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.
