Victory City review: A grand historical, Rushdie style

‘Victory City’ by Salman Rushdie is a feat in world building: it is historical fiction and contemporary commentary infused with magic realism

Salman Rushdie. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The pre-eminence of Salman Rushdie’s writing—the textured tales with multiple threads; the deliciousness of his brand of magic realism; the glistening sentences that can be long and seemingly unwieldy but which never lose their reader; the playful puns with the poignant themes—is a given. There is not much that can be said about his craft that hasn’t already been said before. Any reviewer who sets out to do so surely only contends with two things: the first, readjusting to the “real world” while coming down from the headiness of a Rushdie they just finished reading, and second, the inadequacy of a critique in truly demystifying his spectacular world building.

In an interview with the author published two days before the book’s release on 9 February, David Remnick of The New Yorker writes that Rushdie’s “pleasure…in writing the novel was in ‘world building’, and, at the same time, writing about a character building that world”. Rushdie goes on to tell him: “It’s me doing it, but it’s also her doing it.”

He refers to Pampa Kampana, the heroine of Victory City. Having witnessed as a nine-year-old the end of the Kampili kingdom and a mass jauhar of which her mother was a part, she vows to “laugh at death and turn her face towards life. She would not sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld. She would refuse to die young and live, instead, to be impossibly, defiantly old”. With a celestial blessing at that very moment, she is able to do just that.

Pampa Kampana lives to be 247 years old. The duration of her life matches that of the rise and fall of Vijayanagara, the titular victory city which she creates with magical seeds that she gives to Hukka and Bukka, two former cowherds-turned-soldiers, some years after the erasure of the Kampili kingdom. An unnamed narrator (Rushdie, it is easiest to believe) is the translator and reteller of her story, from her epic poem Jayaparajaya.

If it weren’t for the larger-than-life Pampa Kampana herself, the most interesting role in Victory City would be that of this narrator. He is an efficient sutradhar in how he is able to hold the story’s many mini-worlds and subplots together, never giving in to the temptation of discursiveness to which the tale might have easily lent itself. Yet, where necessary, he presents competing narratives and other travellers’ accounts of the time as it were, to fill in any gaps in Pampa Kampana’s long poem.

In doing so, he is an ideal researcher-reteller, seamlessly keeping the plot tight while periodically popping by to raise important flags on writing, authorship bias, and the possible limitations in interpreting history from a poem.
Even with such disclaimers, the hold Pampa Kampana’s story has is never diluted. Notwithstanding some thematic similarities with Qara Koz in Rushdie’s 2008 novel, The Enchantress Of Florence, Pampa Kampana is perhaps one of Rushdie’s most compelling characters. It is with, and through, her that Rushdie is able to draw from a diverse range of storytelling traditions: the Indian epics and Greek myths, Grimm’s fairy tales and a bit also by way of Washington Irving. It is only through her that Rushdie is able to present historical fiction that spans over 200 years, inspired by the largest of south Indian kingdoms, the Vijayanagara empire, even as he sprinkles in highly allegorical smatterings about the early days of the East India Company and the tactics of power they, and later the British Raj, used.

Most tropes are, therefore, familiar—what epic story about human flaws and foibles hasn’t already been told?—but Rushdie is clever in the fresh ways that he employs them. With Pampa Kampana especially: She isn’t just a woman who births a whole new city and its people; she, and not a man, possesses the seeds to be able to do so on her own. After a battle in which she helps the forest dwellers win, she goes into a restful slumber spanning six generations, cut off from the world behind beds of thorns. She can only be woken up with an act of love—a kiss, of course, but this one from a great-granddaughter with a desperate need to belong somewhere and to someone.

With the blessing of an extraordinarily long life and slow ageing that she receives in the first few pages of the book and the hurt and emotional turmoil stemming from it, Pampa Kampana is as much Alfred Lord Tennyson’s version of the Greek character Tithonus from the eponymous poem, as she is a cleverer version of him, having her boon customised enough to see her through being a great ruler of Bisnaga, the mangled version of Vijayanagara as pronounced by Domingo Nunes, one of the city’s first foreign visitors and Pampa’s lovers. At one point in the book, she is compared to Vyasa narrating the Mahabharata to Ganesha, as she does Jayaparajaya to Tirumalamba, the daughter of the kingdom’s most popular emperor, Krishna Deva Raya. At another time, her ability to see the war, despite her blindness, and dictate its happenings for her poem, reads like a turning on its head of a popular image from the Mahabharata: the blind Dhritarashtra keeping track of the war through Sanjaya’s gift of vision.

