Book Review | Allegory for a civilisation in crisis an ode to undying power of words

Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, has a grand, epical sweep — rooted in history, yet dazzlingly fantastical and, often, profoundly allegorical. The narrative’s chronological span is over 200 years, which is roughly how long the formidable Vijayanagar (literally, Victory City) empire in south India lasted (from mid 14th century to mid 16th century CE). Rushdie weaves a fabulous tale about this fabulously rich and powerful city, from its birth to its decline, and conjures up a narrative that is at once a testament to his boisterous imagination as it is to his ideas about creation, myth-making, and the undying power of words.

We are told right at the outset that the story is a retelling of a magnificent work of verse called Jayaparajaya (Victory and Defeat), which was lost for centuries, and that it is now being narrated by one who is “Neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns.” The person who originally wrote the story, says Rushdie, is Pampa Kampana, who, when she was nine years old, watched her mother walk into the fire together with a group of other women, after their men perished in a war with an invading army. 

Alone and traumatised, the young Pampa Kampana comes to be touched by a goddess who speaks to her. Imbued with this divine power, she is able to work magic, and when she meets the rough cowherd brothers, Hukka and Bukka Sangama (historical figures who actually founded the Vijayanagar kingdom), she tells them to scatter some vegetable seeds upon the land and watch a city grow out of them.

And as she had prophesied, a city does miraculously spring from the seeds overnight, and so do its citizens. Pampa Kampana breathes life into them, and for days afterwards, she sends whispers into their heads, telling them about themselves, their backstories and their families, their parents and their children, giving them memories of the past and perhaps dreams of the future.

Pampa Kampana is venerated for her stupendous act of creation, and for a time, enjoys great glory and love. She shows herself to be a bold and free spirit — queen consort to King Hukka and lover to a Portuguese horse dealer and ammunition expert, who cannot pronounce the name of the city and calls it Bisnaga. And so Rushdie’s Vijayanagar comes to be known as Bisnaga, which, incidentally, is also a compression of the words ‘visha’ and ‘naga’, and is perhaps an allusion to the poison and serpentine treachery that are forever at work in the alleys and backways of every mighty empire.  

The novel is closest in temper to The Enchantress of Florence (2008), which is set in Renaissance Italy and the Mughal court of Akbar. Here too, history is entwined with the myths he summons, and historical characters and battles exist alongside the phantasmagoria of wonder and enchantment. Pampa Kampana is blessed with eternal youth and is destined to live as long as Bisnaga exists, but as the years roll by, her unconventional and advanced ideas — her demand for gender parity, for instance — come to be regarded with distaste. The new ruler, who happens to be her own son, denounces her as a witch, scoffs at the story of her having midwifed the city into existence, and she is forced to flee Bisnaga and live in exile in a forest.

In many ways, Pampa Kampana, the heroic prophet-creator-poet, bears echoes of the life of Rushdie, who has known both adoration and opprobrium for his acts of creation. Like her, he spent years in hiding, after he wrote The Satanic Verses and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on his head in 1989. Like her, he too made a triumphal return from the wilderness. And in what can only be described as eerily prescient (Rushdie completed this novel before he was stabbed in New York in August 2022, and lost one eye), like him, Pampa Kampana is blinded by those who are truly unseeing: the bigots who are enveloped in the darkness of their own lethal stupidity.

But blindness does not deter Pampa Kampana. Eyeless in Bisnaga, she continues to write her epic poem, recording history as it takes place. And when the great kingdom finally falls, and the 247-year-old Pampa Kampana too is on the brink of death, she knows that the only thing that will survive the ruination all around, are the words she has been writing for aeons. 

“Words are the only victor,” she says. And that sums up the burden of Rushdie’s magical song.

But Rushdie throws a lot more into the electrifying stew that is Victory City. He dwells on oppression, religious zealotry, authoritarianism, the evil colonial stratagem of divide and rule, feminist values, patriarchy, the redemptive and reviving power of love, and so on. Again and again, he suggests that the human spirit is at its most vigorous and creative when it is allowed to flourish in an atmosphere of openness, tolerance, and egalitarianism.

Despite its serious subtexts, however, Victory City is, first and foremost, a joyous outpouring of the author’s bravura imagination, shot through with his wry humour and wit. It is as much an affirmation of Rushdie’s belief in the imperishable nature of words, as it is of his own creative genius — one that no amount of hate can silence or stamp out.

Victory City

By Salman Rushdie

Penguin Hamish Hamilton

pp. 352, Rs.699