Salman Rushdie is one of the very few writers in the modern era to use the English language with flair, literary deftness, creative imagination, and an intimate feel for prose writing. His sentences have that dancing quality of a torrential river tumbling and overflowing its way across a lush terrain in full spate. It is unstoppable. In his hands, words and sentences follow each other effortlessly, with so much coherence and art, that it makes the art of writing look so simple, yet intricate, and profound. It is a gift Rushdie possesses, and he has unabashedly used this gift for over four decades to give us works of exquisite beauty and magical narratives that may remain unsurpassed for a long time considering the sheer range of themes and the invention of language, especially the Indian-ness of it. Victory City, the latest book by Rushdie, is no exception. It is a rollicking ride in Southern history told through the lens of fantasy and employing Rushdie’s unique brand of magical realism, that leaves the reader wondering if it is fact or fiction, or is it fictional fact or factual fiction. One doesn’t read Rushdie’s books to learn history; that’s for sure, but at the same time, his stories often have a deep undercurrent of historical research scaffolding the story, which bubbles up now and then to tease readers and push them to question their perspective. Rushdie is primarily a storyteller in the grand tradition of storytellers, and like all good storytellers, he never shies away from touching a raw nerve in his readers or presenting an alternate view of accepted wisdom. He has always written to entertain, haunt, and startle the reader – all achieved through pages and pages of honeyed prose and fertile imagination.
It is true that present-day history textbooks don’t talk much about the empire of Vijayanagar anymore. (It is another thing that many historical events are modified in the textbooks under the current dispensation, let’s not get into that here). However, I remember reading about the famed Vijayanagar Empire during my school days. I was fortunate to have had a history teacher (praise be to the memory of Mr. Ramanaprasad, an astonishing historian who could teach and inspire at the same time) who often digressed from the school syllabus on South Indian history and emphasized the achievements and the significance of the Vijayanagar empire, and how history has been somewhat unkind and relegated them to a place of secondary importance in the public consciousness. The names of Harihara and Bukka, the founders of the Vijayanagara kingdom (Hakka and Pukka in Rushdie’s book) and the priest Vidhyaranya would frequently cross his lips, and reencountering those names in Rushdie’s book evoked enjoyable memories.
Historically, The victory city played a pivotal role in arresting the surge of Islamic influence across Southern India. Hakka and Bukka were renegades from the army of Mohammad bin Tuqlaq (one of the most idiosyncratic Muslim rulers to have ruled the Delhi Sultanate) and they established the kingdom of Vijayanagar on the banks of River Tungabhrdra in the year 1336. Legend shrouds how and why these two brothers did what they did, but miraculously in their hands, a beautiful city arose in modern-day Karnataka. Rushdie picks on this factual clue and weaves a magical story of origins and consequences. He introduces, the young, mysterious girl Pampa Kampana (what a beautiful name, it rolls out of the tongue with a certain satisfaction), who witnesses her mother commit sati, and in the agony of that loss, has a strange vision of a goddess, an epiphany, that gives her the power to create a universe through silent whispers and deep meditation. Those paragraphs when Rushdie describes in lush prose the birth of a city from nowhere, peopled with citizens who are born with a sense of history, and the emergence of a civic society virtually from nothing – are among the finest prose you will ever get to read. Rushdie’s imagination runs riot. After all – Rushdie says – History is nothing but words, and Pampa Kampana, his fictional heroine, who wills the city through her powers and crystallizes the victory city from words, watches her kingdom wax and wane in fame as rulers come and go. The priest Vidhyaranya (such a priest actually lived during that period), who plays a critical role in shaping the history of Vijayanagara, also gets his due in Rushdie’s plot; but in this case, not surprisingly, Rushdie paints a naughty picture of the saint as the seducer of Pampa Kampana, and who would do anything to preserve the strict codes of the priesthood. The shadow of Vidhyaranya follows Pampa throughout the narrative.
Rushdie makes deft use of the factual accounts left behind by foreigners who visited the land of Vijayanagar during that period: Nicholo de Conti, Domingo Paes, Barbosa, and Nuniz – all these Italian and Portuguese travelers with names as magical as their travels, are made to brush shoulders with Pampa, briefly turn into her lovers, and then resume their onward journey. Historically, we owe a lot of what we know today about the kingdom of Vijayanagar to the journals of these itinerant foreigners. We owe a great debt to them. Rushdie uses their accounts as a peg to anchor the course of his story, and the fate of Victory City itself is punctuated by the presence of one traveler or the other. Pampa’s children resemble their firangi fathers, and to each child Rushdie imparts a colorful life, interleaving fantasy and fact together. In Rushdie’s novels, there is never a straightforward character. They are always incredulous and improbable, straight out of fantasy books, but at the same time, in a very strange way, they stand out alive, real, and palpable. In this regard, Rushdie’s stories closely resemble the late Angela Carter’s, a British writer he immensely respects. Carter’s own stories often border on the fantastical, and she is one of the leading exponents of magical realism in modern times. And of course, she wrote adorable and delicious prose that melted on literary tongues.
