A profound commentary on the construction of Indian identity
This much we know to be true:
During the era that we in the West call the 14th century, the brothers Hakka and Bukka, of the Sangama clan, fled the Delhi Sultanate and went southward. After crossing the Krishna River, in the region that corresponds to present-day Karnataka, they built a city that would grow to become the capital of a great empire. They called this city Vijayanagara, which is Sanskrit for “victory city.” The civilization that developed there was immensely prosperous and cosmopolitan, admired by travelers from as far as Venice and Portugal, who wrote of its religious tolerance, exquisite architecture and abundant riches.
It was a society of poets, scholars and merchants, which for three centuries controlled most of southern India until the neighboring sultanates in the Deccan plateau joined forces, attacked the empire and destroyed its capital. While it lasted, the Vijayanagara Empire was a hotbed of cultural fusion where half a dozen languages coexisted and reached memorable heights of literary refinement, and where women enjoyed more freedom than anywhere else in medieval India.
But in every history there are lacunae, events that escaped memory, people whose achievements weren’t written down. In those blank spaces of the historical record, Salman Rushdie weaves the threads of his imagination and creates the vast epic that is his novel Victory City. By retelling history in the style of myth, he gives us a timeless portrait of India as he has dreamed it, a land of infinite creativity and glorious diversity that has often had to endure the curse of narrow-minded rulers who can only conceive of one correct way of living. More than a political allegory, Victory City is a prayer addressed to the future.
The novel’s main fictional addition to the historical account is the character of Pampa Kampana, a divinely gifted woman who witnesses the two and a half centuries of Vijayanagara’s splendor. She presides over the city’s birth and lives to watch in despair as it is destroyed. Across four successive dynasties, she becomes prophetess, fugitive, queen, spy, grandmother, witch, conspirator, saint, soldier, thief, chronicler and survivor. She brings the city to life by summoning it from the depths of the earth and growing it like a plant. Spawned without a history, the city comes already formed, with houses and streets not made by human hand, and with fully-grown inhabitants without ancestry, identity or any idea of how to live. So Pampa uses her magic to give them fabricated memories. People need to know who they are and where they come from, even if it’s a lie.
This bit of magical realism contains an astute observation from Rushdie: modern India often resorts to made-up narratives to tell itself its history and identity. Under Narendra Modi’s ultranationalist regime, the official version of India’s past has been entangled with authoritarian control of information, us/them revisionism, literalist readings of mythology, ethnic supremacy, fanatical patriotism, normalization of sectarian violence, science denial, entrenchment of a monoculture, sanitization of the caste system, patriarchal propaganda, and erasure of Muslim achievements.}
Rushdie has in mind the difficulty of presenting any faithful and honest rendition of the facts, and this is acknowledged in the composition of the novel itself: an unnamed narrator tells us that the text of Victory City is a prose version of Pampa’s much more elegant narration in Sanskrit verse, which we don’t get to see. This is an instance of the literary device of the found manuscript, as employed in Don Quixote, and the novel’s first paragraph is addressed at the reader in a tone that echoes Don Quixote’s introduction.
From time to time this narrator reminds us that we’re not learning these events from an eyewitness point of view, but only as filtered through rewriting, translation and abridgement. There’s no moral judgment of Pampa’s use of fiction to create the history of Vijayanagara; in fact, the text’s self-professed nature seems to be saying that any version of history a society chooses to accept will always be mediated by someone’s account of it. It’s a sharp irony that, when Pampa tries to explain to the people that their history was an invention, they insist that it really happened they way they learned it. The subtext is that it’s not a bad thing that all identity is constructed; knowing this fact actually empowers you to choose how you construct it.
Pampa is very aware of the type of society she came from: a rigid patriarchy divided by religious allegiances. Her constant struggle as her miraculous city’s caretaker is to steer its people, be it explicitly or in secret, toward a way of life that values openness, harmony, pluralism, learning, and equality. But time after time, her efforts are opposed by strongmen who define themselves in reference to some designated enemy and waste the empire’s wealth in campaigns of conquest to feed their vanity, or priests who won’t listen to women and seek to enforce their favored form of devotion as the only authorized form of devotion. Like the best speculative literature, this is an imagined country that speaks with calculated precision about the real one.
Rushdie has been a frequent critic of religious extremism, on both sides of the Indian partition. He has the scars to prove he knows what he’s talking about. The land of wonders depicted in Victory City is a vision of the freedom India could achieve, in some other century, in another life.
Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.
Reference: Rushdie, Salman. Victory City [Random House, 2023].
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
