Her experiences are sure to take readers on a deep, meditative journey into the intersections of language, identity, politics, and belonging.
Published Apr 17, 2025 | 6:49 PM ⚊ Updated Apr 17, 2025 | 6:49 PM
Deepa Bhasthi. (Supplied)
Synopsis: Deepa Bhasthi’s Heart Lamp, the English translation of Banu Mushtaq’s short stories, has made history after it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Her experiences are sure to take readers on a deep, meditative journey into the intersections of language, identity, politics, and belonging.
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer, translator, and researcher whose body of work traverses essays, literary criticism, political commentary, and translation. Her sharp intellect and prose have earned her a distinctive place in the Indian literary landscape — both in English and Kannada.
Her most recent work, Heart Lamp, is the English translation of Banu Mushtaq’s bold and emotionally charged short stories, originally written in Kannada. The book has made history after it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 — the first-ever Kannada translation to achieve the feat. It marks a watershed moment not only for Bhasthi but also for Kannada literature’s visibility on the global stage.
In this conversation, Deepa reflects on the many threads that weave her literary life together: Her quiet childhood in Kodagu, the shaping power of Kannada, the inherited rhythm of storytelling from her grandmother, and the politics and poetics of translating a voice like Banu Mushtaq’s — deeply rooted in community, religion, gender, and resistance.
She speaks with rare honesty about the joys and dilemmas of translation, the need to decolonise our reading habits, the pressures of writing in English, and the emotional and ethical labour involved in carrying a story across linguistic and cultural borders.
What emerges is a portrait of a writer who is as introspective as she is incisive — committed not only to the act of writing but to what it means to listen, feel, and translate with care.
Her experiences are sure to take readers on a deep, meditative journey into the intersections of language, identity, politics, and belonging.
Q: Can you tell us about your earliest memory of language — not just as a tool, but as something that stirred emotion or meaning? Was it in Kannada? Was it a story, a poem, a moment?
A. What a lovely question this is! I am sure someone must have sung songs for me as a baby, but I don’t remember those. My paternal grandmother lived with us, and she raised me on stories. She is my first memory of language, because I remember the world she opened up for me. She was an extraordinary storyteller, and her body, her expressions and her face would become the character she was narrating. I was mesmerised and have spent my writing years trying to recreate the sense of awe in readers that she created for me in her storytelling.
Another vivid memory is of the language of the jackals. Next to the house I grew up in is Stuart Hill, or Stone Hill in local parlance. Wild jackals roamed the hills and come night, they would start howling. As a child I believed I knew what they were telling each other, even though I did not have an understanding back then that theirs too was a language.
There have been no jackals on the hill now for some decades, but even today, I can recall what they sounded like. Over the years, I’ve come to realise that language can flow under one’s skin like this.
Q. You’ve often spoken about the rich cultural backdrop of Kodagu. How did growing up there influence your relationship with Kannada and your literary instincts?
A. I strongly believe that place influences the way we think and feel, just as much as the language(s) we live in influence how we name the world. The Kodagu I grew up in was very, very quiet and isolated, especially in the monsoon. I was raised on a coffee plantation on the edge of Madikeri town, and our house would turn into something of an island when it rained.
I remember rains that never stopped for a fortnight, there would be no electricity for weeks, and the nights were impenetrably dark, like the Malenadu nights in Kuvempu’s stories. Since I am also an only child, I had plenty of time and space to hone a riotous imagination growing up.
The steady quietness of the mountains, the dense forests and the relentless weather, the sheer elemental forces at play here every day, these, I hope, have inspired the sense of wonder I seek to carry in my writing.
Q. Was literature an active part of your home life? Were your parents or anyone around you nurturing your curiosity in books or writing as a child?
A. Yes, literature was a very big part of home. Everyone around me read; my mother and grandmother were always reading, mostly fiction, and my father usually all kinds of magazines and the newspaper. Aunts and cousins, when they visited, always came with their holiday reading packed.
