By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Mr. Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, was published by Random House in 2023. From David Remnick’s article in The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/salman-rushdie-recovery-victory-city) published in the February 13 & 20 issue, which includes an interview with Mr. Rushdie, I learnt that Mr. Rushdie finished writing the book last summer.
Mr. Rushdie, who is all of 75, the numerical age of Free India, arguably, has witnessed as much history-making and mythmaking as the main character of Victory City, Pampa Kampana, who was 247 years old when she died in 1565. This woman, whose age wouldn't surprise anyone who is familiar with the lore and legends of his or her own culture, this woman, when she was 18, open-sesame-d a city with a sackful of magic seeds. Instantly, she filled this city with people, whispering purpose into the surprised human shells. She, who was Queen Consort not once but twice (she aged very, very slowly) and Queen Regent once, ended up being blinded with a hot iron rod (no, she couldn’t prevent that, nor the approaching doom of the Empire), by the decree of the most famous ruler of the empire.
Long before Victory City, or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Stranger Things, Mr. Rushdie showed us his own blessings. From the start, from Midnight’s Children (1981), his words were, for his gaping readers, crouching tigers and hidden dragons, and his characters, stranger things. Victory City, which, we are told, is a retelling in prose of Pampa Kampana’s "immense narrative poem”, lets the Johnny Mo-like Grandmaster Li, and his pupils, the three princesses, perform fantastic acrobatics, and it secrets away benevolent magic in the mind of Pampa Kampana, thus stripping down the narrator’s words to the point of no misinterpretation. The words construct a cautionary tale.
Pampa Kampana outlived several generations. There was no escape for her until she had accomplished the tasks that were divinely assigned to her. She had to begin the story of this medieval Indian empire. She had to be an engine of change. When she could no longer make any difference, she had to finish the final, important assignment of whispering to us all, the almost-Queen becoming the female bard of Bisnaga. She knew them all, the protagonists and the bit players, and had, additionally, a fugitive's view, a bird's eye view and a blind woman's view. On the last day of her life, she wrote about the event she foresaw long ago, the ruin of the magnificent capital city.
For those of you who are interested, here’s a long excerpt from Chapter 11:
"The Remonstrance had grown. Haleya Kote found many members willing to … shield him from unwelcome attention. It was no longer a small, insignificant cult, could now count its secret supporters in the thousands, and had changed its demands, dropping its less palatable early proposals and adopting, instead, an inclusive, kindly, syncretist worldview, which had turned it into a popular, although banned, opposition party. Its platform had the unusual characteristic of looking forward by looking back – in other words, it wanted the future to be what the past had been, and so turned nostalgia into a new kind of radical idea, according to which the terms "back” and "forward” were synonyms rather than opposites, and described the same movement, in the same direction.
"There were handwritten leaflets scattered all over town, and graffiti on walls, but neither remained where they were put for very long. The gangs of the regime swept up the leaflets and burned them, and the graffiti artists knew that their archenemies would be close at hand, so they had to work fast. A single word was as much as anyone could put up, and by the next morning it had been washed away. So it was hard to protest, and yet the effort continued. The Remonstrance contained many highly motivated persons. Haleya Kote heard more than once the story of the heroic protestor who dared to stand alone at the heart of the bazaar distributing pamphlets. When the DAS [Divine Ascendancy Senate] squad arrived to arrest him they found that the sheets of paper he was distributing were blank. No text was written on them, there were no drawings or coded messages, nothing at all. Somehow this blankness angered the DAS team even more than slogans or cartoons would have.
"What does this mean?” they demanded. “Why isn’t there any message written here?”
"There’s no need,’ the protestor replied. “Everything is clear.”"
In Chapter 12, Pampa Kampana, living incognito in Bisnaga, whispers to Deva Raya, the current king, who is her grandson:
"From her alcove behind the almirah she began to whisper into the king’s ears. In the depths of his palace Deva Raya clutched at his head, not knowing where these extraordinary new thoughts were coming from all at once – not understanding how it was possible that he was having such inspirations…”
"The voice in his head told him to forget war and bigotry.”
If Deva Raya was reminded of his legendary grandmother, he brushed such thoughts aside:
"She had probably been a mean old woman, but no sorceress, and now she was gone, and that old world could disappear along with her. All he wanted was to listen to the voice of his own genius in his head, pointing the way towards the future. Now it was time for aqueducts, mathematics, ships, ambassadors, and poetry.”
Also from Chapter 12:
"In those days [90 years after Pampa Kampana gave Hukka and Bukka Sangama the magic seeds to invent Bisnaga] the people of Bisnaga had a complicated relationship with memories. Perhaps they distrusted them unconsciously, without even knowing or believing that at the beginning of time Pampa Kampana had planted fictional histories in their ancestors, and created the whole city out of her fertile imagination. At any rate, they were people who had little regard for yesterdays. They chose – like the denizens of Aranyani’s forest! – to live wholly in the present, without much interest in what came before, and if they needed to think about any day other than today, then that day was tomorrow. This made Bisnaga a dynamic place, capable of immense forward-looking energy, but also a place that suffered from the problem of all amnesiacs, which was that to turn away from history was to make possible a cyclical repetition of its crimes.”
It should be apparent even from these few excerpts that the narrator of Victory City is a mere storyteller who humbly reproduces Pampa Kampana’s original story. He (or she) does not take sides or promote any ideology. He (or she) is neither a neo-nostalgist nor an amnesiac. The reader is as free to disagree with Pampa Kampana’s views as she is to agree with them.
The murderous assault on Mr. Rushdie on August 12, 2022 at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state has resulted in several health setbacks for him. He can no longer see with his right eye.
Comments