Even in the very first line of the book, the unnamed narrator tells us that she was “a blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess”. The blinding, however, does not happen until the very last section of Victory City. It is only here that a reader realises its poignancy, especially in the context of the author’s own incapacitated state— Rushdie is now blind in one eye—after being stabbed in Chautaqua, New York, in August last year. The parallels between his situation and Pampa Kampana’s, from the time she is blinded, are eerie, almost clairvoyant, given that Rushdie had finished writing the book months before the attack.

Soon after the blinding in Victory City, Pampa Kampana struggles to write, and also suffers terrible dreams. As did Rushdie, according to his interview to The New Yorker. But once Pampa Kampana remembers that she has to act on the promise she has made, to record history as it happens, she begins “to feel her selfhood returning as she wrote…. She could not describe herself as happy—happiness, she felt had moved out of her vicinity forever—but as she wrote she came closer to the new place where it had taken up residence than at any other time”.

The book’s fictionalised version of Achyuta Deva Raya, successor and brother of Krishna Deva Raya, even tells her, “If I can’t burn you…I can certainly burn your book, which I didn’t need to read to know that it’s full of unsuitable and forbidden thoughts…” Soon after stabbing Rushdie, the 24-year-old attacker Hadi Matar, who had praised Ayatollah Khomeini in an interview to The Washington Post after the incident, also said he had only read “a couple pages” of Rushdie’s  The Satanic Verses, which led to the Iranian leader’s fatwa against the writer.

By way of craft, Victory City is pure, unadulterated Rushdie. There is nothing drastically new he is doing this time: The depth of research into history can match the work that went into The Enchantress Of Florence; the way he blends lightness and tragedy in historical fiction is reminiscent of Midnight’s Children; and while the word play in Victory City is nowhere near as delightful as it was in Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, it is still very much there.

Even as it talks of religious fundamentalism versus syncretic cultures, also at one point detailing the political advantages of the latter, Victory City shines a light on women’s ability to govern and fight, on the complexities of the weight of duty, of marriages, of the relationship between brothers, of the bond between mothers and daughters. It does all this even as it fleshes out how friends, lovers and loved ones are lost, irreparably, due to misunderstandings that neither can help nor explain, and foes are won over peacefully, almost miraculously.

But what Victory City does, best of all, is to remind us to keep examining the idea of fiction versus fact, truth versus lie, and that one isn’t always better than the other —it reinforces the power of tales we tell ourselves, the things that we can will into being; and it shows us how stories, and their telling and retelling, can save us in our times of need.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 10 February, 2023

The startling originality of Shehan Karunatilaka

The 2022 Booker Prize winning author Shehan Karunatilaka's bitingly confident, yet funny and self-deprecating writing is just what literature from the subcontinent needs

Shehan Karunatilaka (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The most electrifying thing about Shehan Karunatilaka’s writing is its sheer chutzpah.

Let’s start at the very beginning of his second novel, The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida, which recently won the Booker Prize 2022. The year’s literary newsmaker has one of the strongest opening pages in recent times. Readers and critics alike tend to find a second-person narration somewhat distancing, even confusing; we would rather have someone tell us “I saw this” and “I did that” than have a book that does not tell our personal stories liberally toss out “you-s” at us. But Karunatilaka is not here to play it safe. He understands that somewhere deep inside, we have all experienced discontentment and that we all identify, to differing degrees, as misfits.

As Maali and about Maali, he writes: “So you quit each game they made you play…. You left school with a hatred of teams and games and morons who valued them. You quit art class and insurance-selling and masters’ degrees. Each a game that you couldn’t be arsed playing.” Whether or not this applies exactly to every reader, Karunatilaka knows how to hold us by the shoulders, get us to turn our heads, and tell us that he knows us, knows the things we wouldn’t say out loud. Lest that part of the opening fool us into thinking the narrator is an empty and unempathetic contrarian, which none of us wants to be, the book also has this later: “You wish you had your camera, just as you wish you had somewhere to develop negatives and someone to show them to. Just like you wish you had more time and something to care about.”

