The fabulous imprecision of history

Salman Rushdie's style of retelling history as fable is evident in his latest novel, Victory City, as he creates a narrative that mixes fact and myth to create a captivating story

Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City, is framed and animated by something ephemeral. Whispered histories. Histories that are fiction, and vice versa. Contorted histories, posing as grand mythologies. Troubled histories. Histories that spawn new histories; histories that multiply and mutate and change the course of a narrative.

This is the story of the Bisnaga Empire, its history retold by an anonymous narrator who is “neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns…” The self-deprecatory narrator is part of a group (a tantalising “we” appears in the beginning of the novel) that has unearthed a clay pot that contains an ancient Sanskrit poem — the Jayaparajaya or “Victory and Defeat”. This poem, 2,400 verses long, has been composed by Pampa Kampana, the divinely gifted progenitor of cities, who is 247 years old when she buries it on the last day of her life.

The poem’s discovery, four and a half centuries later, and its retelling “in plainer language”, is the resurrection of 14th century Bisnaga, the city that has emerged from seeds scattered upon rocky ground by its founders, Hukka and Bukka Sangama. Pampa Kampana, we glean from the narrator, has offered the new city and its people a history, by whispering to them a variety of fictions. “The new people need stories to tell them what kind of people they are, honest, dishonest, or something in between. Soon the whole city will have stories, memories, friendships, rivalries,” she informs the Portuguese visitor, Domingo Nunes, as she whispers to the citizens of Bisnaga about their lineage, their childhoods, their faiths.

This act of creating a narrative by recasting history as fable is quintessentially the Rushdian oeuvre. Several of his novels are euphoric reinterpretations of real events — the politics of a land intermingling with the gods and myths of its people, resulting in incredulous histories. Midnight’s Children (1981), with its magic-realist cities, immediately springs to mind. Victory City, which draws from this tradition, is a fabulous retelling of the fortunes of the Vijayanagara Empire, established by the Sangama brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya I, in the southern parts of India.

To return to Bisnaga, the city that has grown from seeds, its glories and tragedies are parablesque sketches of the modern metropolis. In an ideal society, women are equal to men, and are active participants in administering the state, in laying down its laws, its social and sexual mores. In Bisnaga, during the reign of Bukka Raya I, Pampa Kampana, his polyamorous queen, trains women woodcarvers and stonemasons and brings erotic art to residential quarters, bars, bazaars, hostelries. She transforms Bisnaga into “a place of laughter, happiness and frequent and variegated sexual delight”. She also suggests to the royal council that women should have the same rights of succession to the throne as men: “To deny this possibility is an untenable position. It must be rethought.” But the city, with its women warriors, judges, bailiffs, and skilled woodcarvers, also rumbles with rebellion. Puritanical forces are at play, creating schisms between its citizens, several of whom are influenced by the zealot Vidyasagar. Factions are formed, military expeditions are planned, an army retreats, the king dies, and Pampa Kampana escapes into the jungle.

The jungle is a recurrent motif in Mr Rushdie’s narratives. In Midnight’s Children, the labyrinthine Sunderbans is a site of befuddlement and terror: “… the jungle which is so thick that history has hardly ever found the way in”. In Victory City the jungle is where Pampa Kampana, her three daughters, Grandmaster Li Ye-He (their martial arts instructor), and Haleya Kote (former soldier, underground radical, the empire’s political advisor) seek refuge. They build a home with the permission of the spirits and deities of the forest; they converse with its live creatures. Pampa Kampana recruits a team of parrots and crows to fly into Bisnaga and bring back news of her beloved city. The jungle, exilic location of grand epics, is where Pampa Kampana regains her strength (for even the nearly immortal may find their spirits withered in the real world), and strategises for the future.

Victory City, with its supernatural heroine, its city that blooms from seeds, its eras that turn from golden to ashen, its kings, bigots, and foreign visitors, is an epic, or an epic reconfigured for a modern age. Bisnaga teems with an urbane crowd; characters from history are altered to suit the course of this tale; fact and myth collide to create pleasing confusions. For instance, the stammering Portuguese visitor Domingo Nunes, (one of Pampa Kampana’s many lovers) could be Domingo Paes, who did actually visit the Vijayanagara Empire. But he arrived in the 16th century, while Mr Rushdie’s epic (or is it Pampa Kampana’s?) is set in the 14th century. But then, Victory City isn’t a history textbook. It is the inexact story of an empire; so made-up, so real.

The writer is the author of Stillborn Season, a novel set amidst the anti-Sikh riots of 1984