Salman Rushdie
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Victory City/ 2023
An overview
Aditya Mani Jha, February 11, 2023: The Times of India
Salman Rushdie’s 15th novel Victory City begins with a 56-word sentence — one that foreshadows the novel’s major themes with the flair and the sheer linguistic energy we have come to associate with the master. Like the opening line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad…”), here too we are flung headfirst into a character’s final moments. “On the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty-seven years old, the blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga and buried it in a clay pot sealed with wax in the heart of the ruined Royal Enclosure, as a message to the future.” A sorcerer-poet, Pampa Kampana chronicles the rise and fall of the empire she midwives into existence, the Vijayanagar (literally, the ‘victory city’ of the title) kingdom. An unnamed narrator who is neither “a scholar nor a poet but a mere spinner of yarns” (presumably Rushdie himself) has retold Kampana’s epic poem, called the ‘Jayaparajaya’ (literally, ‘victory and defeat’), for a modern-day audience. 'Victory City' sees Salman Rushdie returning to his roots as a humourist, whose great subjects remain religious intolerance, censorship amd the costs of uprooting oneself and starting from scratch in a foreign land This is the central conceit upon which Rushdie mounts his grand fable, written in the magical realist style of his youth. Victory City sees Rushdie returning to his roots as a humourist first and foremost — a historian-comedian-fabulist, whose great subjects remain religious intolerance, censorship, the transformational power of storytelling and the costs of uprooting oneself and starting from scratch in a foreign land.
Kampana’s magic is powerful enough to spawn an entire kingdom and its inhabitants from okra seeds. But this does not place her above the narrow-mindedness, greed and lust of the men she places on the throne, one after another. Her initial choices, Hukka and Bukka the cowherds-turned-conquistadors, turn out to be predictably disappointing.
A Portuguese traveller who she takes for her lover keeps ‘reincarnating’ to the point of the whole exercise becoming tedious and farcical, in true Rushdie fashion. In general, her own fortunes fluctuate with the moral compasses of theses ersatz monarchs. A jealous rival to Kampana eventually blinds her in a gruesome scene, but the sorcerer-poet continues writing her epic poem nevertheless. As she says in the novel’s final act, “words are the only victors” in this bloody game.
Why Rushdie still matters
Kampana’s blinding scene also, sadly, reminds us of the recent attempt on Rushdie’s life on August 12, 2022, when a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar stabbed the author multiple times on the eve of a public lecture he was supposed to deliver in Chautauqua, New York. The attack has left Rushdie with enduring nerve damage, because of which he finds it difficult to type. He has also lost the usage of his right eye.
The 75-year-old Rushdie is widely considered one of the most original and inventive novelists of his generation. Unfortunately, his books, full of irreverent, parodic humour, and a general disdain for authority, have also landed him in trouble frequently — generally at the hands of religious and/or authoritarian governments.
His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was deemed offensive and banned by several governments (including India). Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death; translators of his work have been subjected to assassination attempts.
His 1981 masterpiece, Midnight’s Children (which won the Booker Prize) included some unflattering passages lampooning India’s then-prime minister Indira Gandhi, who later sued Rushdie. In 1995, his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , was not distributed in Maharashtra for several months because of instructions issued by the xustoms. They were afraid that the novel’s merciless caricature of the politician Bal Thackeray could lead to political violence in the state.
Perhaps because of this history of violence, Rushdie told David Remnick recently in an interview: “I have always felt that my books are more interesting than my life. The world seems to disagree”.
The Rushdie method As mentioned before, this novel sees Rushdie returning to the magic realist style he favoured in the 1980s and ’90s, inspired by writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino. The influence of Calvino’s Invisible Cities — where various kingdom-cities around the world are compared to the incomparable Venice — is particularly strong in Victory City . The novel’s ‘retelling of an epic poem’ is actually a way for Rushdie to blend social realism with a tone more commonly associated with high fantasy. This is because with pre-modern literary works, especially the Indo-Persian epics Rushdie is so enamoured of (he wrote an entire novel in the style of A Thousand and One Nights , after all), the narrative “leaps from one exceptional event to another”, to quote Amitav Ghosh.
See this passage from Victory City , for example, where the superhuman feats of a character are immortalised in Pampa Kampana’s verse — and then promptly brought back to the realm of the mundane by the author. This one-two manoeuvre is typical of Rushdie.
“Grandmaster Li Ye-He was our saviour,
rolling over the zenana like thunder
on Mount Kailash,
his blades as powerful as thunderbolts,
flashing in the night like the light
of freedom.
I give here my poor translation of Pampa Kampana’s imperishable verses. I cannot come close to her poetic genius (I have not attempted to match her in metre or rhyme) but I offer it to suggest to the present reader the intrusion into the narrative of a moment belonging to a universe of marvels (…)” This “universe of marvels” is what Rushdie has always sought to recreate with his fiction, which is why the conventional 20th century style of straight-lines realism was always going to be inadequate for his purposes. A Rushdie utopia is a land of unfettered truth-telling, where freedom of speech necessarily includes the freedom to offend.
A secularist hardliner, Rushdie is forever suspicious of leaders who begin to assume divine personas, or who seek to capitalise on the religious fervour of the masses. In Victory City , too, there’s a section where we see Krishna Raya (based on the real-life Krishnadevaraya), the wise king, extending mercy to his vanquished rivals. But in the same breath, Rushdie warns the readers that even secular men like Krishna Raya can become unwittingly caught up in the God complex.
