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Time of India
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
‘Edeya Hanate' set for stage adaptation
Shivamogga: 'Edeya Hanate' (Heart Lamp), a story by Hassan-based writer Banu Mushtaq, which is part of the story collection that won the International Booker Prize, will soon be performed on stage. Satya Shodhana Ranga Samudaya, Heggodu, will present this play, and Janamanadaata Repertory troupe artistes will perform. According to M Ganesha Heggodu, principal of the Ninasam Theatre Institute, Heggodu in Shivamogga, who is directing the play, this is the second story of Banu Mushtaq brought to the stage. "In 2019, 'Hrudayada Tirpu' was brought to the stage," he explained. Salma Dandin, an old student of the National School of Drama, Delhi, will play the lead role of Mehrun along with conceptualising the play. This 55-minute play with seven characters will be performed first on July 5 at NINASAM, Heggodu. It will be performed at Kiru Rangamandira in Mysuru on July 19. "In Hassan, the play will be performed on July 12. Our idea is to perform this play in all the taluks of Hassan district as it is the home district of Banu," he said. The artistes and the team will rehearse the play for a month's time before presenting it on the stage. "The audience will get the feel of reading the story while watching the play. It will be like a poem," Ganesha said. "The story will be adapted in its originality to the stage," he added. "Janamanadaata Repertory troupe has been performing plays since 2005. 'Mayamruga' of Poornachandra Tejaswi will be the other play that will be presented by the troupe this year," he said.
The Hindu
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Literature Across Borders
Published in the wake of the International Booker Prize win for Heart Lamp by Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi, this special digital edition from The Hindu explores how Indian literature travels across languages—and what gets transformed along the way. In a country where language is identity, culture, and memory, translation is not just a literary act; it is a bridge. This collection brings together some of the most insightful voices in the field: writers, translators, publishers, and scholars reflecting on the art, politics, and emotion behind Indian writing in English translation. What's Inside Explore 11 essays and interviews that decode the invisible yet powerful force of translation in Indian literature: · Lost and found in translation By Urvashi Butalia · Discovering the world of Kannada in English By N.S. Gundur · I made it a point to translate with an accent Interview with Deepa Bhasthi by Preeti Zachariah · How Perumal Murugan broke the glass ceiling By Kannan Sundaram · Cross-cultural currents and literary inventions in Malayalam literature By Navamy Sudhish · From 'anuvad' or translation to 'samvad' and dialogue By Anuj Kumar · Two-way bridge: The Journey of Marathi literature By Prathmesh Kher · Stories from unheard corners of the Northeast By Sudipta Datta · The art of assembling a glossary By Mini Krishnan · Catching the nuances of original texts By Ramya Kannan · The anxieties of the Indian translator By Arunava Sinha Each chapter offers a unique perspective, revealing how translation shapes what we read, how we understand it, and who gets heard. Literature Across Borders is available free for all digital subscribers of The Hindu Group. Non-subscribers can also purchase the e-book on Amazon To download a sample of the e-book : To buy the e-book from Amazon: To download the PDF version for the book, subscribe here:
Free Malaysia Today
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Free Malaysia Today
Petals and thorns: India's Booker prize author Banu Mushtaq
Indian author Banu Mushtaq won the coveted literature prize for her collection of 12 short stories titled 'Heart Lamp'. (AFP pic) HASSAN : All writers draw on their experience, whether consciously or not, says Indian author Banu Mushtaq – including the titular tale of attempted self-immolation in her International Booker Prize-winning short story collection. Mushtaq, who won the coveted literature prize as the first author writing in Kannada – an Indian regional language – said the author's responsibility is to reflect the truth. 'You cannot simply write describing a rose,' said the 77-year-old, who is also a lawyer and activist. 'You cannot say it has got such a fragrance, such petals, such colour. You have to write about the thorns also. It is your responsibility, and you have to do it.' Her book 'Heart Lamp', a collection of 12 powerful short stories, is also her first book translated into English, with the prize shared with her translator Deepa Bhasthi. Critics praised the collection for its dry and gentle humour, and its searing commentary on the patriarchy, caste and religion. Mushtaq has carved an alternative path in life, challenging societal restrictions and perceptions. As a young girl worried about her future, she said she started writing to improve her 'chances of marriage'. Born into a Muslim family in 1948, she studied in Kannada, which is spoken mostly in India's southern Karnataka state by around 43 million people, rather than Urdu, the language of Islamic texts in India and which most Muslim girls learnt. She attended college, and worked as a journalist and also as a high school teacher. 'Confused' But after marrying for love, Mushtaq found her life constricted. 