the int'l booker prize winner

banu mushtaq, deepa bhasthi, kannada literature

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ROUGHLY ONCE A DAY, I’m accosted by some opinion on why fiction is dead, and why literary fiction is especially dead. Sometimes it comes from someone who doesn’t seem to read much fiction at all, sort of peering into this world and wondering why they aren’t picking up books the way they did when they were children, and why they find that non-fiction fits better with their lives today, because their thesis is that the modern world doesn’t really need any more made-up realities than it already has. I’ve also read that it’s because of poor attention spans, bad writing, and certain initiatives that have weakened the meritocratic nature of book-writing.

Other times, this statement comes from people who are on the inside. A small government grant being slashed is felt even more when literature sales are abysmal. Schools don’t seem to be teaching reading properly anymore, so readers might be disappearing merely as a byproduct of an older generation fading out. These people point to the brilliant books they’ve read that haven’t broken through the way they used to, or to the whole swathe of other books that haven’t gotten published because of the categorical demands of publishers. This has neutered fiction, made it stale, and rendered the possibility of change quite hopeless.

When people talk about the struggles faced by writers in the past—censorship, genuine pennilessness, lack of distribution—I find myself thinking that today’s writers deal, more than anything, with a culture that doesn’t really believe in or value fiction. But it’s not just outside them. Daily, these small messages stud into our brains. We must spend our mornings swiping away these thoughts to get a chance at a small, open window in which we can let ourselves reach deep inside.

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I REVIEWED THIS YEAR’S INTERNATIONAL BOOKER-PRIZE WINNER HEART LAMP. It’s the first-ever Kannada work—the language spoken in Karnataka, India—to get this honor, as well as the first-ever short story collection. In my review, I add a lot of necessary history that I think is integral to understanding and appreciating the text.

➡️➡️➡️ LINK HERE

LINK ALSO HERE ⬅️⬅️⬅️

The writer Banu Mushtaq comes out of a tradition that emerged in the 70s. At the time, Kannada literature—which is diglossic, meaning it’s very different spoken than written—was for a slim elite. One politician said it was as good as bhusa, cowfeed, for what it provided to society. So a group of writers from the left-out communities took it upon themselves to crack literature open. They didn’t just change who was writing or what they wrote about, but they also changed how they wrote. Stories centering the self became stories involving larger communities. Protest words and frank emotions flooded their writing. Sometimes, magic and the unreal entered their prose, replacing the realism that didn’t necessarily include these communities.

Mushtaq chose to write in Kannada—she was originally placed in an Urdu Muslim school and transferred over to a Kannada Christian one at a young age. In Kannada, she could write for the wider audience of women that she hoped to reach. Her stories are frank, emotional, and intense. They follow Muslim communities across Karnataka, and especially women who live severe isolated lives and their often-conservative husbands. For all of this, Mushtaq has received death threats and fatwas, all from within her own community, who she continues to live alongside.

I was moved and surprised to learn about a people that genuinely believed in the power of literature. I learned so much from reading their debates—as much as it seemed like literature should serve social means, there were other writers who also urged that it not become simply a tool, that doing so would create the conditions for it to eventually be a less useful tool. There were genuine attempts to give the raw writing that emerged out of this movement more form, and to have it interact with the genuinely brilliant literary inventions of the past.

I’d recommend reading the piece. It’s published with Himal Mag, which was among the first to coin the term "South Asia.” They used to be in Nepal and are now in Sri Lanka. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan has written about their strangulation.

Of course, the piece is important because reading it will give you a sense of Heart Lamp’s history. I don’t really know anymore if it’s straightforwardly good to just read books from different places, just as I don’t think someone spending a week each in 50 different countries makes them a more open person. It’s the same with books—they feel so superfluous when you don’t get their context. You might finish Heart Lamp and get nothing out of it. Knowing a little bit about Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi’s intentions will help you get more.

But I also think the history is important because Heart Lamp imports the time it was written in: a time when people really cared a lot about literature and fought over it. A time in which you could say that literature was bhusa, useless, read by none, yawningly boring, and then smash it open and rework it until it was.

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I WROTE A BIT MORE about Kannada here, if you’re curious about this language spoken by 65m+ people.