Salman Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’ — A response
For a long time, Salman Rushdie used to be among my favourite writers in English, and not just Indian English. The romance started obviously with Midnight’s Children, and I went back to read his earlier novels. During a memorable evening in Indianapolis in 2003, I attended an event where he spoke about his craft and other topics of interest. Bought a couple of his books — Fury, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and had them autographed. Almost a fanboy.
However, the enthusiasm for a new Rushdie book waned over the years. The Enchantress of Florence and Shalimar the Clown were not unputdownable, unlike his earlier novels. Quichotte disappointed me. I did not even buy The Golden House. Rushdie had essentially dropped off my radar.
And so, when his latest novel ‘Victory City’ was released earlier this year, I was not even aware of it, but a chance stumbling upon of a brief review that it was Rushdie’s take on the Vijayanagara empire and the city of Hampi, tickled my interest, and I ordered the book immediately.
Victory City is a much better book than some of Rushdie’s recent works. But to be honest, and sadly, the bar has become a bit low. Or may be my own sensibilities have changed. It is not easy for any writer to maintain a consistently high level of ‘readability’ throughout a long career. John Le Carre was probably an exception.
Spoiler Alert — Some of you may deem the details below as spoilers.
Coming to the book itself, Rushdie’s premise of a 9-year-old girl (who watches ‘Sati’ being performed by hundreds of women, including her mother), who receives the blessing of Goddess Pampa and uses the magical powers to literally seed the birth of Bisnaga city (Vijayanagara), its people and the empire, lives for 247 years and finally dies after the fall of the city, but not before completing her magnum opus of a verse epic and hiding it for posterity to discover — is quite clever. It is in the details of the execution that he seems to falter a bit, exposing his laziness in research at several places.
The Rushdie style of writing is intact but the shimmer has faded over the years. Where he used to be unpredictable about what he would do with a character or a scene, whether he would use his lacerating wit or a dose of magic realism or both — in this new novel, Rushdie is quite predictable, until he realizes it himself and forces some sudden changes of tempo, locale and mood — almost as if he is careful to stick to a formula that once worked so well for him and his characters. Perhaps, it was the challenge to pack 250 years of glorious and magical history into a single book of 330+ hard cover pages.
Nevertheless, Rushdie has picked a great subject and I guess he did not have to strain much for his research because many books have already been written about the Vijayanagara empire. Most likely, he did not even have to visit the ruins of Hampi or any of the places such as Tallikota, Golconda, Bijapur, Raichur and Gooty.
Rushdie sticks to the broad story of the rise and fall of the city/empire of Vijayanagara (now called Hampi, which used to be the suburb housing the main temples) starting with Hakka and Bukka (Harihara Raya 1 and Bukka Raya 1) in 1336 CE and ending with the battle of Tallikota (1565), covering the reigns of Hakka, Bukka and Devaraya from the Sangama dynasty, just a brief mention of the Saluva dynasty, the coronation and rule of Krishna Deva Raya, followed by the rule of Achyuta Deva Raya, ending with Aliya Rama Raya and the sack of the capital city by the confederation of Deccan Sultans. One can’t find fault with his choice of key incidents during a 250 year period. He has faithfully followed what the major historians have classified as the major turning points in the history of the Vijayanagara empire. He has also succeeded in fusing magic into this recounting of history, even if some of it may be deemed problematic. More on that later.
Rushdie uses a clever plot device to cover the 100 years or so between Deva Raya I and Krishna Deva Raya by sending the protagonist Pampa Kampana into a magical forest along with her daughters, Grandmaster Li — a Chinese Martial arts guru and Haleya Kote — a loyalist general. Rushdie is both in his element during this period of exile, and also struggling to wade out of a narrative quicksand here.
The character of Pampa Kampana is probably one of the more complicated characters to come out of the Rushdie pantheon over the years. She seems to have imbibed the traits of Qara Koz aka Angelica from the Enchantress of Florence — sorcery (which becomes divine magic in case of Pampa Kampana), beauty, the boon (or curse) of not ageing over centuries, multiple lovers especially of the Portugese/Italian descent, being a witness to the rise and fall of kings and kingdoms, public adulation and hatred etc.
