City of Words

In “Victory City,” Salman Rushdie imagines words will outlast us all

Structurally, Salman Rushdie’s fifteenth novel – “Victory City” – takes the form of an ouroboros, the ancient image of a snake devouring its own tail, creating a closed loop.

Symbolically, the ouroboros represents the interconnected cycle of destruction and rebirth, and that is precisely what Rushdie took as his subject in this 2023 work.

The book begins and ends in the 1500s with the same scene: a 247-year-old blind poet and prophetess named Pampa Kampana burying her 24,000-verse epic poem, written in Sanskrit, chronicling the rise and fall of an ancient city called Bisnaga.

“Victory City” is also a story within a story – a modern retelling and explanation of the events of the epic poem after it is unearthed more than 450 years later.

“We knew only the ruins that remained,” the narrator tells us early on, “and our memory of its history was ruined as well, by the passage of time, the imperfections of memory, and the falsehoods of those who came after.”

The poem – and by extension, the book – serve to fill in the gaps – and correct the misunderstandings – of what happened in Bisnaga ages ago, beginning before the city even existed.

The savvy reader quickly spots several of Rushdie’s ongoing literary fixations: history, time, memory, religion and stories.

To be clear, both the epic poem and the city it chronicles are fictional creations of the author. Rushdie did, however, draw inspiration from the real-life Vijayanagara Empire that ruled southern India from the mid-1300s to the mid-1600s.

In Rushdie’s hands, what started out as historical fact soon becomes much more, and Bisnaga is no ordinary city.

As we discover, Bisnaga and its inhabitants were literally whispered into existence by the poet, Pampa Kampana, after, at the age of 9, she watches her mother walk into a bonfire to be burned alive.

Not surprisingly, that experience transforms her, both mentally and physically. She resolves not to follow her mother into ruin.

“She would laugh at death,” we are told, “and turn her face toward life. She would not sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld. She would refuse to die young and live, instead, to be impossibly, defiantly old.”

Inhabited by a goddess, Pampa Kampana gains the aforementioned power to create adult men and women – and new cities for them to inhabit – from mere vegetable seeds, and to then whisper the sprouted beings into full consciousness. She also acquires the ability to transform both herself and others into animals – birds, for example – when the need arises.

What follows is a succession of kings, queens, mistresses, advisors, and, of course, political intrigues, some that end triumphantly, some that end in decapitation. As time marches on, Pampa Kampana bears witness to – and eventually composes verses about – all that transpires in Bisnaga and its extended kingdom.

But fate makes her far more than a mere witness, and before her own story is complete, she loses her eyes at the hands of an angry king.

In an exceptionally eerie instance of fiction foreshadowing life, Rushie himself was stabbed multiple times by an assailant after “Victory City” was written but before it was published. Rushdie’s injuries included the loss of his right eye.

Now 77, Rushdie found a compelling leading lady in Pampa Kampana, who is, by turns, defiant, mystical and, to the end, heroically committed to her poetic mission.

In her final reflections – having outlived multiple generations of her own family, as well as a myriad of rulers – Pampa Kampana realizes that words alone have the power to last, and that a city of words is all that remains.

In the hands of a mythic “spinner of yarns” like Rushdie, that’s all you need.

To purchase your own copy of “Victory City,” visit bookshop.org, the indie bookstore alternative to Amazon.

###