A Civilization and its Stories: Salman Rushdie’s VICTORY CITY
Photo: Karan Madhok
In his latest work, Salman Rushdie expertly flirts with the line between fact and fiction, declaring all living beings—including those reading his book—may be ‘characters’ in a grander historical fiction. When nothing is real, stories are the only reality.
In a story that spans the timeframe of nearly two and half centuries, Salman Rushdie takes only twenty pages to plunge the reader into an immediate existential crisis. In Victory City (Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2023)—the Booker prize-winner’s fifteenth novel—a young woman named Pampa Kampana, blessed with the ‘voice’ of a goddess and some magic seeds, “creates” a new city overnight. It’s her version of the Biblical Genesis, except that this city—Bisnaga—is born fully populated with thousands of citizens, dogs, cows, trees, elephants, and camels, and with streets and homes and places of work and worship.
The city’s charge has been given to the Sangama Brothers—Hukka and Bukka—former milkmen who are now the royal overlords of this new land and its people. First, they debate the line of succession, the religious rules they will enforce upon the people, and the concubines they shall pick of their palace as kings.
A moment of silence then passes, before Bukka asks, “What is a human being?”
If the ‘new’ humans in Bisnaga could be born out of seeds, then Bukka wonders if, he, too—and if every human—evolved out of seeds and vegetables, or from fishes, or cows. He can hardly look upon the citizens of Bisnaga without contemplating the mysteries of his own origins, and then, his own purpose.
“But we are rootless and we don’t want to be eaten… So how are we supposed to live? What is a human life? What’s a good life and what isn’t?” (20)
All the Bisnagans have, initially, is life. But they lack purpose. They were like “empty people with empty eyes, walking the streets like automata.” That purpose is finally whispered into them by Pampa, who creates stories to form the history and narrative for every new person. She makes up their lives, their castes, their faiths, their childhood games, their siblings. “The whispers know what you need,” said Pampa Kampana, “The new people need stories to tell them what kind of people they are, honest, dishonest, or something in between. Soon the whole city will have stories, memories, friendships, rivalries.” (32) Pampa declares that the city is fully alive once everyone has been told their story.
But soon, she realizes that “every creator must learn,” (100) before Rushdie allows the stream of thought to flow into another existential quandary:
India has always been comfortable with the dualism of the real and the mythological in the same space, where the history of the city can be described for the geographical place on the map, but its stories pump it with a sense of metaphysical immortality, the type that will outlast the city long after its inhabitants are gone.
Once you had created your characters, you had to be bound by their choices. You were no longer free to remake them according to your own desires. They were what they were and they would do what they would do.
This was ‘free will’. She could not change them if they did not want to be changed.
‘Characters’ is a telling choice of words to describe living beings. Rushdie expertly flirts with the line between fact and fiction. One could interpret that his intention is to declare all living beings—including those reading his book—may be ‘characters’ in a grander historical fiction. But when nothing is real, stories are the only reality.
It is this theme of storytelling-as-existence that defines much of Victory City, Rushdie’s ambitious homage to the great epics of Indian mythology. The novel’s primary conceit is that the narrator is a translator and an editor of sorts, bringing alive Pampa Kampana’s Sanskrit account of her life and her kingdom, the fictional ‘Jayaparajaya’ (literally: victory and defeat). The character of Pampa is partly inspired by the historical 14th-century princess Gangadevi, who served as a Sanskrit language poet of the real Vijayanagara Empire, which stretched across much of southwestern India.
Vijayanagara literally means ‘Victory City’; Bisnaga is Rushdie’s account of this kingdom, a magical mythology to crown the real history of events. From Ayodhya to Hastinapura and Kurukshetra to Indraprastha, India has always been comfortable with the dualism of the real and the mythological in the same space, where the history of the city can be described for the geographical place on the map, but its stories pump it with a sense of metaphysical immortality, the type that will outlast the city long after its inhabitants are gone.