The character of Pampa Kampana herself is derived from Princess Gangadevi, the daughter-in-law of the founding Vijayanagar king Hakka. She wrote a poem Madhura Vijayam that chronicled the defeat of the Muslims near Madurai. Rushdie adopts Gangadevi as his voice in the form of Pampa Kampana and writes the novel as an interpretation of a fictional account left behind by his heroine Pampa. He gives Pampa 247 years to live, which incidentally is the reign of the kingdom itself. Critics of Victory City have called the book a “feminist utopia”. Why not? It works well. The kings come and go, but Pampa Kampana stays around as consort, regent, minister, priestess, prophetess, mother, and much more. Her life defines the contours of the fictional kingdom, and through her acts, she creates the novel’s atmosphere. Not many authors could have pulled off such an approach, but Rushdie does it, convincingly.
When Rushdie was stabbed thirteen times by a Muslim fanatic at 10.47 AM on August 11th, 2022 in response to a Fatwa issued by a head cleric thirty years ago (ironically, on Valentine’s Day); fortunately, he had already finished writing the “Victory city” (his sixteenth book since the fatwa). Only revisions and edits remained. The stabbing was a nightmare come true. Since the publication of the “satanic verses” in the 1980s, the controversy it whipped up, and the consequent fatwa for his life, Rushdie’s existence has been under threat, and he had to live in hiding in the UK and then in the US, mostly under protection. The Fatah itself was never revoked (because it can’t be according to the Muslim code), and recently, living on the Freedom of US soil, Rushdie relaxed his vigil and believed that the threat was behind him. He was moving around with greater freedom than before. So, when an ardent Muslim, dressed in black, jumped onto the stage and attacked Rushdie with all the fury only a fanatic can muster, there was an air of disbelief, shock, and horror. How could this happen? After so many years. But there it was, in front of hundreds of people, a young man who wasn’t even born when the Satanic verses was published and by his own admission, only glanced through the book before he decided to execute the Fatwa. Never has a meaningless retribution stretched to such limits against a literary genius.
In an introspective conversation with the NewYork editor David Remnick earlier this year, Rushdie’s first public interview after the attack, he admits that he is shaken, and can never be physically the same again. He has lost an eye, and the movement in one of his hands is affected, but, his passion for stories hasn’t diminished. He will continue to write as long as a theme pulls him in. It is incredible how Rushdie has kept up his output all these years, living under threat and pressure. A lesser writer and man would have succumbed to it, but not Rushdie. The Fatwa, the isolation, and the critique only strengthened his resolve to write prolifically. Not all his books are readable, some of them are mediocre performances by his own high standards. But you can’t put a Rushdie book down. Like an avalanche that sucks everything along its way, even an average Rushdie novel, irresistibly draws the reader into its narrative and leaves one breathless at the end of it. That style, the audacity to invent language where it is found wanting, the mesmerism of his rippling sentences, and the sheer breadth of his creative imagination is enough riveted.
I have read everything Rushdie has written so far. From “Grimus”, which came out in 1975, to “Victory City” in 2023, one can see the evolution of a genius, whose writing steadily gained in maturity, verve, and style. Of course, people talk about Rushdie’s 1981 book Midnight’s Children a lot because it won him fame and awards, but it is important to note that after Midnight Children, Rushdie continued to write great stories, some of them like the“Moor’s Last sigh” or “the enchantress of Florence” are even more satisfying in conception and execution than Midnight’s children. But it is the fate of every author to be remembered for a single work that defines their art: Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, Dicken’s “Great Expectations”, Virginia Woolf’s “The Lighthouse”; and in the case of Rushdie it is the “midnights children”. Rushdie is my writing muse as well, along with Barbara Tuchman, the American historian who wrote “The Guns of August”. Whenever I get into a state of writer’s block, I turn to Rushdie or Tuchman to break the creative impasse. It works for me.
Victory City is a sumptuous tale that is told well. Even if one doesn’t entirely agree with the factuality of the narrative, it’s still a great read. I came across some reviews that criticized the novel for being slow-paced in the beginning, but I personally found the narrative evenly paced throughout. Some may argue that the story gains momentum only in the latter half of the book, but I think the drawn-out descriptions in the first half set the context perfectly, and without them, the rest of the story wouldn’t make sense. Rushdie’s books are definitely worth reading if you’re willing to pay close attention. His books are not for those who like to skim through the pages to kill time.
Victory City should be read and enjoyed in small doses. For those who love to curl around on a sofa with a beautiful story, enjoy good writing, and like to be transported to a different dimension( that magical world that only a well-narrated story can create) I recommend this book. The master storyteller is still in full flow, and we hope Rushdie recovers well and continues to remain creative for many more years to come.