‘No story is ever small’: Banu Mushtaq's Booker win spotlights the quiet power of Indian literature

Until Tuesday, very few people outside the Kannada-phonic world were familiar with Banu Mushtaq's writings. Even after its publication last month, Heart Lamp - the collection of short stories written between 1990 and 2023, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi - she was a veritable unknown in her own country outside Karnataka.

With Heart Lamp becoming the first short story collection to win the International Booker Prize this week, that near-anonymity ends. It underlines the expanding power of translation in making quality literature accessible to a wider readership.

The win also highlights another aspect in woeful short supply in India, a country brimming with literary wealth: branded platforms to recognise and evangelise sterling works of contemporary literature like Mushtaq's.


Over the last few decades, translation - especially into English, but also from a non-English Indian language to another - has gathered steam, making writers available for wider Indian and global readerships.

Much of how we value things hinges on curation. Anglo-American writers dominate the literary landscape because the ecosystem there - publishing houses, reviews, retailers, prizes, readers - invest in promoting, supplying literary works to a minority, but sustainable critical mass, of readers.

That's why even readers of literary writings in India are more likely to know about a debut author from Omaha than a legend from Odisha.

India needs more platforms - high-calibre, non-sarkari institutions with unabashed critical heft and cultural ambition. Not just rah-rah-ing each time an Indian wins an international award, or asking, 'But does the aam aadmi care?' As Mushtaq put it in her acceptance speech: 'No story is ever small.' What we do with it determines whether we understand its value, or not.