“In that age of decapitations, straw-stuffed heads, assassinations, and elephant crushings, news of Krishna Raya’s merciful act spread rapidly, and was thought to be greatly to his credit. Thus began the legend of the new God-king, as godlike as the god after whom he was named, a legend which, very soon, Krishna Raya unfortunately began to believe himself.”
A much-anticipated return to form for the author, Victory City confirms that we need Salman Rushdie’s work more than ever before, arguably.
An excerpt
Salman Rushdie, February 12, 2023: The Times of India
Every morning for two hours Grandmaster Li and Zerelda Sangama practised their skills with swords, long fighting knives, short throwing knives, tomahawks, sticks, and feet. As they fought it felt as if the whole forest came to a standstill and crowded around to watch. Yuktasri watched admiringly like everyone else, but afterwards she said quietly to her sister, ‘I know you and Grandmaster Li are the best, but please don’t intervene in my life. I’m the one the forest women want, not you.’
‘The women are all yours,’ Zerelda assured her. ‘I’ve got other things on my mind.’
What she was thinking about was Grandmaster Li’s Beijing, and other unknown cities with stranger names. Of all the Sangamas she was the only one who had an itch for foreign travel, a desire to see the world beyond her own part of it. Pampa Kampana, perceiving this, understood her daughter’s attraction to the Chinese Grandmaster and feared the spirit of adventure might whisk her child away from her forever. A similarly adventurous nature had brought Li Ye-He south to Bisnaga, and in the forest he told Zerelda tales of his journey by land and sea; as well as tales told to him by his friend Cheng Ho, general, eunuch, and constant voyager, in search of treasure, around and across the ocean to the west; and, in addition, stories Cheng Ho had heard from the descendants of people who had met the Italian Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan in the time of the Yuan dynasty.
‘I have heard,’ Grandmaster Li said, ‘that there is a city across the water with your name. In the city of Zerelda, time flies. Every day the citizens, who know that life is short, rush about with large nets trying to capture the minutes and hours that float around just above their heads like brightly coloured butterflies. The lucky ones who capture a little time and gulp it down — it’s easily edible, and quite delicious — have their lives elongated. But time is elusive, and many fail. And all the inhabitants of Zerelda know that there will never be enough time for them, and in the end they will all run out of it. They are sad, but put on cheerful expressions, for they are a stoical people. They try to make the best use of the time they have.’
‘I want to go there,’ Zerelda cried, clapping her hands. ‘And I also have to see the city of Ye-He, your namesake metropolis, where, as I have been told, the people, who possess the power of flight, live on the treetops while the birds, who are flightless, peck around for worms on the ground. In the trees one can find many stores selling warm clothing, because those who fly know that the air, as one rises up through its layers, rapidly becomes very cold, and it’s necessary to wrap up when you don’t have feathers to protect you. Because of this they, the featherless aerialists, understand that every gift, no matter how wondrous, also creates problems, and so they are a modest people, with modest expectations, who do not ask too much of life.’
Pampa Kampana, eavesdropping on their conversations, was unsure if they were telling each other travellers’ tales they had truly heard, or sending one another coded messages of love and desire in the form of these fabulous descriptions. ‘What is clear,’ she told herself, ‘is that they are planning to leave.’ She put a brave face on it, for grown-up children do finally leave home, and mothers must content themselves with memories and yearnings, but it was hard to hold back the tears. Then she heard Grandmaster Li saying, ‘Soon it will be the time of year at which General Cheng Ho likes to come by boat to visit the port of Goa and eat an excellent fish curry,’ and she realized that the time of their departure would not be long delayed.
She decided to take the initiative and be the one to suggest the big move, so that Zerelda would not have to feel guilty for abandoning her mother in exile. ‘Travel is good,’ Pampa Kampana said, ‘but also dangerous. Remember that Number Two is king of all the land up to and including Goa, and that we are all declared to be witches, so we are fugitives from what he would call his justice. If you want to meet General Cheng Ho safely and embark on his boat without any trouble, we have to make a careful plan.’
Zerelda burst into tears. ‘We’ll come back,’ she said. ‘It’s just a little trip.’
‘If things go well for you both, you’ll never return,’ her mother told her. ‘
And in your place, considering our poor situation here, neither would I.’
Grandmaster Li spoke up. ‘I have already explained to Princess Zerelda that all of this is no more than a fantasy in which we are indulging ourselves, a way of travelling in our imaginations, and I have further explained that it cannot happen, because I am bound by my oath.’
‘You must miss your own country,’ Pampa Kampana said, ‘because, after all, you have been away for a long time, and this decline in our fortunes is not something you could have anticipated; and while you appear to be as expert in fantasy travelling as you are in the martial arts, it’s no substitute for the real thing. Therefore I release you from your oath. My daughter loves you and I see that she loves, too, the kind of journeying life you have in mind. So we must find a way for you to eat a fish curry in Goa with General Cheng Ho, and then go on with him or without him, to China or Timbuktu or wherever the spirit moves you, or the wind blows you, to experience whatever chance has in store. But before you leave, to keep you safe, there is someone with whom I must speak.’
An excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’ with permission from Penguin Random House India