I inherited a vast library from my grandfather who passed away a few months before I was born. Of course, there were no children’s books in his collection. I would finish reading whatever age-appropriate books I could find very quickly.
In the absence of a bookstore in town – we still don’t have one in Madikeri – I picked up my grandfather’s Tolstoys and Pushkins and Dostoyevskys way earlier than I probably should have!
Q. You’ve worked extensively with Kannada literature—as a writer, reader, and translator. What do you think is the most underappreciated aspect of Kannada as a literary language today?
A. Perhaps the way it can, and should be kneaded and bent and shaped to one’s purpose? Maybe this is not restricted just to Kannada but I think there is so little experimenting that happens with language (versus the story) in literary fiction these days.
Somewhere along the way, it is as if we all suddenly became scared to bend the rules. I would love to read works that experiment with the language, that push the boundaries of what language can do. Kannada is, without question, vibrant enough to allow for such adventures.
Q. In one of your interviews, you mentioned that Kannada doesn’t need to be “globalised.” Could you elaborate on what it means to respect a language without needing to constantly translate or market it?
A. I often think of the Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène famous rejection of Western centricity in his statement, ‘Europe is not my centre.’ He viewed Europe as being on the outskirts of Africa, saying that he did not quite care if his films were understood by the western world or not because it was not to grab their attention that he made art.
Kannada is rich enough and has a long enough lineage that it does not need validation from elsewhere to be considered great. It does not become respectable only when it gets translated or marketed outside Karnataka or India. However, that said, every language lends to and borrows from the cultures it comes in contact with; that is how it grows and changes and breathes on.
Translation from Kannada creates new readers for the language, while translation inwards expands Kannada’s world view. When we go global, it is not as much about chasing validation as it is an act of going forth with the confidence, pride and knowledge of what our linguistic culture is capable of.
Q. Have you ever written something in English and felt it would’ve been more authentic or powerful in Kannada — or vice versa? How do you choose which language to write in?
A. I wish I had the luxury of making this choice every day. But the embarrassing truth is that my control over English is far stronger than my ability to express without inhibitions in Kannada. I used to wholly blame English medium education that pushes one away from the comfort of the mother tongue. But I realise that is but a lazy excuse, and I just should have tried harder to retain my proficiency in Kannada as well.
Thankfully, the practice of translation has helped immensely in taking me closer to my first language; it is a kind of coming back home. Perhaps in a few years from now I’ll be able to answer this question very differently.
Q. You’ve worn many hats — journalist, researcher, translator, essayist. What does each role offer you that the others don’t? Do you compartmentalise them, or do they bleed into each other?
A. As a journalist, there is a certain way one writes a report that is often non-negotiable. I do straight-forward reporting very, very rarely now. As for the other forms, there are, of course, some technical differences that must be kept in mind, but the creative process in my head is the same. Every kind of writing is a practice in storytelling as effectively as one can, after all.
Q. Was there a particular moment or project when you realised, “Yes, I want to take writing seriously, as a life’s work”?
A. No doubt, growing up listening to my grandmother tell stories must have sparked the sense of wanting to do the same. I have always been writing for as long as I can remember. My Kannada teacher in school, who also edited the school magazine, used to tell me to write a poem if they were short of material and needed to fill up the page at the very last minute.
So, I used to write (really bad) poetry for many years. I remember reading a short story of mine on the local Akashvani station and getting a letter from a bedridden man whose only source of entertainment back then was the radio, telling me how much he was moved by the story. I think I have always been aware of how powerful art and literature can be.
Q. As someone who’s seen both deadlines and deep-dive essays — how do you approach writing as a discipline? Is it ritualistic, spontaneous, or something else entirely?
A. When I was younger, I was always looking for rituals to try, how the desk should look just right, the perfect notebook and anything else that might favour a visit from the elusive muse. But what works for me, I discovered a few years ago, is to treat it as an office job.
