2023-04-19 23:29:30
ABest to start at the back: In the final pages of his new novel, Victory City, Salman Rushdie brings together a few sources that inspired him to write this one. There are several academic books on the history of India, but also essays like VS Naipaul’s “India – A Wounded Culture”. Also, one whose title is almost identical to that of Rushdie’s novel, City of Victory. This refers to Vijayanagara, a Hindu kingdom in southern India with the capital of the same name that lasted until the Battle of Talikota in 1565. In this it was crushed by the Islamic Deccan sultanates.
Into the historical setting, Rushdie plants a narrative that begins like a fairy tale and soon grows into a parody of a great epic. Between some historical figures he puts an invented over-woman with the fancy name Pampa Kampana, who, as we learn right at the beginning, is said to have lived to be 247 years old and is described as a “miracle worker”, “prophetess” and multiple queen. The present novel is based on their “powerful prose poem” about the rise and fall of their southern Indian empire, which was sealed in a clay jar almost five hundred years ago and was only recently unearthed – although it was “retold in plain language by an author who is neither a scholar nor a poet , just someone who likes to spin threads and presents this version for the simple amusement and perhaps also for the edification of today’s readers”.
The art of exaggeration
This is, of course, a gross understatement, for Rushdie’s narrator, as is usual with his narrators, speaks to us in a highly erudite and very poetic manner over the next four hundred pages – in the manner of gross exaggeration. In this opposite of economic storytelling, nothing is left out, but everything is embellished to the maximum. Rushdie has nurtured it from his early work through the masterpiece The Satanic Verses to the meta-novel Quixote, and again he takes it to the extreme at once. For example, when his epic narrator wants to slam a minor character, simply describing her as a “second-rate king” isn’t enough. Instead, it receives the following sentence cascade: “This second-class one raja there was just enough time on his third-rate throne to build a fourth-rate castle on the banks of the Pampa River, set up a fifth-rate temple in it, and have some lofty inscriptions carved on the rock of a stony mountain” – and that’s the sentence not at the end.
Wounded but alive: Salman Rushdie lost an eye in the assassination attempt in August 2022.
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Image: SalmanRushdie/Twitter
One can, of course, easily justify this rather than criticize it, since it has its function in Rushdie’s postmodern aesthetic, in which everything, absolutely everything, serves the purpose of parody. Men and women, rulers and slaves, culture and war, historical progress and regression, all religions and cults, and last but not least the historical textual forms that describe all this, become the target of ridicule, irony, and grotesque distortion for this author.
Never worked on the farm
In the mild variant, the mockery refers to the partly historical, partly fictitious sources of the story. Mentioned is, for example, the report of a Portuguese traveler about the kingdom of Vijayanagara, who is called Domingo Nunes in the novel. It shows parallels with accounts by Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes from the early sixteenth century, which provide substantial support for the work “A Forgotten Empire” by a British colonial official named Robert Sewell, which is also cited among Rushdie’s sources. Rushdie’s narrator, meanwhile, scoffs at Nunes: “He found it interesting to note the banalities, to name the local produce, and to number the livestock . . . as if he were a farmer, even though he had never worked a single day on a farm.” Taking a stab at colonialism and its literature, Nunes is also said to describe a variety of subjects that locals were not interested in because they were already known to them.
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