Has Rushdie consciously reverted to the trope of a beautiful woman who will not age and can weave her magic over men and cities? It is possible because ‘The Enchantress of Florence’ was his last critically acclaimed book. However, where the Enchantress scores in its non-linear, hyperlinked, multi-layered narrative that sprawls across continents (Mughal North India, Renaissance Europe, Ottoman Turkey, Africa and Arabia), Victory City sticks to just the Deccan plateau, that too mainly the capital city of Vijayanagara and its surrounding areas, rarely venturing out. The narrative is linear and the only layer one could discern was that of Rushdie’s laziness in research that inadvertently exposes his biases.
A weak defence could be that Rushdie’s biases have a solid grounding in history. But these are history books written mostly by Westerners with a natural, university-bred leaning towards a certain notion of India. Take the example of Sati during the Vijayanagara period. It has become an accepted truth that the practice of self-immolation of widows, especially those of soldiers and nobles martyred in wars was widespread in South India during those days. Foreign travellers have written about it. One finds sculptures in and around Hampi that are known as ‘Sati kal’ (Sati stones).
It is true that in villages near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, recent excavations have found some hero stones (of warriors who died fighting to protect the village or live stock) and sati stones (small sculptures of individual women or women with their husbands). However, it is by no means an indication of mass immolations or even that common people (including soliders) followed the practice. None of the literary works from that period (the Vijayanagara period saw a rich output of literature in all major languages of South India, not to mention a plethora of Bhakti poets and saints, and an enormous amount of philosophical, mathematical and scientific treatises) talk about this practice as something that was a common practice. People who give up their lives to protect ‘dharma’ have always been revered and statues erected to position them as local deities. The women in question may or may not have died on the husband’s pyre or immediately thereafter. It is possible that they lived on for a while and died of other causes, after doing a lot of good for the village/s using the goodwill generated by the husband’s martyrdom and the rewards from the local Nayak (king) or the village treasury. And naturally, they would be buried or cremated in the same place as the deceased husband and a stone erected in her memory as well. None of the foreign travellers have stated that they witnessed a sati ceremony. They have all described it in some detail, but added that they heard it from their local contacts — traders and villagers — possibly over a drink or two. It is not uncommon for traders and travellers to spin a yarn or two about the exotic places they visited and lived through to tell the tale. Rushdie himself acknowledges this in the novel. And yet, he uses a massive sati ceremony after the Battle of Kampili (he calls it a minor, insignificant battle that did not even deserve a name) in 1327/28 CE, to trigger the main premise of the story. Not just then king’s wife and women of his family, but hundreds of women (wives of common soldiers and villagers) cross the river at high tide and commit a mass suicide, in Rushdie’s novel. He possibly took the reference from a 2015 popular history book called — ‘Head and Heart — Valour and Self-sacrifice in the Art of India’, which tries to connect the personality cult and the ‘divinity’ construct successfully managed by South Indian kings to the practice of self-sacrifice by loyalist commoners, and posits that even in modern India, one could see this thread in popular art and practice (Eg: Fans and political activists doing self-immolation due to a perceived slight to their leader/film hero/cause).
Fair enough, but Rushdie, one feels, had other plot devices available than to resort to a cliched image of medieval India with mass sati sahagamanas being performed by 100s of women.
The young girl, Pampa Kampana, then feels the divine voice of Goddess Pampa coming through her, but nothing of importance happens. She wanders aimlessly and finds herself near the cave of a mendicant, Vidyasagar. It is interesting that Rushdie chose the name of Pampa (river Pampa in Kerala) for the protagonist instead of Tunga or Bhadra, which are the actual rivers flowing in the vicinity. He renames the sage Vidyaranya, the head of Sringeri Math, as Vidyasagar. Without getting into the historical details where the Math’s official history differs with that of ‘eminent historians’, what strikes the reader is the struggle the author seems to face in conveying a reasonable amount of truth versus how he actually wants to portray the sage. A young Vidyasagar (Vidyaranya) takes the girl Pampa into his protection, and sexually abuses the helpless girl (blessed by a Goddess however) continuously for several years, till she is 18 years old. Vidyasagar calls her Gangadevi. Here again, Rushdie uses the name of a famous poetess during the Vijayanagara times (reign of Bukka Raya 1 to be precise) who wrote a celebrated epic poem called ‘Madhura Vijayam’ about the victory of Kumara Kampana (son of Bukka) over the Madurai Sultanate. Ganga Devi is believed to be the wife of Kumara Kampana, the hero of the epic.
