Victory City
Salman Rushdie
Alfred A Knopf
Rs.519 Pages 352
An engaging novel about the founding and ultimate fate of the Vijayanagar empire (called Bisnaga) after a European mispronounces it
On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was due to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. Shortly after the speakers ascended the stage, a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie with a knife.
While Rushdie survived the attack, he was left visually impaired in one eye, much like the blinded protagonist of his new novel who recovers her personhood after being blinded by a king for her written words. At the time of the attack last year, Rushdie’s next novel Victory City was set to be released in early 2023. Victory City is an engaging fictional saga about the founding and ultimate fate of the medieval Vijayanagar empire (called Bisnaga in the story after a European mispronounces it), which spanned most of southern India between the 14-16th centuries.
At the centre of the novel is a young girl, Pampa Kampana, who grows up to become a celestially blessed sorceress and queen of Bisnaga several times over. She has a powerful desire to live and outlive everyone. This desire has been shaped by her witnessing a jauhar in her childhood.
Pampa Kampana loses her mother to this act of collective self-immolation and grapples with grief and disbelief that turn into defiance of death. At this point, she is blessed by Goddess Parvati who pronounces, “You will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways, and you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure, to see it all and tell its story, even though once you have finished telling it, you will die immediately and nobody will remember you for four hundred and fifty years.”
The novel begins with an excavated manuscript in Sanskrit titled Jayaparajaya (Victory and Defeat) that was interred in a clay pot during the fall of Bisnaga in the 16th century. The story is told by the fictitious translator of the manuscript, who remains a voice that is occasionally seen in a note or a footnote. The translator of this manuscript breathes Pampa Kampana and the Vijayanagar empire back into existence for a 21st century audience.
The manuscript is about Pampa Kampana and Bisnaga; it is her story told in her words and how she shaped an empire. In the novel, Pampa Kampana who carries the blessing of Goddess Parvati and lives for over two centuries, gives two battle-weary brothers, Hukka and Bukka, a sack of magic seeds that are sown and burst forth into a city created out of magic. Her dream is of a kingdom where men and women are equal, and no woman is without voice. However, the brothers, who reign in turn and marry Pampa Kampana in turn, struggle with inclusion and religious fundamentalism, which tend to undermine this project of an inclusive and equal empire. This struggle is repeated in different ways throughout the long history of the Vijayanagar Empire.
At the heart of every era, Pampa Kampana witnesses the empire and its hardships, except when she is exiled. She gives citizens a sense of identity; she whispers myths citizens hold on to in the dark. These whispered stories give the citizens of Bisnaga the knowledge of who they are. Pampa Kampana’s character in the novel is deeply aware of the power of words: “Fictions could be as powerful as histories,” she writes.
Salman Rushdie’s complex novels are never merely about the words one sees on the pages or the story that is being told. The story is often a frame that Rushdie constructs for something more. Victory City is no aberration in this regard. While the history of the Vijayanagar Empire can be found in many places, Victory City is not just about this once prosperous 14th century Indian empire. It is a commentary about power, the perversions of unchecked rule, the violence that underpins all forms of rule (especially empires), the ultimate fall of kings, the hydra-like presence of puritanical movements across time and space, the hubris of dynasties, the generation of legitimacy through propaganda and constructed narratives, and the tussle between the powerful and their desire for immortality.
Sometimes Rushdie’s over-emphasis on his female characters’ physical beauty and attractiveness can be disconcerting, especially when one has read about one pretty female character after another in his novels. I have often found myself wondering if Rushdie’s female characters would have the prominence or attention of the powerful and wealthy in a male-dominated world if they weren’t traditionally pretty. Would a Rushdie narrative work if the female characters weren’t goddesses incarnated and blessed with physical beauty? Why does he deem it necessary to craft strong feminist characters, endow them with beauty, but then disable them with some sort of dysfunctional characteristics?
Either way, Pampa Kampana’s inability to ignore the rulers of Bisnaga proves to be her undoing. The last great Bisnaga king Krishnadevaraya, blinds Pampa Kampana when he thinks she has deceived him. She lives in the corner of a secluded room in a monastery, cloaked in darkness and silence until the day she decides to record the story of Bisnaga — her story — for times yet to come.
With the help of a lettered princess who is sympathetic to her, Pampa Kampana tells her story and the story of Bisnaga and its kings, their avarice, their foibles, their vanity, and their mistakes. She begins to restore herself through her own words. In spite of being blinded by the power of the state, she can now see what she must do. Writing this history is her way of snatching power away from the lofty kings of Bisnaga with their golden crowns. In the end, they will be remembered how she chooses.
Pampa Kampana is destined to live as long as Bisnaga lives. As the fall of Bisnaga begins, Pampa Kampana hides the finished manuscript Jayaparajaya in a clay pot. It is hurriedly buried and forgotten for centuries. Until the present day, when the translator of Jayaparajaya gives Pampa Kampana a new lease of life by placing her work before the world: a 21st-century world where religious fundamentalism locks horns with secular ideologies, where kings set narratives, where fiction is more powerful than history, where the state whispers to citizens about who they are so they can hold on to non-negotiable identities and seek to kill or die for them, where women still struggle for a seat at the table of the powerful, and where rulers still aspire to be immortal by finding a place for themselves in the historical record.
Who wins in this game of history? In Victory City, Rushdie is giving us an answer. If “words are the only victors”, it is the writer who triumphs over kings and rulers. It is the writer who shapes the historical record and our understanding of a particular time and place in history.
When empires have fallen and regimes vanish into oblivion, and writers have been attacked and erased because the state decreed it, their words will endure, always victorious.
Vasundhara Sirnate
(The Book Review)
