Across Tongues, Against Silence: Banu Mushtaq In Translation

Author-activist-lawyer Banu Mushtaq, whose short story collection Heart Lamp (translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi) won the 2025 International Booker Prize, is the first Kannada writer to be awarded the prestigious award for translated works. The Booker-winner was recently drawn into a controversy with political overtones after Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah announced that she would be inaugurating the 2025 Naada Habba (Mysore Dasara) celebration, a popular state festival with a worldwide following. The Chief Minister cited Mushtaq’s Booker win, which has made Karnataka proud, and her work with farmer movements and women’s groups. Mushtaq responded that she was honoured and delighted to be invited. Many Bharatiya Janata Party leaders have criticised the government’s choice. They argue that Dasara is a Hindu religious festival celebrated according to Hindu traditions.

MLA Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, who was expelled from the BJP this March, took to X, tweeting: “Her [Mushtaq] inaugurating Dasara by offering flowers and lighting the lamp to Goddess Chamundeshwari seems to be in conflict with her own religious beliefs...” Some social media comments about the government’s choice “hurting Hindu sentiments” also surfaced.

Mushtaq publicly clarified that she respects Goddess Chamundeshwari and that she has fond memories of watching the Jambu Savari elephant parade on Vijayadashami with her parents during her childhood. Mysore Dasara, which falls on September 22-Oct 2 this year, has always been an inclusive festival. This grand showcase of Karnataka’s art, culture and diversity attracts people of different faiths. Crowds throng the streets to take in the glittering Navratri processions and cultural programmes.

A progressive thinker, Mushtaq is closely associated with Karnataka’s Bandaya Sahitya movement, which emerged in the 1970s, challenging literary hierarchies and carving out a space for Dalit and Muslim voices. Her writing is marked by an undying spirit of resistance. Through her words and her activism, she has always rejected religious dogma and conservatism, championed women’s rights, and raised vital questions about caste and class. This ‘critical insider’ has often faced criticism from her own community but has never backed down.

I think after Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp and Deepa Bhasthi’s essay Against Italics, it would be difficult for translators like me not to adhere to a similar approach. For example, Bhasthi’s argument that when we use Indian words, we need not use the normative pan-Indian words—like ‘sari’, which is called ‘seere’ in Kannada (her example is that of ‘roti’ vs ‘rotti’). In her argument against italicising non-English words, and refusing the typographical marking of linguistic otherness, Bhasthi asks us to dwell more fully in the discomfort and texture of the unfamiliar words as they travel into English. I was editing a story I had translated a while ago and instinctively began to remove italics and avoid the normative pan-Indian words. That is the power of a strong translation; it sets a high benchmark.

This is crucial, because Mushtaq’s stories are not only literary works. I see her works as cultural and political action. She belongs to the Bandaya movement in Kannada literature. This movement redefined the subject matter and aesthetic strategies of literary practice; even more importantly, it redefined the public function of literature. Translating such a voice into English is not a neutral act. It raises a critical question: what happens when we translate a literature of resistance, rooted in specific social and political contexts, into a language that does not carry the same ideological coordinates? Does the act of translation risk muting or taming the rebel? History tells us that often translations effectively result in such taming.

I think the strength of Bhasthi’s translation is in keeping alive the spirit of Bandaya in the way these stories appear in English. She carves out a space in English where Bandaya can be encountered on its own terms. She does this not by literal equivalence, but through what one might call a performative fidelity. The plotlines of resistance are retained, yes, but so too are the rhythms, registers, and rhetorical gestures of the original Kannada. What is untranslatable is not erased but enacted. For example, using Kannada expressions like ‘rii’. The translation thus becomes an intervention, not a conversion.

To understand the stakes here, we must also situate Bandaya within the broader history of Kannada literary culture. Kannada literature, particularly in its modern, institutionalised form, circulating through print media, books, and universities, was, for a long time, marked by exclusivity. It was a literature shaped by upper-caste aesthetics, themes, and concerns. While the 12th-century Vachana movement had once radically challenged these hierarchies by creating a literary space that welcomed men and women from multiple castes and social locations, that inclusivity was lost over time. By the 20th century, mainstream Kannada literature had become insular again—linguistically standardised, culturally narrow, and largely disconnected from the lives of marginalised communities.

It is in this context that the Bandaya movement becomes historically significant. Alongside the Dalit, women’s, and farmers’ movements of the 1970s and 80s, Bandaya challenged the metaphoric gates of the literary canon and demanded entry. It foregrounded new forms, used new languages, and addressed new readers. Unlike the Dalit and women’s movements, which were primarily political with literary dimensions, Bandaya was primarily literary, even as it spilled over into broader social struggles. Together, these movements transformed Kannada literature into a public sphere: a space of critical debate, cultural contestation, and democratic participation. This, I think, is its greatest contribution.

Writers such as Siddalingayya, Devanooru Mahadeva, Poornachandra Tejaswi, Arvind Malagatti, Banu Mushtaq, Besagarahalli Ramanna, Baraguru Ramachandrappa, Veena Shanteshwar, Chandrashekhar Patil, Sara Abubakar, Geeta Nagabhushan, and K. Sharifa, among others, brought to the centre of Kannada literary production the voices, idioms, and imaginations of communities long excluded from it. Their works foregrounded questions of inequality, gender, caste, and power, not simply as content, but as constitutive of literary form itself. They insisted that literature is not a realm apart from society, but within it.

It is in this lineage that we must place both Mushtaq’s work and Bhasthi’s translations. Mushtaq’s stories are not simply about resistance, they enact resistance through their themes, characters, language, and form. And Bhasthi’s translations carry across this spirit by refusing to reduce or assimilate its difference. As her own essay makes clear, the politics of translation is not about access but about encounter. The English reader is not offered a smooth ride but asked to slow down, to stumble, to listen, to come to the text humbly and ethically.

This is why the term ‘Bandaya’ is so important. As Bhasthi notes, it encompasses a wide semantic range: protest, rupture, dissent, defiance. When paired with ‘sahitya’, it signals not a genre, but a function: literature as counter-speech, literature as public act.

In this sense, Bandaya Sahitya aligns with other radical literary movements across the world: from the Black Arts Movement in the US to the Dalit literary movements in Marathi and Tamil. They share a political commitment; even more importantly, a redefinition of literature itself as something embedded in life, accountable to community, and structurally open to other voices.

To translate such a tradition is not to make it “universal” or “global” in the standard sense. As Emily Apter warns, the global literary marketplace often operates under a “monolingual paradigm” where English becomes the default medium and measure of value. In contrast, what Bhasthi’s translations propose and what Mushtaq’s stories make possible, is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls a “politics of translation”. It goes beyond transmission of meaning, to stage an ethical encounter with otherness.

The translation of Mushtaq’s work is not only an aesthetic act; it is a public intervention. It restores Kannada, with all its historical layers and insurgent energies, to its place in the world literary polyphony. It reminds us that translation is not just about what we carry across, but what we allow to remain unflattened, unassimilated, and alive.

(Kamalakar Bhat is a bilingual writer, translator & professor of English. His most recent published work is a volume of essays by Kirtinath Kurtkoti, which he edited & translated)