A grand epic shimmers with parallels of present day

Victory City Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Cape ***** (5 stars)  

Salman Rushdie’s Victory City is an epic saga with a running thread of metamorphosis. It introduces the reader to the expansive chronicle of Bisnaga, a kingdom sprouted from seeds and whose history, people and memory were whispered into form by Pampa Kampana, a 247-year-old enchantress, prophet and poet.    

Told through a dual narrative — one through bracketed elaboration of an unknown speaker and the other accentuated by the role of Pampa — the story of Bisnaga unfolds in 14th-century India. It is essentially based on the story of Vijayanagara, the greatest empire of southern India that vanguarded a time of unity, during a period when the district was ripe with intercultural conflict. In Rushdie’s Bisnaga, a war, unknown in name, culminates in the defeat of a small kingdom and inspires a collective act by women that begins Pampa’s purpose and duty.

Widowed from the war, the women of the kingdom build a pyre and commit a mass suicide. Pampa, holding onto the hand of her mother, watches one woman after the next, in silent sacrifice, being engulfed by the blaze of flames. Her mother, entranced by her fraternity, lets go of Pampa and relents to the cause. Pampa, alone, wanders along the riverbank and is overtaken by a loud, commanding governing spirit, that of the goddess Parvati. The deity, instructing from within, commands that Pampa fight to ensure no other women meet their end in fire and that men regard women in new ways. Only once this succeeds and fails, and is documented for generations that reign after to ensure her story lives on, will Pampa be allowed to meet her rest.

“All’s fair in love and war” is a weighted idiom implicitly punctuated throughout the foundations of Bisnaga and Pampa’s legacy. Love is a theme intrinsic to the boundaries of the walled city and is a concept that stifles Pampa’s expectations of motherhood,  as the city’s creator and of being a mother to children. Her perspective of love and desire is challenged when she meets Domingo Nunes, a Portuguese foreigner who visits Bisnaga and brings with him a layer of the unknown. This fascinates and frightens Pampa as she is faced with a man of difference; a representation of a world outside what she knows, who becomes a lover, a first for a woman pedestalled as a goddess. Domingo, beguiled by the majesty of the city he stumbles upon, inquires about its name. When Pampa enunciates its origin: Vij-aya-nagar, Domingo, with his speech impediment, recites back, “Bij...Bis..naga”, and thus, Vijayanagar was replaced with Bisnaga; a symbol of amalgamation, of what was and what will be known as Victory City.

What follows is a grand tale. Over two centuries, Pampa will navigate the maze of mortality, be exiled into a forest guarded by women (a spell-invoking fortress that turns any man who is not their true self or obtained self-mastery into a woman) and return to her Bisnaga as the enchantress who envisaged its power before its unforsaken fall.

The eruption of wars over difference and indifference, betrayal over jealousy, bigotry, creeds and castes, the mechanics of agency, and the reimagination of women’s equality, sexuality and womanhood as a root of motherhood is critically interrogated in Rushdie-esque prose and detailed with anthropomorphic elements.

Victory City is a map of time, an allegory, steeped in the cultural and spiritual landscape of India and its antiquities, but rumbles with universal belief systems and present-day social movements.

Rushdie is a seven-time Booker Prize shortlisted author, of which Midnight’s Children won in 1981. In an interview with The New Yorker in February this year, he said: “I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life.” This comes after Rushdie survived a near-fatal attack last August in New York, leaving him blind in his left eye. Much like Rushdie’s convictions, Victory City is an augury to the power of words, and more so, to the power of defiance.