Victory City is a novel about writing or, perhaps more generally, about creativity. No doubt, my opening statement is sweeping or over-broad or simplistic, but that’s how we do things nowadays, isn’t it? In fact, given its richness, Victory City is probably a novel about a lot of other things, too, but for the time being let’s pretend there’s something to my opening statement and see where it takes us.
Our first hint (that Victory City is about writing) comes from its framing. Our narrator informs us that, in its original form, the text we are reading was a twenty-four thousand line poem written in Sanskrit and rivalling the Ramayana. It is titled the Jayaparajaya or “Victory and Defeat.” Its author is a woman named Pampa Kampana, but the volume we read is a prosaic translation by our humble narrator who may or may not be Salman Rushdie himself.
The first chapter is a series of origin stories, beginning with the origins of the account itself, then moving on to the origins of its author, Pampa Kampana. We learn that, when she was nine, she watched her mother join the other women of her village on a funeral pyre, a mass suicide in response to the defeat of their insignificant kingdom. For the next nine years, Pampa Kampana shared the dirt floor of a cave with an ascetic, a holy man named Vidyasagar. In all that time, Pampa Kampana did not speak, signalling perhaps that words bear an uneasy relationship to silence, as victory does to defeat. Vidyasagar insisted that his conduct in relation to the young girl was exemplary, but our narrator insists otherwise. Like the opposition twined in the narrative’s title, and the opposition of words and silence, the fates of the lying divine and the truthful poetess become twined through the years. As Pampa Kampana observes years later, “If one is to tell an important lie, it’s best to hide it among a crowd of unarguable truths.”
It may be that Vidyasagar was emboldened by Pampa Kampana’s silence, thinking his lie would go unchallenged. However, the girl’s silence ended soon enough when she regained her voice, or at least a voice, the voice of a goddess who empowered her in other ways, too, investing her with great longevity, protracting her youth and forestalling her middle age until she died finally at the age of two hundred and forty-seven, granting her the power to whisper her stories and thoughts into the minds of those around her, and blessing her with other magical powers, too.
Our narrator pauses on occasion to remind the reader what an impoverished world we would inhabit if it were devoid of magic. So, for example, Pampa Kampana laments the fact that her daughters, who have inherited some of her magical powers, will be the last of her line, and magic will go out of the world and leave behind only banality. However, as with every other value in this novel, it doesn’t subsist in a mere binary—like magic and banality—no matter how hard the world tries to impress values into a simple opposition. As the narrator later reminds us, “the miraculous and the everyday are two halves of a single whole.” Magic doesn’t abide exclusively in a transcendent plane; whatever wall divides the transcendent from the everyday is porous and each one of us has access to that magic.
We have the origins of the poem. And of the poetess. Finally, we have the origins of the city, Bisnaga. Two simple cowherds came to call, Hukka and Bukka Sangama, seeking Vidyasagar’s wisdom and secretly hoping to catch a glimpse of the mute beauty who shared his cave. They came bearing gifts, including a sackful of seeds. After nine years of silence, Pampa Kampana spoke to the cowherds with the enriched voice the goddess had bestowed upon her, and instructed them to scatter their seeds. They of course fell in love with the girl and obeyed her unconditionally, and from their seeds rose the city of Bisnaga, and afterwards, its inhabitants rose fully formed from the dirt. Pampa Kampana used her whispering powers to invest this new people with a sense of shared history and of personal narrative. What began as an illusion, in time became real as the people lived into their history and into their personal narratives. “It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives … and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them, writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life.” With seeds and with whispering, Pampa Kampana achieved something no less miraculous than the edifice raised by a great novelist: where there had been nothing before, she summoned up a rich and teeming city.
While Hukka and Bukka were adjusting to their new life as rulers of a great city, and while they professed their love for Pampa Kampana, hoping to win her affections, the man who would prove to be her great love arrived in the city. This was Domingo Nunes, a Portuguese horse trader whose most significant feature was not his red hair nor his green eyes but his speech impediment. He embodies the complement to Pampa Kampana’s poetry. One makes no sense without the other, just as one cannot savour peace without the experience of war, freedom without chains, nor can one invest life with meaning unless their looms the certainty of death.
Domingo Nunes had an ordinary lifespan and grew old while Pampa Kampana remained youthful, but not before he fathered three daughters with her. As life continued for Pampa Kampana, she met in succession three other green eyed red haired Portuguese men who may or may not have been descendants of Domingo Nunes, and while Pampa Kampana felt drawn to each, they were like faded copies of the original, and her feelings for them were similarly diminished.
