By Fiona Gruber
Salman Rushdie has commented that with magic realism, the second word, realism, is as important as the first. It’s a reminder of a genre in which the magical and supernatural sometimes obscures and renders less important, storylines that are otherwise convincing and often historically accurate.
It’s this combination of solid foundation with flights of fancy that made Rushdie’s name, most famously with Midnight’s Children in 1981, which won him the Booker Prize, and most calamitously in 1989 with The Satanic Verses. The latter’s passages on the Prophet Muhammad were deemed blasphemous by the Iranian regime and led to a fatwa. After years in hiding, Rushdie felt more recently that he could resume a normal life, but in August last year, in the US, he was attacked on stage and severely injured. It is why the otherwise loquacious author is unable to promote this, his 15th novel.
Salman Rushdie pictured before he was attacked in August last year. His latest novel is rooted in fact.Credit: David Levenson/ Getty
In Victory City, Hindu mythology with its tales of deities and magical happenings permeates the everyday, but we are also plunged into the documented history of medieval southern India. This is the metropolis of Vijayanagara, or Bisnaga and the dynasties that ruled there.
It is a realm Rushdie pungently evokes; the teeming alleyways, with their sharp spicy aromas, the lush gardens and the heat-hazed plains, the thundering of war elephants and the shedding of blood – quite a bit of that – recreate an Indian world as densely carved as a temple frieze.
Victory City by Salman Rushdie.
That realism is also employed to examine some big themes, dear to Rushdie’s heart, about the nature of gaining and maintaining power, the relationship between state and religion, the way societies can quickly change from humanistic and pluralistic to puritanical and repressive, and the role of women within this and all patriarchies.
Vijayanagara is rooted in fact; the city and the vast empire it spawned (which was mispronounced Bisnaga by the Portuguese) dominated southern India from the 14th to the 17th centuries. The marvels described in the novel really existed until it was largely destroyed after the battle of Talikota in 1565 and the kingdom crumbled within a few decades. The city’s magnificent ruins are now a World Heritage Site.
But what about the magic that frames and speckles the narrative and allows a single protagonist with a superhuman lifespan? In Victory City the city’s birth, if not its demise, is down to one woman.
Pampa Kampana is a semi-divine prophetess and poet with a dyspeptic disposition. She is named after a river and a local manifestation of the goddess Parvati, who has possessed her and given her supernatural gifts. Her jaundiced appraisal of human folly is fostered by the loss of her mother to the ancient Hindu practice of suttee, or self-immolation, at the start of the novel and she is then cursed to outlive all those dear to her.
We discover her longevity in the opening sentence which tells us that “on the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty seven years old … Pampa Kampala completed her immense narrative poem on Bisnaga”.
Bisnaga, Victory City, is famed (and was in history) for its arts and architecture, gardens and technology. Women hold positions of power and work in professions usually the preserve of men, and although Hinduism dominates, those of other faiths and cultures are welcome. Foreigner traders from Persia, Portugal and Italy marvel at its beauty and size and in its heyday, it was the second-largest medieval city on earth, after Beijing.
A group of writers and supporters gather in solidarity with Salman Rushdie outside the New York Public Library, a week after he was attacked and seriously injured.Credit:
Pampa Kampana can take some pride in this for she has created the city from a handful of seeds and whispered its teeming population into fully formed life complete with memories. She places its first two kings, the cowherds Hukka and Bukka, in charge and, once her work is complete, dallies with a handsome Portuguese horse trader named Domingo Nunes.
In a world where animals talk, gods meddle and humans can transform into birds we follow Pampa’s travails in love, motherhood, queenship and exile – a persistent theme in Rushdie’s writing. At various times she is revered as a goddess, reviled as a witch, admired as a poet and feared as a warrior. Kings come and go, wives and children vie for power and influence, priests connive and another enemy is besieged and vanquished, its leader’s head cut off and stuffed with straw.
There are a great many of these conflicts, lifted from the history books and Rushdie is bogged by chronology. An awful lot of people come and go in 247 years and many are viewed at the same middle-distance focal length, discouraging emotional engagement. The result is a sometimes plodding read, with fatuous asides from the author explaining the poet’s intentions or omissions. As a result, the narrative can wilt with fatigue.
Pampa Kampana is a juggernaut, carrying a vast narrative and her elongated life is in danger of becoming as tedious to the reader as it is to her.
This longevity does, however, allow for an examination of the impermanence of both good and bad regimes. Visionary rulers come and go, some eras treat those on the margin better than others. Buildings crumble but if you’re lucky, chronicles survive. Given his treatment at the hands of extremists and the attack on him that left Rushdie blind in one eye and with a nerve damaged hand, there is a steely defiance to Pampa Kampana’s final poem, which applies also to Rushdie and his persecutors:
“How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens?/ They exist now only in words. While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both./ Now they are neither./ Words are the only victors.”
Victory City by Salman Rushdie is published by Jonathan Cape, $32.99.
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