In Bisnaga, Rushdie proposes a new mythology, a city populated by magic and fuelled by stories. The Jayaparajaya is fascinated with time, rushing through nearly three centuries of Indian history that features the rise and fall of important kingdoms, great wars with invading armies, palace intrigue, and the arrival of curious foreigners. The narrator tells us that its “quality of verses improves on Ramayana.” (11) The narrator themselves later admits that they can’t match Pampa’s writing genius; something beautiful is, inevitably, lost in translation.
Rushdie borrows liberally from the tropes of the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and other epics. There are curses and boons, there is the cruel cyclical nature of time, there are gods casually interfering with mortals and mortals with godlike abilities, there are cruel kings and great ones, complicated lines of succession, inner-family politics, and the unmistakable hero’s journey of rise, exile, return, rise, and fall again. There is also morality and symbolism through poetry within the epic itself, much like the Gita was in the Mahabharata.
But Rushdie disrupts the traditional tropes in a crucial way: the central star around which the story orbits is a woman—Pampa—a creator, poet, leader, and philosopher, who exercise her fierce independence upon the kingdom and the larger world. In this way, Victory City is also a criticism of the epics, a reimagination of what our cultural foundations may have looked like if the stories we told and remembered gave the appropriate agency to its women.
After a battle in the principality of Kampili—a ‘battle without a name’—there was a great bonfire, where the remaining adult women committed sati, setting themselves ablaze. Orphaned at 9, Pampa would carry “the scent of her mother’s burning flesh in her nostrils.” It would be a childhood tragedy that—much like Bruce Wayne—would serve as her origin story, haunting and shaping her actions for the rest of her life.
Victory City is also a criticism of the epics, a reimagination of what our cultural foundations may have looked like if the stories we told and remembered gave the appropriate agency to its women.
The goddess bestows powers upon this young orphan. Pampa is able to create a society of gender equality, where women will be treated better. It’s a society where “the most powerful novelty of them all” would be for men to “start considering women in new ways” (94). The women will do work considered unsuitable for them elsewhere in the country. Bisnaga became “the first and only region in all of land where people couple contemplate the idea of a woman sitting alone upon the throne” (99).
Pampa sits at the heart of this ‘feminist utopia’ (as labelled by The Altantic) She is the instigator of Bisnaga, its protector, and the only steady entity that lasts as long as the kingdom does. Pampa is described as a “promiscuous beauty whom neither time nor motherhood could age or tame” (61).
Unlike Ayodhya and Hastinapura, Bisnaga mirrors its creator’s personality: a city not just of victory, but a victory that is specifically feminine.
This includes the ‘Forest of Women’, where Pampa, three of her daughters, and two male companions spend over a hundred years in exile. This ‘vanvaas’ (exile in the forest) is a direct tribute to similar narrative turns in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, but, with an intentionally feminist twist. Only women are allowed in this forest: all men turn into female form as they enter, except for the men who have “achieved complete self-knowledge and mastery over their senses” (122).
Meanwhile, back in Bisnaga, the rulers who have exiled Pampa usher in an era of misogyny and illiberalism, conceived primarily by the sage Vidyasagar, an advisor to the king. In the forest, Pampa meditates about the idea of a world without kings; not just a world without monarchy, but a monarchy that is particularly gendered around violent men.
Pampa is the ‘mother’ of Bisnaga, but she never ‘rules’ the city directly. She rejects the destructive line of kings: who either seek war and violence or are lost in the bliss of epicurean delights. Meanwhile, it is the women adjacent to the throne—led by Pampa—who whisper life and growth into civilization, who help to heal and rebuild.
Pampa is near 200 years old by the end of her exile. Once a queen, she now returns a revolutionary. Time has stood still in the forest, but the outside world has proceeded on without her. Pampa herself begins to feel the sorrow of her near-immortality. She knows she will outlive everyone she loves or forms a close bond with: the men she beds, the daughters and descendants that follow her.
In the course of her long life, she is sometimes loved, sometimes feared, sometimes pitied and sometimes forgotten. Pampa has little concern for these matters; as she approaches her 200th year, even love begins to feel meaningless in her long life. She has no interest in being exalted like a queen. What Pampa does desire, however, is legacy, to be acknowledged for what she has created, to be credited and recognized. “I don’t want to be invisible, I want to be seen” (241), she says.
