HEART LAMP by Banu Mushtaq, reviewed by Mehruba Chowdhury • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Banu Mushtaq translated by Deepa Bhasthi, reviewed by Mehruba Chowdhury
HEART LAMP (And Other Stories)

As a Muslim woman, I am frequently frustrated by the way Western media perceives and portrays our lives, often obscuring the complex realities of patriarchal oppression within our communities. Like any other group of women, Muslim women’s lives are riddled with many layers of oppressive systems. Patriarchy harms us, too. The only difference is that it sometimes wears the cloak of fake religiosity tinged with hypocrisy. In May 2025, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp won the International Booker Prize, marking the first win for both its independent publisher, And Other Stories, and for a work written in Kannada. In this collection of short stories, Mushtaq explores some of the everyday trials women face in patriarchal communities where religion is widely misinterpreted to control women’s lives.

In these twelve short stories, Mushtaq wrestles with classism, injustice, oppression, and violence through the lens of Muslim girls and women in Southern India. The struggles Mushtaq depicts are culturally specific, yet their underlying truths resonate with women across the globe. This is because patriarchy takes on many forms depending on different cultures and locations, but ultimately, its results are the same: it controls and destroys women’s lives.

Originally written in the Kannada language, Heart Lamp is Mushtaq’s first book to be translated into English. The translation by Deepa Bhasthi creates a rich reading experience by refusing to bend the text to fit standard English conventions, reflecting the plurality of the English language. For example, Bhasthi retains local hyperboles, sayings, phrases, and repetitions to paint a portrayal of the author’s original language. This creates a sensory experience for the reader who can almost hear the characters speak with the accent of their original language and the nuances of their specific cultural upbringing. She also deliberately forgoes italics and footnotes for the words that remain untranslated in English on the page, engaging and challenging the readers to immerse themselves in this culture further.

Drawing on her experience as a lawyer and activist, Mushtaq crafts an incisive critique of patriarchy and harmful sociocultural traditions that upend—and even end—many of her characters’ lives. In the opening story, “Stone Slabs For Shaista Mahal,” Shaista is married to a man who appears to be madly in love with her. Yet, when she dies due to complications after giving birth to their seventh child, he swiftly finds a replacement for her in a much younger woman. The irony is that Shaista forgoes the full postpartum confinement period that many women in her culture observe after childbirth to recover because, as she tells our narrator, “ … if I am not with him, he becomes very dull.” In her world, the woman lives and dies for her husband’s needs. So our narrator in this story, Zeenat, tells us: “No matter which religion one belongs to, it is accepted that the wife is the husband’s most obedient servant, his bonded labourer.”

In “Stone Slabs For Shaista Mahal,” Mushtaq also introduces the theme of men refusing to use contraceptives, sometimes explicitly against their wives’ wishes, which is echoed in other stories in the collection. The men in some of the other stories who try to control their wives’ bodily autonomy include characters who hold influential positions in society. The mutawalli (a custodian of an Islamic property or trust) in “Black Cobras” refuses to let his wife get a surgery to prevent future pregnancies, citing his image and claiming that he’d be “answerable” to people.

Despite the differences in culture and setting, the modern-day American woman could easily relate to the struggle for reproductive freedom in a male-dominated society that seeks to control their choices and bodies. In fact, Mushtaq reveals how women can never win by giving in to men’s whims when it comes to their reproductive goals. For instance, in the titular story “Heart Lamp,” Inayat actively denigrates his wife, Mehrun, for the natural bodily changes caused by childbirth, such as “loose stomach,” to justify his extramarital affair, as if he hadn’t contributed to her five pregnancies.

Another theme Mushtaq explores in these stories is the patriarchy’s conflation of sociocultural traditions with the Islamic religion to distort the latter’s teachings to subjugate women. The men in these stories routinely twist and misinterpret Islam’s decrees to fit selfish desires that harm women. In “Fire Rain,” the mutawalli tries to appear as a just and pious leader in society, yet refuses to share his inheritance with his sisters, even though the Quran mandates it as a woman’s right to get a share of her father’s property. Similarly, in “Black Cobras,” which is perhaps the most hauntingly heartbreaking story in the collection, Aashraf is a poor woman whose husband leaves her because she hasn’t given birth to a son. Using religion as justification, the man marries another woman without giving a backward glance at his wife or three daughters, one of whom becomes seriously ill. However, as one of the woman characters tells us, the readers: “For his own satisfaction, he will even bring down God. He will bring up the Qur’an and quote from the Hadith. But if he is told to give something to feed that poor woman, then he begins to shirk his responsibilities.” Here, Mushtaq gets to the heart of the hypocrisy of these men, who invoke religion only when it suits their own agendas and not when they are required to do the right thing according to their religion.

Digging even deeper, Mushtaq reveals the crux of the matter in the way poor women are far more disadvantaged and oppressed because of widespread misinterpretation of Islamic law. For example, Zuleikha, an upper-class Muslim woman in “Black Cobras,” informs Aashraf:

See, this is where the biggest problem is. In a lot of our jama’at, the mutawallis don’t know the law themselves. Secondly, they don’t have the authority to implement the law. Thirdly, no one listens to them. And then they accept only the parts of the law that suit them.

Due to her upper-class status, Zuleikha is more privileged than Aashraf, and her understanding of Islamic law reflects this. Aashraf isn’t equipped with the knowledge that Islam allows the husband to engage in polygamy only if he can provide for the wives in the same way in terms of his resources, time, and attention. That’s not what happens to Aashraf, who is left to fend for herself and her daughters in this cruel world.

Some of the stories also portray complex class struggles and the conflict between materialism and spirituality. In “The Shroud,” the affluent Shaziya is plagued by guilt when she fails to deliver on a promise she made to a poor woman in her neighborhood. The poor woman requests Shaziya to bring a Zamzam water-soaked kafan (shroud) from Medina for her own burial someday. Due to her poverty, the woman cannot make the pilgrimage herself, but Shaziya, despite her promise to the poor old woman, gets enchanted by a carpet during her shopping and dismisses the idea of bringing back the “heavy” kafan. The symbolism is powerful here. She trades the kafan (spirituality/good deeds for the afterlife) for the carpet (materialism/consumerism) and later suffers for her choice.

The pressure on women to juggle a career with the responsibilities of managing a household and raising children is yet another theme explored in this collection. In “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri,” the narrator is a successful lawyer who is solely responsible for raising and educating her two daughters despite having their father with them because, as the expression goes, “a saree likes it thread, a daughter like her mother.” She accepts it without any complaints, as it’s the norm in her world. Later, when her daughters’ Islamic tutor becomes erratic due to his obsession with a cauliflower dish, she resolves to find a solution for his irrational and harmful behavior toward his wife. She does this as if it’s the most natural thing in the world: catering to a grown man’s demands, no matter how irrational. However, as the reader, we know that the narrator in this story is well aware of the irrationality of it all. Patriarchy would have us believe that the modern woman should accept this as the natural order of things.

The stories in Heart Lamp demonstrate the errors of such a belief. Moreover, what makes Mushtaq’s collection so important is that it makes clear how these issues plague women everywhere around the world. Wherever patriarchy resides, women are subjected to vicious cycles of abuse, even though the details of that abuse might be different.

Mehruba Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi-American writer based in New York. She received her BA in English literature and political science from Agnes Scott College. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Business Insider, Borgen Magazine, and elsewhere.