ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

The Politics of Everyday Survival: Domestic Labour, CARE Work and Female Resistance in Banu Mushtaq’S Heart Lamp

Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada into English by Deepa Bhasthi, foregrounds the everyday lives of Muslim women whose experiences have largely remained absent from mainstream Indian literary discourse. Rather than portraying resistance through overt rebellion or organised political movements, Mushtaq locates female agency within domestic labour, caregiving, emotional resilience and ethical decision-making. This article argues that Heart Lamp redefines resistance as an everyday practice embedded in the ordinary routines of women's lives. Drawing upon Barbara Harlow's theory of Resistance Literature, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's concept of the subaltern, Silvia Federici's analysis of reproductive labour and James C. Scott's theory of everyday resistance, the study examines three representative stories—"Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal," "Heart Lamp," and "Black Cobras." Through these narratives, Mushtaq exposes the invisibility of women's domestic labour, critiques patriarchal interpretations of religion and family and reveals how care itself becomes a political act. Her female characters resist oppression not by abandoning their social roles but by transforming caregiving, moral courage, truthful speech and everyday survival into forms of resistance. The article demonstrates that Mushtaq's fiction expands conventional understandings of feminist resistance by showing that ordinary domestic spaces are also sites of political struggle. Ultimately, Heart Lamp presents women's everyday survival as a powerful assertion of dignity, justice and agency within unequal social structures.