In her role as the ‘mother’ of the kingdom, Pampa is never too far away. Even in exile, messenger birds fly in and out of the forest, giving her news of Bisnaga. Upon her returns as she bides her time in the shadows (like Odysseus when he initially returns to Ithaca after his wayward travels) Pampa continues to influence the throne, whispering to Deva Raya, the “puppet king” of Bisnaga, encouraging him to shed the recent history of violence for poetry and the arts.
More kings come to stake their claim for the throne: great kings, weak kings, cruel kings, distracted kings. The narrative mirrors many real kingdoms and inner-family struggles, including the Mughals and the real Sangama dynasty: tension between brothers, sons hoping to usurp their fathers, and elaborate games of strategy played out by the ministers, advisors, and queens to rebalance the weights of power. New challenges crop up every generation, bringing in new heirs competing for the throne. In a moment of angst, Pampa meditates upon the ideal model for governing a society like Bisnaga, and if a government with more democratic values might bring better balance to the city than the monarchy. It’s an obvious foreshadowing of the future, of the revolutions to come, of the transfer of power from the crown to the people.
But the story makes no guarantees of any idealism of true utopias. “Maybe this is what human history was:” thinks Pampa, “the brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats.” (142)
Bisnaga doesn’t exist in isolation, and Rushdie seamlessly transitions real and mythological history in India through the story’s porous borders. Kings and ministers debate about religion in using much of the same language as our contemporary politicians: the segregation of Hindu and Muslim, the decisions between what to allow and what to ban, politics of vegetarianism and circumcision. There are many (on the nose) echoes of modern India, of the subjects being leashed by the fear of a small group of people who have weaponized religion. In the forest, there is a caste system among the birds, too (130). Then, rumours of a new clan of foreigners—the ‘pink monkeys’—provide a new source of stress, a species that serves as an allegory for the arrival of colonial powers. And the inevitable mixing of races moves all the species forward.
Rushdie, however, makes the classic mistake common in so many such dynastic narratives and stories about rulers and their kingdom: we are told about the large population of the city, but we never see or experience what their lives are like. There are hardly any ‘regular’ Bisnagans in the narrative: the people who have been seeded into existence, whose histories have been whispered by Pampa. He writes that the ‘Jayaparajaya’ gave voice to the “anonymous, to the ordinary citizens, the little people, the unseen,” (290-291). But what are their voices actually saying?
The citizenry, instead, move and act as a faceless, voiceless monolith, a collective that that has little individuality. We are told when “All of Bisnaga came to honour her,” (304) or when “one million people” are desperate to get away (334), but their actions mean little when Rushdie’s narrator doesn’t identify their personal stories, the very stories that served as the grounding platform upon which Bisnaga was built.
This, then, is the great irony of Victory City: a story about storytelling, where most of the actual stories are untold. Too much of the narrative is told simply through exposition, reading like a historical summary of events, a flowery Wikipedia entry. Events are reported one after the other, decisions are made, the plot moves forward, the account is accounted for. Near the end of the book, instead of Pampa whispering to Bisnaga, Bisnaga whispers to her; but we the readers never hear their words. In a novel about a city, the city itself is rarely seen.
It has been fascinating to observe Rushdie’s literary evolution; he is one of the true living giants of literature, and his work has often been the standard-bearer of stories and storytelling styles from the subcontinent. But this is not the same Rushdie of Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses, novels filled with magical and ethereal prose, dense in its ambition and detail, adapting the culture’s oral storytelling traditions with a burst of literary invention. Victory City, written nearly 40 years after Midnight’s Children, sacrifices the loose, almost stream-of-consciousness prose for a calculated and strict formality of scripture. Despite some mind-spinning moments of meta, Victory City remains a guarded, “faithful translation” of the fictional ‘Jayaparajaya’.
Instead of stylistic invention, much of Victory City provides a slight update to a storytelling form that has always existed. The plot, too, often falls into the trap of predictable formulas of thrones and successions. In this, Rushdie isn’t exactly subverting old tropes; he’s only paying homage.
