducing them.

In contrast, in her afterword to Heart Lamp, Deepa Bhasthi defends her decision to ignore these expectations; for her, it is a way of being more loyal to what she says makes the Kannada prose evoke “oral storytelling”. Thus, in her paragraphs, points-of-view can shift from sentence to sentence, where English convention may have dictated at least a paragraph-break; in the same section of a story, tense can suddenly shift as a narrator immerses deeper into reminiscing, or a point-of-view shifts closer to a character’s position in time. I cannot comment on what makes Kannada prose comparatively more “oral” than Urdu prose, or about how uniquely Banu Mushtaq’s storytelling emphasizes this orality, as I do not read or speak Kannada. This concern of accuracy versus readability is, in any case, a debate that extends far beyond this text: Pevear and Volokhonsky present the antithesis to Katz in Dostoevsky translations; the American academic Francis Pritchett (whose own translation of Intizar Hussain’s Basti earned an Urdu text a Booker shortlisting) to Memon and Jalil.

The ambition of Bhasthi's translation goes further still. In dialogue, in close-third sentences, the diction is palpably that of an Anglophone South Asian writer – punctuating and abbreviating clauses in the way they would perhaps sound if a Kannada-speaking person were writing in English. It makes this translation not that of the Kannada into American or British English, but into a particularly Indian English. This is not a possibility for writers working with languages like Turkish or Korean; no English fiction of canonical status has emerged from those literary worlds. But Bhasthi seems aware that in translating Banu Mushtaq, she is bringing this writer to an Anglophone readership, primarily of South Asia itself. For instance, when she chooses to retain “doublisms” (like, for example, translating “hot-hot” for an occurrence of “garam-garam” in Urdu), I was reminded of Salman Rushdie. Bhasthi says this imbibes the English of the translated text with the musicality of the original Kannada, and whereas Rushdie does it for satirising ends and she does not, I suspect that these “doublisms” are as unremarkable in Kannada as they are in Urdu — passing fluidly, as part of the language’s rhythm. In English, though, they become marked, noticeable, signalling style, and perhaps even intention. In this context, it would be revealing to access an Urdu translation of Mushtaq’s work; while it is apparently in circulation in India, it has not yet found its way to a Pakistani publishing-house.

Nonetheless, that this translation has achieved the status it has – that it appears to be so specifically in conversation with other Anglophone works of South Asia in a manner uncharacteristic of Urdu translations into English – points to a large and thriving culture of English-language reading in the region. Heart Lamp is a bold and new kind of translation, no doubt made possible by a publisher’s confidence in this readership, by a translator’s particular range of reading in these worlds of Kannada and South Asian English fiction.

As a Pakistani reader, it pains me that the beautiful Indian edition remains inaccessible to my country’s booksellers – that for all its liberalisations for certain pilgrimage visas, the Pakistani government has not yet attempted to undo its ban on book imports from India, that our writers and translators continue to have a limited, restricted access to this thriving world. And given how Indian perspectives surrounding Kashmiri secessionism remain unchanged – how readily the Indian intelligentsia begins echoing calls for eviscerating Pakistani cities – the prospect of this access developing in the immediate future seems bleak.

This chiefly affects Pakistan’s own creative outputs, its possibility of nurturing young translators like Deepa Bhasthi. Just in terms of Urdu translation work, it is pertinent to mention that both Muhammad Umar Memon and Frances Pritchett are academics in the United States, while Rakshanda Jalil is Indian. Even Zubair Ahmad’s translation was made possible by a high degree of Punjabi literary interest, emerging from a transnationally-interested Punjabi diaspora in Canada, rather than from Pakistan’s most prosperous and populous province. “Regional” languages that do not have such financiers abroad, like Pashto or Sindhi, have not yet found the state support or a system of literary awards that seem central to how a writer like Banu Mushtaq emerged in the Kannada literary landscape. These creatives – or any Pakistani literary creative for that matter – cannot even engage and cultivate a relationship with readers from across the border; they must wait to attract the interest of academics or publishing-houses in the United Kingdom or the United States before they can make those strides.

But in assessing the resonances of Heart Lamp, in considering what a sensibility like Banu Mushtaq’s might offer to literary conversations around Muslim fiction and storytelling in Pakistan, I admire both her work and that of her translator. And I wonder — as I read Mushtaq’s disarmingly affectionate dedication to her husband — whether the text’s eventual circulation in Pakistan might not only expand our sense of shared literary geographies, but also make space for solidarities we have yet to imagine.