Salman Rushdie (1947), who quite often makes the news for the wrong reasons, surprises his readers with a powerful, sensuously written and at times witty novel. Victory City is structured as a historical epic retold by a humble writer. The setting is the Vijayanagara Empire in South India, which went through a period of prosperity and decline from the 14th to the 16th century.
Rushdie makes use of actually existing persons and verifiable events in his book. The unnamed narrator bases his account on a document buried in the ground which was recently recovered. The original text is by Pampa Kampana who, as a medium, bridged the worlds of gods and earthly mortals.
Pampa is not only given words that lift her narrative above mundane existence, she is also in possession of supernatural powers with which she can influence others. If Pampa is to be believed, she was even responsible for the founding of Victoria City. After planting a handful of magic seeds and beans, the city rises, including its adult inhabitants. Pampa gives the citizens breath of life and provides them with a ‘history’.
For the first few weeks, life in Bisnaga (Victory City) is paradisiacal. As wife of prince Hukka, Pampa gets to call herself queen of the empire she created. With Salman Rushdie, such a narrative does not remain at a carefree fairy tale level for long. In an intriguing way, he interweaves the past, the present and, unintentionally, even the future. Thanks to the chosen narrative perspective, he makes it clear to his readers that India was a highly developed society at the time, where religious freedom set the tone and where European passers-by were considered half barbarians.
Readers with western viewpoints tend quite often to regard other cultures as inferior and conservative. It is therefore enlightening to read that in 14th-century Vijayanagara, art and culture were put on a pedestal, economy and science flourished, and women had more opportunities than many of their 21st-century gender counterparts. Rushdie may be exaggerating when Pampa argues for equal rights for men and women. His story becomes credible again when the progressive queen is knocked back by her husband. The king has to grit his teeth anyway, watching his wife’s shameless amity with a Portuguese horse trader.
The supposed divine inspiration of this epic retold in intelligible language provides the humble author with comments that have contemporary winks: ‘It should be noted here that this is the first time in the text that the poet tells us that the queen and the king had two children; we might even say that this omission is an imperfection In the work.’
In a subtle way, Pampa’s life story touches that of Rushdie. Whereas Pampa could mould the inhabitants of Victoria City at first, she gradually loses control. When the empire falls into the grip of dogmatic leaders who have no patience with dissenters, she is forced into exile.
That parallel with Rushdie’s own period in hiding may have been deliberately made, that does not apply to the prophetic fate Pampa suffers: when the vengeful king treats her eyes with a hot rod, she loses her eyesight. In the summer of 2022, Salman Rushdie was attacked with a knife during a lecture in upstate New York by an extremist who was offended by The Satanic Verses (1988). The 21-year-old perpetrator admitted after his arrest that he had read only a few pages of this novel written by Rushdie. The writer lost the sight in one eye in the attack and he can’t use his writing hand anymore.
Indian-born and British-raised Salman Rushdie’s career momentum after winning the British Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children (1981). In his work, the author combines eastern and western narrative traditions and complements them with Magic Realistic elements. When Rushdie fused historical facts, dreams, revelations and Koranic fragments into a multi-layered novel about good and evil for his frame story The Satanic Verses, it remained quiet for six months. However, on Valentine’s Day 1989, Iranian leader Khomeini pronounced a curse on ‘nest fouler’ Rushdie for allegedly insulting the Prophet. The outlaw writer disappeared from the public radar for some time. In recent years, he reappeared in public to give lectures, among other things. Rushdie’s work seemed to suffer somewhat from his fatwa. In Victory City, which he completed just before the attack, he regained his vital narrative voice. It is to be hoped that recent events have not affected that voice.
Salman Rushdie: Victory City, novel. Publisher Jonathan Cape, 2023, 352 pages.