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Banu Mushtaq is a lawyer, a writer, and a social activist from Karnataka. She is an active member of the Bandaya Sahitya Movement in Karnataka in the 1970s and 1980s. Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp won the International Booker Prize in 2025. The book tells the stories of different women from Muslim communities in South India. The twelve stories capture the condition of Muslim women of Karnataka, where men are supposed to have the rights of ownership over wives and daughters. The themes of these stories relate to women’s rights to education, equality, and reproductive rights, as well as restrictions on women in the name of religion. Her characters in the stories of Heart Lamp are Muslim, yet their experiences are universal and recognised by women from different backgrounds. The present article analyses patriarchal society that subjugates women as portrayed in a few selected short stories by Banu Mushtaq.
Dr. Begum Farida Alam. “Heart Lamp: A Study on the Subjugation of (Muslim) Women.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 698-709. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.42.
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