Book Excerpts: Translator Deepa Bhasthi on Banu Mushtaq, this year’s International Booker Prize-winning Kannada author

Banu Mushtaq’s entire career, be it as a writer or as a journalist, lawyer and activist, can be summed up in one Kannada word — bandaya. Bandaya means dissent, rebellion, protest, resistance to authority, revolution and its adjacent ideas; combine it with sahitya, meaning literature, and we get the name of a short-lived but highly influential literary movement in the Kannada language in the 1970s and ’80s. Bandaya Sahitya started as an act of protest against the hegemony of upper caste and mostly male-led writing that was then being published and celebrated. The movement urged women, Dalits and other social and religious minorities to tell stories from within their own lived experiences and in the Kannada they spoke. Of the many Kannadas that exist, theirs was dismissed as folksy, in contrast to the ‘prestige dialect’ from the Mysuru region that remains most used in popular culture.

Banu grew up in a progressive family and was educated in Kannada and not, as was common for Muslims then, in Urdu. She came of age during the decades when the personal-is-political emerged as a major theme in intellectual thought. Writing during and in the aftermath of the Bandaya movement, her works consciously moved away from what she calls the boy-meets-girl tropes of romantic fiction, and instead sought out narratives that critiqued patriarchy and its hypocritical traditions and practices. While there were several women who were inspired by the literary and political landscape of the ’80s, Banu remains one of the few who have continued to write regularly in the ensuing decades…

When I began to work with Banu’s stories, I grappled with what this project would be: a lapsed Hindu and an upper-caste person translating a minority voice into our shared alien language. It would be a disservice to reduce Banu’s work to her religious identity, for her stories transcend the confines of a faith and its cultural traditions. Nonetheless, in today’s India, where a decade of far-right politics has descended dangerously into Hindutva-led majoritarianism, hatred and severe persecution of minorities — iterations of such violence are found in many other countries of the world too, lest we forget — it is essential to note the milieu that she lives in and works out of. While of course a translator need not be from the same background as the writer, it still felt important to me to acknowledge our differences, our respective positions and privileges, and use this awareness to be more responsible and sensitive in my translation.

That said, I choose to attribute my gustakhi, my imprudence, to translate Banu to something she once said to me. She said that she does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community, that women everywhere face similar, if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues that she writes about. This sisterhood to which those of us who identify as women belong is the cushion I place my translation on. The coping mechanisms we devise, the solutions we find and the adjustments we make around men are survival strategies nurtured across generations. The particulars may be different, but at the core is a resistance to being controlled, ‘tamed’, or disallowed the exploration of our full potential. These experiences, both Banu and I believe, can be found anywhere in the world. Some of us step on the cindering balls of coal and carve a space for ourselves. Some of us learn to exist too close to the fire. None of us are left unscarred.

— Excerpted from ‘Heart Lamp’ with permission from Penguin Random House

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