BookBrowse Reviews Victory City by Salman Rushdie

BookBrowse:

Salman Rushdie's sweeping new novel details the rise and fall of a 14th-century Indian empire, combining historical accounts with magical fantasy.

The city Vijayanagara was founded in the 14th century by two brothers, Hakka and Bukka Sangama, and quickly sprawled into a large empire that covered much of southern India. Hakka and Bukka became the empire's first kings, respectively, and the empire lasted over two hundred years, expanding and contracting with wars, cycling through kings via death and assassination and coups. Salman Rushdie's latest novel, Victory City, traces this empire's history, remaining, it seems, pretty loyal to the facts. Where Rushdie diverts from actual history is the main character he puts at the center of his novel: Pampa Kampana, a woman with magical powers who is the real creator of the city and the behind-the-scenes brains driving many of its operations.

So Victory City seems at first to be a feminist, fictional retelling of a male-dominated history. At age nine, Pampa is visited/inhabited by a goddess who gives her powers and a prophecy: that a great city will rise, and Pampa "will fight to make sure… that men start considering women in new ways." Never mind the prophecy's capaciousness—Pampa takes her mission to heart. In this telling, Pampa provides Hakka and Bukka with magic seeds, from which sprout the infrastructure and citizens of Bisnaga ("Bisnaga" is a butchered Portuguese pronunciation of the city of Vijayanagar). We follow the history of Bisnaga through Pampa's long life in and outside of the city. As queen—she marries Hakka, then Bukka—she champions art and sexual freedom and diplomatizes with a local religious leader whose oppressive, intolerant ideas influence Bisnaga's people. After a coup, she is exiled with her daughters to the enchanted Forest of Women, then returns to Bisnaga years later to continue advocating for policies of equality, separation of government from religion, etc. As the goddess has told her, she will live just long enough to see the empire rise and fall, so Pampa is alive for over two hundred years.

Rushdie's account of the history of Bisnaga is truly interesting and entertaining. Sometimes his strokes are too broad and his movement too plodding, but for the most part there are interesting characters, engaging dialogue and enough detail to flesh out the world without being overwhelming. And the novel works as a subtle satire of contemporary politics—especially in its observations about dictatorial leaders, and about religion as a tool of social control and oppression—but isn't overpowered by that reading. A short arc about a king who is referred to as Number Two—because he's the second of his name, and because he sucks—wouldn't be out of place in a modern satire about Trump's presidency, but it could be cringey and insufferable if made explicit. It works here because Rushdie is so grounded in the history of Bisnaga that modern-day parallels are called to mind but never become the story itself.

Despite Pampa's mission of equality, her writing and her actions aren't exactly feminist. The novel—purportedly a translation of an epic poem by Pampa about her life—lists women in parentheses as an afterthought to men, as in, "They were a brotherhood (and sisterhood) of overpowering warriors." When she and her daughters first arrive at the enchanted Forest of Women, they warn their two male companions that weak-willed men will turn into women upon entering. Pampa calls this a "serious problem," and everyone treats a gender switch as if it would completely change who a person is, not to mention with an implication of how terrible it would be to become a woman. And for a woman who has experienced trauma that she explicitly understands as the result of patriarchy and male oppression—the suicide of her mother, who didn't think life was worth living without men; molestation as a young girl by a monk—Pampa takes little interest in the alternative society of the forest. In the forest, she says, the laws of the outside world "had been blown away like dust… and only nature ruled"; it is filled with "refugees like ourselves from one cruel kingdom or another, or just wild women of the wood, who have chosen to live their lives away from the coarse presumptuousness of men." Is there nothing she can learn from this place, which is free from the oppressive laws and structures that she is attempting to dismantle? Is her curiosity, or envy, not even slightly piqued? Pampa seems to respect the women of the forest—and later risks her life to protect them from colonizing foreigners—but her apparent belief that they have little to do with her, and that the forest is simply a temporary digression from real life and society, is strange.

This hypocrisy is, I imagine, an intentional part of Pampa's character. Her political imagination is limited—she's blessed with enough power and wisdom to play politics well in a patriarchal monarchy, but not enough to transform society into a feminist utopia, or even, it seems, to imagine what that might look like. Victory City reads often like a cynical satire of the liberal project. Placing women in positions of power, as armed guards and royal advisors, isn't actually building the better, progressive society those women may think it is.

But some of Rushdie's other choices seem to transcend this winking hypocrisy and become gleefully misogynistic. Most of the women are described as beautiful, to a point where men are constantly falling in love with them at first sight; these beautiful women rarely need to eat and often succumb happily to the advances of the ugly, cruel or crude men who have taken a liking to them. Pampa physically ages less than 20 years in all her 250 years of life, so that she is beautiful for the whole novel, and men can keep falling in love with her. A woman's beauty is, of course, contingent on her being between 18 and 35 years old; conveniently, Pampa ages normally until she turns 18, so that Rushdie's male characters can ogle her without being creepy.

Victory City suffers as a novel because of this. Rushdie hasn't made Pampa a strong enough character to anchor Bisnaga's centuries-long history. Her inconsistencies in character seem less a product of complexity and more like the author forgetting what he wrote about her earlier on. Her magical powers are too consistently convenient and perfectly calibrated. She reminded me of a pale imitation of Elena Ferrante's Lila, best friend and competitor of Elena, the narrator of the Neapolitan Novels. Lila is fascinating to Elena and to almost everyone who meets her; people want to impress her and tell her things; she is intelligent and imperious and seems to possess some strange power to know the truth and how history will unfold. But for all the realism of Ferrante's novels and all the magical fantasy of Rushdie's, Lila seems more supernatural and mysterious than Pampa does. Lila's power over her small, violent neighborhood is inexplicable, whereas Pampa's has a clear origin. Elena can only guess as to what's going on in Lila's head; when Pampa does something, we know exactly why and how she does it.

Early on in Bisnaga's history, when Pampa provides her newly-created citizens with their backstories, she whispers their lives to them in "that mysterious moment between sleeping and waking." Even then, less than fifty pages into the novel, the word "mysterious" struck me as an overreach: Rushdie wanted to evoke a shadowiness, a surreal sense of possibility, but hadn't earned it. Everything in Bisnaga is cut and dried; for every event, there's someone pulling the strings and an origin story for that person's capabilities. I'm glad this story was told, but I wish it hadn't been so explained.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2023, and has been updated for the February 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.