Th
e following review for Victory City ran on the cover of The New York Times Book Review on February 1, 2023. Artwork by Lou Benesch
Review by Michael Gorra
Pampa Kampana’s tale begins when her mother walks into the flames. “The story goes” that with all their husbands dead in battle, the women of a small and ruined kingdom built a bonfire on the banks of a river, “said farewell to one another” and silently stepped into death. The “cannibal pungency” of their burning also smelled of sandalwood and cloves, and afterward Pampa could never bring herself to eat meat, not once in all her remaining 238 years, during which she was three times a queen and aged so slowly that she looked younger than her own great-granddaughters many times removed. But she was just 9 when her mother died, and as she wandered away from the flames she was visited by the goddess whose name she bore. So her powers came, and after a few years there also came the brothers Hukka and Bukka Sangama, cowherds turned soldiers, who were on the run from defeat.
Pampa gave them a bag of seeds, and where the brothers sowed them the air started to shimmer and a “miracle city” began to grow, first palaces and temples and then people too, people whose memories Pampa willed into being. Whole armies rose from the earth, ready with battle elephants to fend off attacks from neighboring sultans. The brothers became great kings in the south of what’s now India, first Hukka and then Bukka, and Pampa married them each in turn, though her true love was a Portuguese horse trader who showed the Sangamas how to make fireworks. And, moreover, guns.
All of this is true, sort of. Oh, not Pampa Kampana and her seeds, but that mass suicide did happen, in the early 14th century. Hukka and Bukka were real, and so was the city they founded, whose name Salman Rushdie has taken as the title of his 16th novel, “Victory City.” That’s English for Vijayanagar, the capital of the empire that dominated the region for, well, Pampa’s life span is just about right, until a decisive military defeat in 1565. Vijayanagar’s ruins are now called Hampi, its temples are a UNESCO world heritage site, and its architectural remains stretch across the subcontinent’s south, right down to its fingertip point. The empire’s vast armies, its reliance on war elephants and its long quarrel with the Muslim sultanates to the north — all of that is real too, and there were even several Portuguese wanderers, who left records of their travels.
“Victory City” presents itself as a manuscript found in a long-buried clay pot, an “immense narrative poem” in Sanskrit by Pampa Kampana herself: the secret history of an empire, as condensed by a nameless present-day scribe, “who is neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns.” (Merely.) The world Pampa calls into being is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is about a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals. Hukka and Bukka say they want peace but make war on others to preserve it, and they can never quite conquer their land’s intolerance: a fundamentalist insistence on having the one right belief that works to undermine the pluralism of the city’s founding principles.
That is one of Rushdie’s oldest themes, going back to “Midnight’s Children” more than 40 years ago. It received its most pointed treatment in “The Satanic Verses,” whose attack on spiritual purity prefigured the fatwa visited on Rushdie himself, and later in “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” which used the convivencia of medieval Spain, in which people of different religions are said to have lived amicably together, to critique the militant Hindu nationalism of modern Mumbai. Yet these essentially political concerns have always been embedded — embodied — in the play of Rushdie’s own style, in the irreverent exhilaration of a prose that works by piling one thing upon another, a digressive grammatical plenitude in which there is room for all. Victory City is born from a seed, and soon “stray dogs and bony cows walked in the streets, trees burst into blossom and leaf, and the sky swarmed with parrots, yes, and crows.” Those last words are a bit deflating, a sudden shift in the register, but that’s Rushdie; not just the parrots but the crows too are welcome
Nevertheless, everything here seems muted. Rushdie’s main interest lies in tracing Pampa’s life history, showing how her power and position change with the years, forever oscillating between better and worse. She undergoes a long period of exile, and watches as her husbands’ founding dynasty is replaced by another clan of adventurous warlords, and then replaced again. Once Hukka and Bukka are out of the way, however, those different rulers and their battles begin to seem interchangeable, and their shifting names barely matter. Maybe that’s the point; maybe that’s the way dynasties look from a distance. But Pampa is the book’s only vivid character, and the life of her great city never takes a clear form in one’s mind; for comparison see the precisely detailed but wholly imaginary Turkish island in Orhan Pamuk’s recent novel “Nights of Plague.”
What does come through is Rushdie’s own generosity toward his predecessors, his consciousness of working within a great tradition. One of his recent novels rewrote the Arabian Nights, and another, “Quichotte,” paid homage to Cervantes. “Victory City” invokes the Ramayana, but Rushdie has a more immediate precursor in mind, and the tale of his own vanished city comes loaded with allusions to Italo Calvino’s ever-marvelous “Invisible Cities,” in which all places are but shadows of an incomparable, idealized Venice. Moreover, the book’s historical setting suggests a buried strand in Rushdie’s work as a whole. “The Moor’s Last Sigh” evokes the time just before Columbus; “The Enchantress of Florence” moves between Renaissance Italy and the Mughal court in Delhi. He repeatedly looks to a past in which European colonialism had not yet taken hold, when the different parts of the world were locked in a bloody but still more or less equal competition. Just why is a subject scholars might do well to explore.
The best pages of “Victory City” offer something different, though. Late in the novel — late in her life, late in the empire’s history — Pampa falls out with the ruler of the day, who orders his courtiers to blind her. They use a hot iron rod, and “in the beginning there was only the pain, the kind of pain that made death feel desirable, a blessed relief.” Then dreams come, nightmares that leave her “sweating her lost eyesight out of every pore in her body,” but at least there are images and “the darkness was no longer absolute.” That blindness is foretold in the novel’s very first sentence, and Rushdie could not have known when he wrote it that in August 2022 he himself would be attacked by a religious fanatic, stabbed many times and losing the sight of one eye. Still, this is not the first time that he has been the Cassandra of his own fate, and in its haunting, uncanny, predictive power “Victory City” shows once again why his work will always matter.
