Salman Rushdie’s Victory City. Aesthetics of Thick Description of History. Pradeep Trikha reviews

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Victory City. Salman Rushdie. Penguin Random House India, 2023. 338pages.

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t the outset, Salman Rushdie’s new novel Victory City re-narrates the history of two and a half centuries from the 1340s to 1590s. The period is regarded as one of the richest historical periods, Rushdie’s art of ‘thick description’ (to use Gadamer’s term) has already been revealed through his earlier fictional writings like Shame (1983) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), The Victory City records the rise and fall of the Vijayanagar Kingdom.  Actually, the ‘thick description’ in Victory City is more than an analytical consideration of context; it is rather an articulation of how we see and understand. Drawing on the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, there is an aesthetic quality to our experience that is never completely rendered visible in our accounts. ‘Perhaps this is because we do not draw on context to make sense of the evidence presented; we see and understand in contexts—physical, historical, cultural, linguistic, moral, experiential, affective—that we venture in, as Clifford Geertz put it, as we conjure our interpretations of what is going on’¹. It is only by allowing ourselves to be guided by critically questioning the complexity of our contextualized responses that we can gain a better grasp of this complex architecture that is analysis.  Per his habitual tenor, Rushdie moves forward and backwards in time and space, defying linearity and logic. It is the story of Pampa Campana, a mysterious woman, believed to possess the powers of enchantment, attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. Victory City is a stunning book full of wonders. The narrative consists of four parts-  ‘Birth’, ‘Exile’, ‘Glory’ and ‘Fall’ divided into twenty-two chapters. At times the chapters are interconnected and at instances, each chapter reads like a story. The novel is billed as a historical romance reflecting mutual suspicion and mistrust among the generations. Victory City brings forth Rushdie’s excellence in ‘narrative engineering’. The narrative represents a turn from present to past from politics to poetics. Rushdie even tries to respond to the current trends in research that replenishes postmodern and post-colonial and inter-contextual studies. It is not the first time that Rushdie focuses on intertextual studies. He employed it in The Enchantress of Florence and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Along with intertextuality he employs the tools of new historicism in order to yield a complete and critical value of works of art.

The novel has the potential to be read like a postcolonial text, for instance, one of the founders of the city remarks:

‘The day will come, Bukka said mutinously, ‘when we will no longer allow foreigners to tell us who we are

(Thanks to Pampa Kampana’s amused delight in Domingo Nunes and his garbled mispronunciation, she chose to refer to both the city and the empire as ‘Bisnaga’ throughout her epic poem, intending, perhaps, to remind us that while her work is based on real events, there is an inevitable distance between the imagined world and the actual. ‘Bisnaga’ belongs not to history but to her…After all, a poem is not an essay or a news report. The reality of poetry and imagination follows its own rules. (p. 33)

 

The epic of the Vijayanagar kingdom Jayaparajaya (‘Victory and Defeat’) consisting of twenty-four thousand verses in Sanskrit and Kampana’s life span is 247 years. Once she creates the name for the city she decides to write an epic by making up the stories of its people, their castes and faiths, and their family relations thus giving rise to the grand narrative of the city. Interestingly the novel is a celebration of the power of words:

What they did, or thought, or felt, no longer exists,
Only these words describing those things remain.
They will be remembered in the way I have chosen to remember them.
Their deeds will only be known in the way they have been set down,
They will mean what I wish them to mean.
I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words.
Words are the only victors’ (p. 338)

The prefatory remarks of the writer in Part Two of Victory City are:

The jungle stands at the heart of the great ancient tales. In Mahabharat of Vyasa, Queen Draupadi and her five husbands…..spent thirteen years in exile… In Valmiki’s Ramayana, the lady Sita and the brothers Ram and Lakshman are exiled…. for fourteen years. In Pampa Kampana’s               Jayaparajaya, she tells us her time in exile, which is to say vanvaas, plus her time in hiding in disguise, which is agyatvaas, added up to a total of one hundred and thirty-two years. By the time she re-emerged in triumph, everyone whom she had ever loved was dead. Or almost everyone. (p. 121).

Rushdie’s love for the epical sweep in his writings is unflinching. He weaves his narrative fabulously through his boisterous imagination which he does through new historicism. As a child, Pampa Kampana was touched by the goddess who speaks through her for the rest of her life. It is through divine power that she convinces Hukka (Harihara Sangama in actual history) and Bukka Sangama to establish the city by scattering vegetable seeds. She becomes a queen consort to Hukka Sangama and enjoys the power and glory of the empire and falls in love with Dunes, a Portuguese horse trader who pronounces Vijayanagar as ‘Bisnaga’.

However, the people who brought Victory city to life and their descendants subsequently brought its downfall. Pampa Kampana wanted ‘Bisnaga’ to attain the status of a perfect city, but eventually, it became a city of imperfection, instability and bigotry after the death of Krishnadevaraya  Kampana vouches:

But there is an invisible temple you and I will build, and its building blocks will be prosperity, happiness and equality. And also, of course, your overwhelming military success. (p. 258)

Another perspective from which the novel can be interpreted is that of gender equality.  Pampa Kampana was strongly in favour of women having equal rights in succession:

Women, she said, should have the same rights of succession to the throne as men, and that if  he agreed and the appropriate proclamation, could be devised and approved by the royal council, it would  then be  necessary for a  decision to be made as to whether  the bloodline and Hukka or Bukka should determine the future of dynasty (p. 94)

 

Victory City is the novel based on Pampa Kampana’s epic on, ‘the Bisnaga’s empire which narrates about, ‘…its women warriors, its mountains of gold, its generosity of spirit and its lines of mean-spiritedness, its weakness and its strengths (p. 4). An unnamed narrator also tells us: ‘We knew only the ruins that remained, and our memory its history was ruined as well, by the passage of time, the ‘imperfections of memory’ and the falsehoods of those who came after

In the acknowledgements to the Victory City Rushdie enlists the books he referenced including the history of Vijayanagar from the early 14^th to the later 16^th centuries.

History is often written in the light of political agendas, but Rushdie’s notion is to advocate in favour of kindness and humaneness. As a humanist, his focus is on justice, respect and equality and similar codes of conduct for any civil society. Since the novel deals with power politics, it inevitably also deals with class oppression and marginalization that turns into resistance, resilience and empowerment.

Work Cited

1. The Hermeneutical Aesthetics of Thick Description – Melissa Freeman, 2014 (sagepub.com)

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Pradeep Trikha, is Professor in the Department of English, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India