Like all good tales, this one follows a pattern of exile and return. Roughly half way through her life, Pampa Kampana flees the city of Bisnaga with her daughters and seeks refuge in the forest of the goddess Aranyani. I am of the view that all tales of exile, whether they take the form of an expulsion from the garden, or wanderings around the Mediterranean after doing battle in Troy, or swallowing the red pill and slipping into the Matrix, at bottom all of it is an account of alienation from a previously integrated, possibly mythical, state of being (Eden, Penelope’s embrace, an underground city called Zion). A Freudian might talk about the alienation we all experience when we’re forcibly cast out of the womb. But since I’m restricting my discussion here to writing, I’m inclined to think of alienation as the barrier that persists between each one of us and which we try to penetrate with our clumsy words.
Each of us is fundamentally unknowable and alone, and yet we make heroic attempts to share our interior lives and to attend closely to those attempts by others. Pampa Kampana whispers her stories into the minds of Bisnaga’s citizens, but she isn’t the only one with this ability. When Hukka’s and Bukka’s three brothers, Chukka, Pukka, and Dev, threaten the city, three warrior women are assigned to guard them and these women insinuate thoughts into the brothers’ dreams. Finally, Pukka asks if, when these three women put their heads together, they aren’t communicating brain-to-brain. I suspect many of us entertain a fantasy of unmediated communication and hope, maybe in the afterlife when we have been freed of our bodily limitations, that we will greet those who have gone before with pure thought unencumbered by words. After all, words can obscure meaning, or they can be downright duplicitous. As Pampa Kampana advises the crows and parrots she sends out as spies, it’s important to listen to “the words beneath the words.”
In addition to the spiritual fantasy of unmediated communication, there is the political fantasy of unity. For idealists, the fantasy finds expression in a utopian hope: if only they could hear reason, then they’d agree with us. For pragmatists, the fantasy follows a more coercive tack: if only they’d agree with us, then we wouldn’t have to put up with their reasoning. Such (non)exchanges appear in our public spaces with increasing frequency and it feels like something catastrophic might flow from our failure to reach across barriers and inspire our adversaries to share our vocabularies and usages. Recently, I witnessed this in my hometown as truckers tried to crash their way onto the lawns of the provincial legislature with signs calling for freedom and unity. Onlookers said they, too, support the cause of freedom and unity, but use those words to mean something different. The truckers said the onlookers have been duped by the government; the onlookers said the truckers are uneducated bumpkins. As each side insists they have exclusive access to “the words beneath the words,” the barriers between them become more solid.
Life is not much different in Bisnaga, where each side of an exchange asserts the rightness of their cause while insisting that the other side’s intractability is really just a function of poor communication: if the other side could just understand, then they would change their minds and join the cause. With the deaths of Hukka and later, Bukka, there is a contest for the throne. Pampa Kampana’s old foe, Vidyasagar, acts as kingmaker and puppeteer, installing Pampa Kampana’s middle son on the throne. As the boy’s first act, he outlaws his mother’s magic, declaring Bisnaga a theocracy. In his inaugural speech, he states: “Henceforth our narrative, and our narrative only, will prevail, for it is the only true narrative. All false narratives will be suppressed. The narrative of Pampa Kampana is such a narrative, and it is full of wrong-headed ideas.” From exile in the forest, Pampa continues her whispering: “[S]he would have to persuade many of them that the cultured, inclusive, sophisticated narrative of Bisnaga that she was offering them was a better one than the narrow, exclusionary, and, to her way of thinking, barbarian official narrative of the moment.” I would be remiss if I failed to point out that, at least at this point in the novel, Pampa Kampana’s story overlaps Salman Rushdie’s; he is a man in exile whispering a story of inclusion and enlightenment in the face of powers that insist simple binaries are the only way to talk about things and that dissent is a betrayal.
Despite the serious themes, Rushdie treats the reader to playful moments. There is the occasional Tom-Swifty. ‘“If I may intrude,” Haleya Kote intruded …’ Or ‘”It’s chewy—apart from any other reasons for eschewing it.”’ And in one scene, he hearkens back to Midnight’s Children. A Princess Tirumala of Srirangapatna has an “undeniably impressive nose” which has been celebrated in at least one great poem by Mukku Thimmana whose name means “Nosey Thimmana.” One cannot help but think of Saleem Sinai’s protuberant proboscis and this reminds us that Rushdie has been doing his whispering for a long, long time.
For a while, Pampa Kampana has her way and Bisnaga enjoys a period of inclusion and enlightenment, but forces from within and from without undermine her efforts. Just as the magic that keeps her alive is finally unsustainable, so too the magic that invests life in Bisnaga with its joy and its creativity and its freedoms. This feels to me like a dark conclusion and I wonder if maybe I have missed some sign of hope. But given recent events, not least the attack against Rushdie in Chautauqua, and the recent lynching in eastern Pakistan, I wonder if maybe Rushdie’s Victory City is a prescient document declaring the disappearance of magic from our own declining world.