Maali does not have time, though, not really anyway, since he is dead, and he has only seven moons, or a week in the afterlife, to figure out the way forward. And he needs to do this while trying to uncover how and why he died, and who “disappeared” him (used, he notes, as a popular “passive verb” in Sri Lanka of the 1990s, the time in which the novel is set).

It’s easy, therefore, to categorise this novel as a whodunit. It is. But unlike most books of the genre, it isn’t the exciting elimination of suspects that drives the plot. The pulls, pushes, and priorities are, just as in life, multiple: Maali also needs to understand the ways of the specific stage of the afterlife he’s in and come to terms with the pointlessness inherent in the purpose of his life’s work. He has to also jog back through memory to understand the impact a broken home had on him, and in turn the impressions his brokenness left on the two great loves of his life, DD and Jaki. All of this, as he tries to drive some of their actions from the afterlife. His death opens up the various strands of conflict in Sri Lanka’s civil war too, but first, Maali has to tell himself his own story, recalling it in non-linear snatches.

The other interesting thing about Karunatilaka’s work is that one can identify the ubiquity of certain tropes and themes, and how, despite this, the treatment does not slip into predictability or pretentiousness.

Just as Maali Almeida is about, and narrated by, a missing gay photojournalist who drinks, gambles compulsively and cheats helplessly and ceaselessly on his boyfriend, Karunatilaka’s debut novel from 2012, Chinaman: The Legend Of Pradeep Mathew, was narrated by an alcoholic journalist who tries to find a missing yesteryear cricketer. Most recently, even between Maali Almeida and The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises, his anthology of short fiction and vignettes that came out in September (Hachette India, 272 pages, Rs. 599), there is a clear recurrence of themes—the idea of breath and the significance of death. This repetition becomes particularly poignant if the books are read in close succession—it makes it seem as if Karunatilaka is an artist obsessed, someone who, with everything he creates and regardless of it, will keep digging till he reaches the kernel of the one thought, the one question, that is everywhere, yet teasingly out of reach.

Any such intentionality will not be surprising given the startling originality of Maali Almeida, first published in 2020 as Chats With The Dead, before its UK publication in August—the book bubbles, line after line, into a concoction you rarely see being brewed with words. It is as weird as it is wonderful, as snarky and funny as it is terribly dark, as driven by a supernatural adventure as it is held tight by the knots of a very real, bloody and long-drawn civil war. The dialogue mimics banter sprinkled with local phrases but it is tight, sharp and witty, and sometimes, in the same breath, segues into the most heartbreaking scenes. Reading Birth Lottery, written over the span of two decades, it becomes clear how Karunatilaka embraces the strange and signature tonalities seen in Maali Almeida—he even employs the same slightly self-deprecating but bitingly confident tone when he introduces the anthology to his readers.

Over the last few decades, a few authors from Sri Lanka have successfully held the world’s attention. Michael Ondaatje is, of course, Karunatilaka’s only predecessor from the island-nation on the Booker’s list of winners. The country’s only other finalist, Romesh Gunesekara, had made the Prize’s shortlist in 1994 with Reef, about the life of a young chef as unrest begins in Sri Lanka. His other titles, like The Match in 2006 and Suncatcher in 2019, were also about young boys beginning to understand the ideas of love, friendship and home, with Sri Lanka’s conflict raging in the background. Shyam Selvadurai, too, became most known for his 1994 title Funny Boy, which follows a young, gay boy and his well-to-do Colombo-based Tamil family, whose lives and loves are affected by the Sinhalese-Tamil issue.

These are all good books—and, in the case of Funny Boy, a moving and important queer narrative from South Asia—written by masterful storytellers. But none of these have been able to do what Karunatilaka has done with technique, tone and imagination in Maali Almeida. Here is a book that conjures up a spirited yet dark afterlife, fills it with its own systems and characters even as it draws from ancient thoughts, and has it engage closely with the living; on this it dusts a good dose of debauchery, alongside conflict and corpses. By making its politically moderate protagonist the bridge between life and death, it ends up also being a philosophical deliberation on centrism, conflict and the very nature of life itself. Karunatilaka misses nothing.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 5 November, 2022