'I was not allowed to have any intellectual activities. I was not allowed to write,' she said. 'I was in that vacuum. That harmed me.' She recounted how as a young mother aged around 27 with possible postpartum depression, and ground down by domestic life, had doused petrol on herself and on the 'spur of a moment' readied to set herself on fire. Her husband rushed to her with their three-month-old daughter. 'He took the baby and put her on my feet, and he drew my attention to her and he hugged me, and he stopped me,' Mushtaq told AFP. The experience is nearly mirrored in her book – in its case, the protagonist is stopped by her daughter. 'People get confused that it might be my life,' the writer said. Explaining that while not her exact story, 'consciously or subconsciously, something of the author, it reflects in her or his writing'. Books line the walls in Mushtaq's home, in the small southern Indian town of Hassan. Her many awards and certificates – including a replica of the Booker prize she won in London in May – are also on display. She joked that she was born to write – at least that is what a Hindu astrological birth chart said about her future. 'I don't know how it was there, but I have seen the birth chart,' Mushtaq said with a laugh, speaking in English. The award has changed her life 'in a positive way', she added, while noting the fame has been a little overwhelming. 'I am not against the people, I love people,' she said referring to the stream of visitors she gets to her home. 'But with this, a lot of prominence is given to me, and I don't have any time for writing. I feel something odd… Writing gives me a lot of pleasure, a lot of relief.' 'Patriarchy everywhere' Mushtaq's body of work spans six short story collections, an essay collection and poetry. The stories in 'Heart Lamp' were chosen from the six short story collections, dating back to 1990. The Booker jury hailed her characters – from spirited grandmothers to bumbling religious clerics – as 'astonishing portraits of survival and resilience'. The stories portray Muslim women going through terrible experiences, including domestic violence, the death of children and extramarital affairs. Mushtaq said that while the main characters in her books are all Muslim women, the issues are universal. 'They (women) suffer this type of suppression and this type of exploitation, this type of patriarchy everywhere,' she said. 'A woman is a woman, all over the world.' While accepting that even the people for whom she writes may not like her work, Mushtaq said she remained dedicated to providing wider truths. 'I have to say what is necessary for the society,' she said. 'The writer is always pro-people… With the people, and for the people.'
Daily Maverick
10-06-2025
- Daily Maverick
Small Boat — a devastating novel about a migrant shipwreck and the cruelty of indifference
The deadly results of detached officialdom are made painfully clear in this harrowing novel. There's a particular kind of story that's rarely executed well – one without heroes, without lessons, without even the cold comfort of a villain you can confidently point at and say: there, that's the evil. Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat – a slim, bruising novel translated from its original French with quiet precision by Helen Stevenson – is that kind of story. Small Boat, which was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 people in the English Channel on 24 November 2021. They were crowded into an inflatable dinghy in the dark, reaching out over crackling radio lines, asking – in French, in English, in Kurdish – for help. They didn't get it. What is known and not imagined in Delecroix's pages is that both the French and British coastguards received their calls. And both hesitated, passing responsibility back and forth like a poisoned parcel. People died while operators discussed jurisdiction. The Cranston Inquiry, established to examine the failures of that night, is continuing, its transcripts and testimonies peeling back the layers of bureaucratic neglect. Delecroix doesn't give us the migrants' stories directly. He focuses instead on a fictional French coastguard operator, a woman who spent that night on the radio doing (or not doing) what her training, her weariness, her own justifications allowed. In the aftermath, she is questioned – not in a court, but in a room filled with mirrors. She faces a policewoman who looks like her, thinks like her, speaks with her same clipped, professional cadence. She listens back to recordings of her own voice on the rescue line, promising help that would not come, offering assurances she did not believe. She is left to reckon with the unbearable fact that someone, somewhere (was it her?) spoke the words: 'You will not be saved.' She isn't especially monstrous. She's tired. She's professional. She has a young daughter at home and an ex-partner who sneers at her work. She runs on the beach to decompress. In one of the novel's most arresting turns, she compares herself to a mass-produced tin opener: efficient, functional, affectless. Delecroix draws her with enough delicacy that we cannot quite hate her. And that, of course, is far more unsettling. Reading Small Boat, I thought – as one inevitably does – of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. Not evil as grand spectacle or ideology, but as administration, the quiet conviction that one is simply fulfilling a role. Arendt coined the phrase watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief Nazi organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann organised the trains but claimed never to have hated the passengers. What Arendt saw was not a monster but a functionary – and that, of course, was the point. I thought, too, about my own work as an anthropologist researching forced displacement across Ireland, Turkey and Australia. I've sat with people whose lives are shaped not by violence in its cinematic form, but by violence as policy: the hotel room without a kitchen, the letter that never arrives, the bed that's taken away with no warning. I've heard a senior Irish official describe the state's provision of housing and support for asylum seekers as 'sufficient'. Meanwhile, people, stateless and waiting, are asked to prove their vulnerability again and again until even their grief is suspect. Institutional indifference The institutionalisation of indifference: that's the real story here. The smugness of protocols. The liturgy of duty rosters and shift reports. It wasn't evil that let those people drown in the Channel – it was ordinary people in warm offices citing rules, filling forms, following scripts. We can see the birth of such indifference in policies like the UK's abandoned Rwanda plan, which casually proposed outsourcing asylum itself, as if refuge were a commodity. Delecroix's brilliance lies in showing how violence at the border is carried out not by villains, but by workers. By women with mortgages, men on night shifts, people who've learnt to sort calls for help by urgency, credibility, accent. 'Sorting,' the narrator explains, 'is perhaps the most important part of the job.' Not all distress calls are equal. And the assumption – always lurking, never spoken – is that some lives are more likely to be saved. At one point, the narrator's colleague, Julien, answers calls from migrants by quoting Pascal: 'Vous êtes embarqués.' You are already embarked. A fatalist shrug disguised as wisdom. As if to say: you should have thought of all this before you left. The shrug does the work of a policy, the quotation the work of a wall. And yet, the narrator cannot fully perform indifference. She is haunted by the sea. She remembers loving it as a child. Now, it terrifies her. She feels it watching her, pursuing her, wanting to surge past the shore and swallow the continent whole. She runs along the beach to quiet her mind – a run that is almost the same length as the journey those on the dinghy tried to make. If Small Boat has a flaw, it's that it sometimes flirts with making guilt into its own form of lyricism. But this too may be deliberate. It is easier, perhaps, to feel sorry than to feel implicated. And far easier to narrate moral confusion than to prevent its causes. What Delecroix has written is not a redemption story. It's not a psychological thriller. It is a chamber piece for one voice and many ghosts. There are no grand gestures here, just small refusals, small failures. And the small, flickering boats of each human life, drifting towards – or away from – one another in the dark. In a world ever more brutal towards those who flee war, hunger and despair, Delecroix's novel is a necessary and merciless indictment. It reminds us that the shipwreck is not theirs alone. It is ours too. DM First published by The Conversation. Fiona Murphy is an assistant professor in refugee and intercultural studies at Dublin City University in Ireland. This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
The Hindu
09-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq feted in Shivamogga
Leaders of various progressive organisations, activists, elected representatives and officers of Hassan joined hands together here on Monday to felicitate writer and advocate Banu Mushtaq, who recently won the International Booker Prize for her collection of stories, translated into English, Heart Lamp. Baragur Ramachandrappa said the International Booker Prize was an honour to the Kannada's intellect. 'Ms. Mushtaq wrote stories in Kannada, and Deepa Bhasthi translated them into English. Both writers deserve appreciation,' he said. The district enjoys the distinction of contributing the first Kannada inscription found at Halmidi village in Belur taluk and the first International Booker Prize for Kannada. 'Ms. Musthaq wrote stories that she picked from the world around her. The prize she won is recognition of her involvement in struggles for the emancipation of the working class, women, Dalits, and all downtrodden sections. She has been actively involved in the Bandaya movement in the State', he said. Ms. Musthaq said that India is known for diversity, and it was the duty of every individual to uphold this (diversity). 'Literature is one of the forces that celebrates diversity and, with that, it keeps the country united,' she said. The prize, she said, was not only for her contribution to literature. 'I have participated in the protests and struggles for social justice and equality. My writing is not separated from my these activities. I consider this prize as a recognition of all such activities,' Ms. Mushtaq said. H.S. Anupama, writer, spoke about the contributions of Ms. Mushtaq. Lok Sabha member Shreyas M. Patel, MLA Swaroop Prakash, Deputy Commissioner C. Sathyabhama, Superintendent of Police Mohammed Sujeetha, Dharmesh of CPM, Kannada Sahitya Parishat district president H.L. Mallesh Gowda, and others were present. Earlier, the writer was taken to the programme venue at Hasanamba Kalakshetra in a procession from the Deputy Commissioner's office.
