I started to read Victory City a year ago but stopped. Working for a small non-government, not-for-profit organisation left little spare time. But I resigned last October to create more space for my own priorities: reading and writing among them.
I enjoyed Salman Rushdie’s improbable legend of Pampa Kampana enormously. There is a lightness of touch to this nested ‘found fiction’, as if the author's unidentified narrator shares the idea that while he is re-telling an abridged version of a lost, monumental epic poem about a magically created kingdom (now destroyed) none of us should take the abridged version too seriously. We are invited to proceed with sceptical but open minds.
An orphaned child is imbued with Divine powers and supernatural long life. Pampa Kampana whispers into existence a great city and all its people from a bag of seeds. She bestows dynastic authority upon Hukka and Bukka Sangama who plant the seeds as Pampa instructs. The brothers -- cowherds then reluctant soldiers; captured, enslaved yet somehow escaped -- become the first two kings of Bisnaga: an unrivalled empire for almost all its two hundred and fifty years until it is crushed in a final, ill-conceived war. The city is razed to the ground. Centuries old Pampa, blinded in rage by the Empire’s last king, is freed from her unnaturally long life then dies with the city she created.
Despite that authorial conceit, however, there is serious thought and critical testimony in Salman Rushdie's tale: about the position of women in society, the hypocrisy of holy men who retreat to caves, the power of storytelling (and story tellers) in place over time (across generations) as well as colonialism, class, religion, gender, demagogic male power and the ruinous consequences of hubris. Although the book is more fun to read than my list of horrible things makes it sound.
Victory City also gives us more evidence of the skill, craft and quality of Salman Rushdie's writing. He is, I believe, a truly accomplished author. Since I first read Midnight's Children it has never been a surprise that it won the Booker and best-of-Booker accolades. It's a brilliant novel. Victory City doesn't have the heft, the spread, the imaginative bravado of Midnight's Children but it's an entirely different book, serving a different purpose. Nevertheless, Victory City shows us again that Salman Rushie is a genuinely great contemporary writer. His finest works will be read and studied for generations; long after the haters, the attackers (and their poisonous ideology) have withered and died.
Victory City reads as if its writing had been effortless, inspired (which may be an absurd idea to attach to a novel by this author in particular). I've no doubt writing the book took time and hard work. It reads so well, of course, because its author is such an experienced, skilled, and imaginative writer. It just feels like the text dropped onto the page, fully formed.
After reading some reviews online, I am embarrassed to acknowledge I had no idea there was / is a city named Vijayanagara, eponymous capital of a real southern Indian empire established in 1336 by real Sangama brothers. Nor did I know that its last regent, Aliya Rama Raya (age 81) really was, in fact, beheaded at the battle of Talikota in January 1565.
After the battle, Vijayanagara was sacked, ruined, and burned to the ground during a six-month occupation. The city was never re-populated and today its ruins are a UNESCO listed World Heritage site. At the height of the empire's wealth and power it was the second-largest city in world at that time, after Beijing.
How could I not know any of this? Ethnocentrism and the legacy of the hubris of the British Empire, are parts of the answer to my own question.
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