May 24, 2025
LITERATURE NEEDS TO justify its existence from time to time. This is my strong belief, and for years I went in search of some proof of life
Mushtaq emerged as part of the Bandaya Sahitya movement in the 1970s, which allowed a small number of Dalit writers to change the Kannada literary landscape by introducing protest writing into an otherwise buttoned-up literature. Mushtaq was radical not just in what she wrote about – often working-class, Muslim women and their conservative partners – but also in how she wrote it. Hers was a direct, confrontational writing, rather than one reliant on allegory and myth, in a rejection of the otherwise Sanskritised literary forms then predominant in Kannada.
