Rushdie's City of Words

His version of the history of the Vijayanagara Empire puts at rest doubts about his creative talents that may have crept up after his last few works of fiction

Victory City

Author: Salman Rushdie

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: 342  

Price: Rs 699

Rejoice, for Salman Rushdie, the master story-teller, is back, at the peak of his form with a new novel. Victory City is easily among his best, with Midnight’s Children and Shame for company.  It shows us why he deserved the Booker of Bookers and puts at rest doubts about his creative talents that may have crept up after his last few works of fiction. It adds heft to his overweight portfolio of credentials for the Nobel Prize in literature. If it were up to me, I would give it to him come October.

This is Rushdie’s version of the history of the Vijayanagara Empire, which governed most of the Indian peninsula south of the Krishna between the 14th and the 16th centuries. The anonymous narrator, obviously Rushdie, claims to be presenting a simple translated version of the 24,000-verse epic poem, Jayaparajaya, victory and defeat, the work of Pampa Kampana, a blind poet who literally gave birth to it and lived through its rumbunctious start, its glory and its eventual fall and destruction. This creation by Rushdie is blessed by the Goddess Pampa (Parvati), who speaks through her and gives her everlasting beauty and youth. This celestial beauty who lived to be 247, hardly ever aging, blinded by the most illustrious Vijayanagara ruler Krishnadevaraya in a fit of rage, is so utterly captivating that we want to keep reading her lyrical account. It is full of real and magical events and creatures and human beings, Indian and foreign, warriors and villains, commoners and courtiers, artists and religious scholars, lovers and enemies, Hindus and Muslims, wars and court intrigues, births, marriages and deaths (in a Rushdiesque ironic quirk, the author himself was blinded in one eye after a bizarre attack at a literary event at Chautauqua, New York in 2022, months after he had completed the manuscript).

Rushdie uses a whole panoply of literary devices, even as he maintains great fidelity to recorded history. Pampa Kampana, an orphan who lost her father in a war and mother in a mass suicide of war widows by fire, grows up mute in a cave where she is given shelter by a brooding religious scholar (who is not above abusing her in due time). As a young woman, she gives magic seeds to two shepherd brothers, Hukka and Bukka Sangama. They plant them and a magnificent city arises instantly from them. Pampa whispers life histories and memories into the people and so the empire begins, with the brothers as the founders of its first dynasty.

Rushdie’s rich imagery brings the medieval city to life in all its glory, its grand palaces, monumental temples, streets and crowded bazaars, canals and fountains, the adjoining enchanted forest of women teeming with real and fabulous beasts and birds, and even a tavern that could well belong to any modern metropolis. We move through a succession of kings, some good, but mostly mediocre or terrible. The events and personages are rooted in written history, but their interpretations are all embedded in Rushdie’s vivid conjuring. We exult in the glories of the city, when peace reigns and a pluralistic population grows prosperous, arts and culture thrive and religion matters little. We “float on a tide of sadness” when the opposite happens, as it must. And Pampa and her progeny, beautiful and accomplished girls and loutish boys, propel the history forward. Pampa lives to be the Queen of the empire thrice over. But as she says at one time, “I really wanted to be the king.”

Even though Rushdie deals with mostly real historical events, he says at one point, history is “not to be interpreted literally…[It is] part of the poetic vision …that must be interpreted as metaphors or symbols.” Some allusions are too obvious, such as the invasion of pink monkeys of the Enchanted Forest, who foment trouble between brown and green monkeys and try to usurp their territories by divide and rule tactics, or religious intolerance of a new imperial order. Others are a little indirect, such as a parallel between the prosperous Vijayanagara and what we now come to identify as the liberal West, complete with social issues such as gender equality and sexual orientation. Some are too deliciously subtle; what else is 247 years old? The American declaration of Independence of 1776 was 247 years ago!

But above all, it’s about words. And Rushdie the wordsmith supreme holds a master class. The prose is luminous, with rolling sentences and their accentuated cadences enhancing the magical spell of the narrative. You are immediately hooked, when in just the first paragraph you read “This is [Pampa Kampana’s] story, retold by the present author, who is neither a scholar nor a poet, but merely a spinner of yarns and who offers this version for the simple entertainment and possible edification of today’s readers.” Rushdie goes on to paint in 60-odd words in the same sentence, the most comprehensive picture of a plural society I have yet read.

Here is another sample: “Time passed, — can you feel it passing? — like a ghost in a corridor, fleeting past white curtains blowing at open windows, like a ship in the night, or a high migration of birds, time passed, shadows lengthened and shrank back, leaves grew and fell back from branches, and there was life and death.”

And the immediate thoughts of the Pampa Kampana, the Queen Regent after being blinded by King Krishnadevaraya, tells the reader what this masterwork is all about: “But now, little by little the whispered secrets of the city allowed joy to be reborn, in the birth of a child, in the building of a home, in the heart of loving families she had never met, in the shoeing of a horse, the ripening of fruits in their orchards, the richness of the harvest. Yes, she reminded herself, terrible things happened, a terrible thing had happened to her, but life on earth was still beautiful, still plenteous, still good. She might be blind, but she could see that there was light.” She also realises that “in the end, the salvation of human beings came from other human beings, and not from things, no matter how large and imposing — and even magical — those things may be.”

It is in the fitness of things to end this appreciation with the Rushdie couplet that concludes the book: “All that remains is this city of words/Words are the only victors.”