Events are reported one after the other, decisions are made, the plot moves forward, the account is accounted for. Near the end of the book, instead of Pampa whispering to Bisnaga, Bisnaga whispers to her; but we the readers never hear their words. In a novel about a city, the city itself is rarely seen.
And yet, the homage wondrously succeeds. Even as an imitation of the classics, Victory City is a piece of literature that stands shoulder to shoulder in its complexities and timeless ambitions as the classics themselves. It’s a tale that is often so spellbinding that the reader may even forget that they’re reading a Rushdie—the name, not the writer—the same man who is credit for writing the ‘Booker of Bookers’; the same who lived most of his life escaping from a fatwa to his name; the same, who, just months before the release of this novel, was gravely wounded after multiple stabbings during a public lecture.
Rushdie’s real life often overshadows the fictions he creates; in Victory City, it is in the act of telling stories—reality and fiction bleeding into each other—that he celebrates. Pampa’s stories bring a kingdom alive, her stories protect her own legacy, and it is the stories that will survive her—and Bisnaga—after it is all over.
Some familiar trademarks of Rushdie still populate this work, particularly the blend of magic and realism, and the modernist tendencies that remain in conversation with 20th century literary giants like Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino. Like García Márquez 1967 opus One Hundred Years of Solitude, Victory City opens with a grand foreshadowing of the narrative, and continues to move forward to the beat of proceeding and receding waves. Bisnaga—and other fictional cities of this universe—begin to feel like philosophical experiments of cities, an extrapolation of the poetic vignettes found in Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In the city of Zerelda, for example, “time flies”, where the inhabitants “rush about with large nets trying to capture the minutes and hours that float around just above their heads like brightly coloured butterflies,” and they “know that there will never be enough time for them, and in the end they will all run out of it” (143).
Much like García Márquez’s Macondo, Victory City feels like a fable about the history of a place told through the genealogy of its founding mothers and fathers. The end of Bisnaga is foreshadowed almost at the point of its creation: the ending won’t be a happy one, but with this story, the journey will be immortalized. In 100 Years, a prophecy written on a parchment in Sanskrit—only decoded with the final words of the novel—foreshadow the events of the world just as the world ends. Victory City is a decoding of sorts of Sanskrit verses, too. At first, they are written by Pampa; later, Pampa becomes an oral storyteller, allowing Tirumalamba Devi—one of the last descendants of the throne—to take the role of scribe, writing down the account just as Pampa speaks it. This relationship is a feminist mirror of Vyasa and Ganesha: the sage who ‘authored’ the Mahabharata, and the elephant-headed god who wrote it down.
Time passes, history and cycles tend to repeat themselves, until one begins to connect the dots from Rushdie and García Márquez to Valmiki and Vyasa.
Off page, Tirumalamba Devi will define her own future, travel the world, and soak up its stories. Unlike many female characters of Indian epics, Victory City allows its women to define the course of their lives independently of the gambles, exiles, and conflicts of men. From Yotshna and Zerelda to the (later) Zerelda Li and Tirumala Devi, these women consistently forge their own path, all as successors to the legacy incepted by Pampa, who herself was shepherded by the words of the goddess.
Pampa’s motivations are tied inextricably to Bisnaga. She foretells that she’ll finally be “allowed to die” when the world—i.e., the world of Bisnaga—ends (323). She makes the purpose more explicit at the end of her recitation: “When she buried the Jayaparajaya she sat down, cross-leggged, and called out, ‘I have finished telling it. Release me’ (337). She lived not just to create the kingdom, but to keep it alive through story—long after it’s all over.
Cities are built and cities are destroyed. Civilizations spur to great heights before being eventually ravaged. Even the city of victory will eventually be defeated. But it is the tradition of storytelling that will outlast it all, that will be the link to immortality. Even in a tale of this city of victory, the only victors are words.
Near the end of her life, hobbling with her walking-stick through the city she mothered, Pampa walks to the seminary with a satchel, where she “sought the comfort of old books before the end” (333). For book lovers, there could hardly be a more romantic image of the twilight of one’s life. Pampa merely wanted to be left alone with her stories.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, and the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