The brothers Hakka and Bukka are portrayed by Rushdie as simple cowherds from Gooty who failed in their amateur military adventures, got captured by Tughlak’s army and converted into Islam to save their skin. They visit Vidyasagar for guidance after escaping from the Delhi army, and instead find the beautiful young woman Pampa Kampana. Pampa takes their offering of seeds, blesses it, and give it back to them, asking them to sprinkle the seeds below the hillock. And just like that, a city is born, complete with all the buildings, temples, and people.
This is where Rushdie unleashes his best literary technique. Now that Pampa Kampana has magicked a city into existence and the people thereof, she needs to give them histories, personal attributes and emotions. She does this through whispers. Amazing craft by the writer indeed.
But what is Rushdie conveying through this magical birth of a city, the people and an empire? And what is the meaning of these ‘whispers’, one wonders. May be it is just the author’s poetic imagination. That is a simplistic answer, I feel. I wonder if Rushdie is conveying that this ‘forgotten city’ (Cf. Robert Sewell) and its glory was actually a figment of imagination and exaggeration by foreign travellers, and the reality was that of a second rate or third rate power constantly fighting with Muslim sultans and finally succumbing to their superior forces and military technology. Rushdie even invents a Ghost Sultan and his invincible ghost army to refer to Zafar Khan, who started the Bahmani Sultanate about a decade after Harihara and Bukka established their capital at Anegondi and started building Vijayanagara as a better fortified capital city.
Not only that. Rushdie also uses his wand of magic realism to create fierce women warriors who are invincible and credits much of the success of the Vijayanagara armies to them.
Pampa Kampana decides to get married to Hakka but also falls in love with the Portuguese horse trader Domingo Nunes. The cuckolded Hakka can do nothing about it, even after the daughters born to Pampa resemble Nunes’ red hair and green eyes. Pampa, touched by the divine, doesn’t see anything wrong in what she’s doing. Not does the author, her creator. Pampa also openly tells Bukka that she can’t wait for his brother to die, so that she can marry Bukka and become his queen. This, after describing Bukka as an obese drunkard with a sense of humour and so, more interesting than the self-righteously boring king Hakka, who can’t digest that he has to share his wife with a trader. I believe this portrayal of Pampa Kampana to be allegorical. The lady symbolises the city/empire of Vijayanagara — an exaggeration, in bed simultaneously with foreign traders and local chieftains and sultans, to sustain an empire, for however long it can manage. Nunes actually gives the city its name ( a city birthed by an Indian woman with a Portugese lover, and gifted to simple cowherds from rural South India, descendants of a third rate principality called Kampili), and imparts the technology of fireworks that he learned from his Chinese friends.
As the story continues, Pampa Kampana keeps meeting Portugese or Italian traders, and decides to get into bed with them in the very first meeting. They all look alike apparently. In between, apart from the three daughters from Nunes, she also gives birth to three sons from Bukka. Rushdie seems to have run out of imagination here or just plain lazy or did not care. He gives the names of three famous cricketing sons of Karnataka to the three sons of Bukka — Bhagwat (Chandrasekhar), Erapalli (Prasanna) and Gundappa (Vishwanath). And makes them all cruel bullies with a misogynistic and sadistic streak. Rushdie could have found hundreds of old Kannadiga names for these imaginary characters. But he seems to derive some pleasure in using the names of gentlemen cricketers adored across the world for their skills and good nature, and turn them into villains. Artistic license it may be, but leaves a somewhat unnecessary and bitter taste for this reader at least.
Pampa forces Bukka to banish the three sons (aged 11, 9 and 6) to teach them a lesson (because they opposed Pampa’s dictum that women should be allowed to become king), but when Bukka dies, she flees into the forest with her daughters and the two loyalists in tow, fearing the wrath of her own sons.
