Class and Gender Intersections in Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp

Abstract

This paper aims to study the multiple shades of victimization that suppress women and the lowly in Banu Mushtaq’s collection of short stories titled Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. Written between 1990 and 2023, the stories in this Booker Prize winning collection showcase the lives of women from Muslim communities in Southern rural India. Selected stories from this collection are put to study based on intersectional theory and Marxist-feminist frameworks in order to decipher the conservative notions that often hold back families and societies from providing women equal opportunities for growth and progress, even in the beginning phases of the twenty-first century. These stories are slices of life, many of which do not show heroic acts of resistance from the part of the disadvantaged, but rather portray sheer reality that invokes subtle terror in readers. Addressing a range of issues like poverty, early marriage, maternal mortality, abandonment and denial of property rights, reproductive rights as well as education, these stories vocalise the use and misuse of authoritarian laws to suit the needs of those they favour. In a class society that is rigidly patriarchal, women and the poor experience systemic oppression wherein they are rendered voiceless and cannot make decisions for themselves even in basic matters of rights and justice. This systemic oppression is intersectional, as it involves multiple dimensions of social power like gender and class. By rawly portraying the woe and frustration that women face in such closed spaces, these stories make an impact for change. Through an intersectional analysis of selected stories, this paper seeks to bring to light the different faces of oppression that women are subject to in rural localities where fundamentalist principles are often prioritised over ethical concerns.