On weekdays, I am in my studio at 10 am, whether I am chasing a deadline or not. A long break for lunch, another brief time away to walk our dogs and have coffee, thereafter I’m working till 6 pm. The after-hours, which I am very protective about, are for reading for pleasure and such other things. It has taken almost twenty years of trying, but I’ve taught spontaneity to come only during my studio hours now!
Q. Translating a powerful voice like Banu Mushtaq’s must’ve come with its own set of challenges. What was your biggest fear — or responsibility — while bringing her work into English?
A. Firstly, though it was Banu who called and asked if I was interested in translating her stories, it was my decision to take up the project after reading her work. So I chose to work with her, and it was not the other way around like some recent media interviews seem to imply.
Banu writes a polyglossic Kannada which is interesting to work with because existing in multiple linguistic cultures at the same time and in the same space is a very familiar practice for many of us, especially in semi-urban and urban South India. What I was particularly careful about were the religious and cultural contexts that her stories are set in – they are very different from mine.
In the times we live in, these social contexts are especially open to misinterpretation, and their scrutiny is not equally applied to the many other patriarchal systems we experience in the country.
What works for me is a complete immersion in the culture of what I am translating, so I was listening to a lot of Urdu and Sufi music, ghazals, watching (very addictive) TV dramas from across the border, reading authors whose works are set in similar settings and so on.
I find that all this pierces apart layers in the source text and language that I might otherwise not be able to access. Plus, it was great fun to discover new cultural favourites by way of such research!
Q. Do you feel that certain emotions or political statements lose their sharpness when moved from Kannada to English? How do you preserve that edge?
A. (Thinks.) To me, this extends to the ‘lost in translation’ principle, which I find rather problematic. The short answer, yes, the translation will never, ever read exactly like the source work. But I think it is the wrong way to think about why we translate in the first place.
No language is exactly like the other, certainly not Kannada, in this case, and English which are part of two very different language families. That said, I firmly believe that we as readers and the target language in question both gain a lot more by reading a good translation without needing to care too much about the minor idiosyncrasies in language that cannot be carried into English.
If I do my job well as a translator, I will not need to reach for italics and footnotes to explain what a Kannada word that I’ve retained means. And that delicate balance between what word to transliterate and what to translate is what can make the final work a pleasure to read.
Q. There’s a new wave of readers discovering translated Indian fiction — but often through a Western lens like the Booker. How do you feel about Kannada literature being filtered through such platforms?
A. It is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? But then, there are so many books coming out every month these days that it is impossible for anyone to keep up with what is happening in translated literature. I wish there were better ways for readers to discover new books that were not dependent on algorithms. But in the imperfect world we live in, I suppose attention from platforms like the International Booker Prize is very welcome. I only hope that it inspires at least some readers to explore more titles that are translated from Kannada and other lesser-represented Indian languages.
Q. What’s your take on the ecosystem for Kannada writers today — are there enough platforms, support systems, or are we still relying too much on English validation?
A. I always talk about having to decolonise our reading habits. So many readers still prefer reading Anglophone authors, and if they do read translations, it is something from Europe or Latin America. Of course, I don’t mean to say we should not be reading such books; they are all essential reading for me, too. But I wish more people in India would also turn to literature from the South Asian region.
I’ve heard many dismiss familiar literature as, well, too familiar, too like our own personal stories. Relatability in the books we read is underrated.
As for what Kannada writers feel about the avenues available to them, I am not sure I am the right person to answer it because my engagement with the Kannada literary world is primarily as a reader, not as a writer in the language.
Q. For younger writers and translators who are passionate about regional languages but feel pressured to operate in English — what would you say to them from your own experience?
Never stop reading in your language! Even if it is one book for every five you read in English, even if it is just the newspaper, keep in touch with the language of your home and heart every day.
Looking ahead, is there a literary dream you’re quietly nurturing — perhaps a form, genre, or collaboration you haven’t explored yet?
I am in the process of getting translation rights for a work by one of my dream authors, so I cannot reveal more at this stage. That apart, I have been working on my own fiction for a while, and hopefully, a book will come to fruition soon.
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
