A Tale of Two Perspectives: Banu Mushtaq Sees Life From Gallis of Hyderabad; Arundhati Roy Writes From a Privileged Altitude

In the crowded field of Indian English writing about the marginalized, two recent voices stand apart for opposite reasons. Banu Mushtaq’s “Heart Lamp,” a debut collection of twelve short stories translated from Kannada, won the International Booker Prize in May 2025—the first for any Kannada title and the first ever for a short-story collection.

Arundhati Roy, two decades earlier, took the Booker Prize for “The God of Small Things” and has since positioned herself as the global conscience of India’s oppressed. Mushtaq writes from inside a Muslim lane in Hyderabad; Roy writes from international platforms about lives she observes from above. The central difference is honesty: Mushtaq names the belt that lands on a child-bride’s back; Roy names only the threats that come from outside the home.

The stories in “Heart Lamp” unfold in the narrow gallis of Hyderabad and the smaller towns of Telangana and Karnataka. The language is plain, the kind you hear over chipped cups of sulai chai. There are no lectures, no flourishes. Just women counting the cost of survival.

In “The Price of Salt,” 14-year-old Sameena is traded to a 40-year-old shopkeeper to clear her father’s debt. On the wedding night he rips her new frock, pins her wrists, and hisses that tears will only disgrace her parents. She learns fast: too much salt in the mutton curry brings a slap. She hides the bruises under long sleeves and tells her mother the marks come from water buckets. Every morning she pockets the coins he leaves on the table. She saves enough for a bus ticket. She never boards the bus. She pays a neighbor boy to teach her to read the shop ledgers instead.

“Black Thread” gives us Razia, locked inside whenever her husband leaves for work. He checks the padlock from the street and times her mosque visits with a cheap watch. One day he spots a black taweez thread around her ankle. He whips her with his leather belt until the thread snaps and her skin turns purple. That night she stitches the pieces together and knots it tighter. When her son asks about the welts, she blames the charpoy. The charm changes nothing. Retrying it is her only rebellion.

Roy’s fiction turns Kashmiri militants into poets of resistance while ignoring their honor killings and forced veiling.

In “The Sound of the Azan,” 16-year-old Farheen is pulled from school the day her period arrives. Her uncle says educated girls invite ruin; her father marries her to a cousin who already has a wife. The cousin visits once a week, takes what he wants, and leaves before fajr. Farheen miscarries twice, burying blood-soaked rags behind the latrine. She starts timing the muezzin’s call. The instant the azan ends, she knows her husband has turned the corner. In those five minutes of silence she writes her name on the wall with stolen charcoal. Rain erases it. She writes it again.

Mushtaq refuses to soften the blows. The husband who beats his child-bride is not a victim of poverty or tradition; he is a man who beats his child-bride. Purdah is not debated—it is the locked door, the timed prayer, the cousin’s weekly claim. Patriarchy is the weight of a belt, the sting of a slap, the miscarriage no one names.

This unflinching clarity earned the Booker. Chair of judges Max Porter called the book “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories” that deliver “astonishing portraits of survival and resilience.” He praised the “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” style that turns daily speech into quiet thunder.

The same instinct for candor over victimhood links Mushtaq to Ismat Chughtai. In “Lihaaf,” a little girl stays with her aunt, a begum married to a nawab who prefers boys. The begum shares her bed with a masseuse named Rabbu. At night the quilt heaves and twists into odd shapes. The child watches shadows on the wall, hears muffled laughs and gasps, feels the bed shake. When the begum scratches an itch high on her own thigh, the child sees everything and stays silent. The story ends with the quilt still moving. Published in 1941, it landed Chughtai in court on obscenity charges. She traveled to Lahore, defended the work herself, and won. She never asked for pity for Muslim women; she showed them desiring, scheming, surviving.

Another Altitude

Arundhati Roy arrives from another altitude. Born to a Syrian Christian family of means, educated in English boarding schools, enriched by her own Booker windfall and global speaking fees, she claims to speak for Muslims and Dalits she has never shared a meal with. In her 2014 essay “The Doctor and the Saint,” she spends pages on Gandhi’s early racism in South Africa. He wrote letters calling African jailmates “kaffirs” and asked for separate cells so Indians would not mix with them. Roy quotes every line. She calls him a caste apologist who slowed the fight against untouchability. 

Fair enough. 

But when she turns to Ambedkar, she skips the parts that do not fit. In “Pakistan or the Partition of India,” Ambedkar wrote that Islam’s brotherhood is only for Muslims. A Hindu can never be equal in a Muslim state. He said purdah keeps women in “civil death” and that Muslim society carries caste in the form of Ashraf and Ajlaf. Roy never prints those sentences. She needs Ambedkar as a pure weapon against Hindu evil. The rest must stay buried.

Her fiction turns Kashmiri militants into poets of resistance while ignoring their honor killings and forced veiling. Her essays paint Hindu nationalism in apocalyptic colors yet stay silent on the uncle who sells a niece, the husband who checks the lock, the cousin who leaves before dawn. To name those crimes would risk arming the right. So Muslim women remain noble victims of external forces, their internal chains politely ignored.

Mushtaq lives inside those chains. She names the bruise, the belt, the blood-soaked rag. She offers no manifesto, no distant savior. Just a girl writing her name on a wall that rain will erase, and writing it again. That is the honesty Roy’s altitude cannot reach.

“Heart Lamp” does not solve anything. It lights a small flame in each room and asks you to look at what is already there. Somewhere in a locked house, a woman is retying a broken thread or tracing her name in charcoal. She does not need a microphone from abroad. She needs the world to stop pretending her pain begins and ends at the border of her faith. The Muslim world deserves honest interlocutors, not patronizing activists who trade her full truth for the cheap coin of moral superiority.

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Vikram Zutshi is an American journalist and filmmaker specializing in religion, art, history, politics and culture.