The most honest part of the novel is also the part irrelevant to the main story. Pampa Kampana’s exile in the magical forest serves as a device to keep the story hibernating for a 100 years. It is during this chapter that Rushdie provides us with another allegory — of the pink monkeys. He makes it clear that he is referring to the coming of the European colonists — the Dutch, the French and the British. The forest Goddess and Pampa join hands to drive the pink monkeys away, but it leaves the forest Goddess drained of power and Pampa herself goes into a long sleep of 100 years. Is Rushdie hinting at the lack of stamina of the native society and its Gods to face the continuous onslaught of foreign armies over hundreds of years, to eventually just give up?
There is a lot more to dissect but let me just say that the episodes of Deva Raya and Krishna Deva Raya follow this pattern faithfully. Two more examples of Rushdie’s lack of research or ability to understand the geography and culture are probably worth mentioning. Rushdie refers to the Golkonda Sultan as the Diamond Sultan and credits his riches to the diamond mines found in Golkonda. Yes, the diamonds were known as Golkonda diamonds and Golkonda was indeed one of the world’s important trade and processing centers for diamonds and pearls. But some basic googling would have told Rushdie that there never have been any diamond mines in or near Golkonda. What the historians refer to as Golkonda diamond mines were actually mines from the Godavari and Krishna delta regions, and the deposits near the foothills of the Nallamala ranges in present day Andhra Pradesh.
The second example is that of Aliya Rama Raya. The son-in-law of Krishna Deva Raya who was the de-facto ruler of the empire between 1542–65 hailed from Nandyal area, in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh. His name was Araveeti Rama (Ramudu?) and he became Rama Rayalu after marrying into the king’s family. The prefix ‘aliya’ is Kannada for son-in-law. Since he was the son-in-law of the great king, he became known as ‘aliya’ or Aliya Rama Raya. But Rushdie doesn’t seem to recognize the meaning of ‘aliya’ and uses it as a normal part of Rama Raya’s name.
Rama Raya’s successors setup the Aravidu dynasty which ruled the remnants of the once mighty empire from Penugonda and later, Chandragiri and Vellore. The Aravidu dynasty ruled over substantial territories between 1565 to 1646.
Aliya Rama Raya defeated the Golkonda, Bijapur and Ahmednagar sultans multiple times in one-on-one wars, and also played mediator among these Deccan sultans whenever the opportunity presented itself. However, like all political leaders who think of themselves as modern-day Chanakyas, Aliya comes across as a person who was great as a tactician and operational leader, but weak in strategy. His mistrust of his own generals amid fear of a coup made him hire two Muslim generals (the Gilani brothers) who were earlier commanders in the Bijapur army (which he defeated soundly). In spite of the so-called ‘superiority’ of the Turkish artillery, the numerically strong Vijayanagara army with their war-elephants and Portuguese guns were winning the war against the confederacy of the Deccan sultanates, when the Gilani brothers chose to betray by joining forces with the Bijapur and Golkonda armies, resulting in Aliya’s beheading on the battle field.
However, Rushdie doesn’t want to mention this betrayal by the Muslim generals of the Vijayanagara army in the novel. He makes Aliya get down from the elephant to pee in the middle of the battle, to be beheaded by the Bijapur sultan. He invents an imaginary conversation before the battle, where the Deccan sultans state: “Let no body say that we are going into this war on behalf of our one true God against the many false gods…we are going into this war to teach a lesson to the trickster that he never forgets.” I sense the author justifying the horrific acts of destruction, arson and vandalism against the city of Vijayanagara as a lesson taught to the king. How convenient of Rushdie to ignore the historical accounts of the battle and the destruction that followed?
Perhaps it is just me. I consider myself a son of the soil of Rayalaseema, a descendant of the rich sampradaya of the Vijayanagara empire to which my forefathers belonged to. We are aware of the many faults within the society that led to the fall of the empire, but the world view has sustained over the last 500 years. I admire Rushdie for his literary acumen but can’t help but notice his lack of understanding and fairness. His powers of imagination are working only in spurts but even there, his romanticism of the glorious past of Islamic rule in India, as evidenced by the ‘Enchantress’ and now this novel Victory City, makes me wonder if he has learned much at all from all the history books he has read.
To conclude, Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’ indicates a once vibrant artist losing his spark but summoning up enough effort to come out with a derivative story with only a few flashes of his original talent. One could read it once and feel mildly satisfied. But the book will not haunt the reader like the good ones do.
