In recent decades, Rushdie, who now lives in New York, has been unconcerned, the former death threats after the publication of his “Satanic Verses” (1988) no longer seemed to pose a real threat to him. The author, who naturally moved in the limelight, wrote in his autobiography “Joseph Anton” about a realization of the time when he had to live anonymously and under police protection to protect his life: “There was no such thing as absolute time. There were just varying degrees of uncertainty.”
Two months before the assassination, in which Rushdie was seriously injured, he finished work on his fifteenth novel, Victory City. One inevitably reads the novel, a summary of his work, with a different perspective, since it could have become his literary legacy.
Return to historical India
While Rushdie had recently turned to contemporary American analyzes (“Quichotte”, “Golden House”, “Rage”), he returned to India with “Victory City”, the scene of his greatest works (“Midnight Children”, “Des Mauren’s last sigh”), back, but this time to the past. Victory City is a story of Vijayanagar, a 14th-century South Indian empire.
At the same time, it is a story about Pampa Kampana, a nine-year-old girl at the beginning of the book, who has to watch as her mother and other women set themselves on fire after an attack on their town. The women follow the fallen men to their deaths. Kampana is then endowed with magical powers by a goddess – she is supposed to create an empire in which a woman will never have to burn herself again.
Stories as politics, stories as identity
Later, as an adult, she gives a sack of seeds to two cowherds and tells them they can use it to grow a city. And indeed, a city grows out of the ground, complete with its residents – however, these residents are devoid of any identity and reason: “But for every new area in which people begin to live, it takes a while before it feels real, she said, that may take generations or longer.”
The solution to the problem is “fiction”: Kampana must whisper his or her story into each resident’s ear “to heal the multitude of their unreality”: “She made up their lives, their caste, their beliefs, told them how many siblings they had, what games they played as children; and whispering her stories through the streets of those who needed to hear them, writing the city’s grand narrative, creating its history after creating its life.”
Rushdie’s narrator presents himself as a competent mediator and apparently humble historian: he seems to be citing the epic that Kampana, who lived to be several hundred years old, wrote about her city, only rarely interferes, provides interpretation help by describing human emotions of the 14th century .transported into the language of the 21st century. Admittedly, precisely this narrative strategy is Rushdie’s clou: stories are never neutral, they assign sovereignty of interpretation, establish winners and losers ex post and at the same time serve as orientation in the contradictions of everyday existence.
Toxic Masculinity in the Middle Ages
It is secondary whether one regards stories as truth or fiction – no author knows how to show how thin and manipulable this boundary is more lightly than Rushdie. This quality of understanding stories both as an anthropological necessity and as a political factor, without falling into rigid seriousness, characterizes Rushdie’s most successful novels – in “Victory City” she finds her greatest consequence to date.
In any case, the decidedly feminist perspective is new: “Victory City” is the story of a victim of violence who challenges his patriarchal environment – a world of war and religious striving for power. Kampana, a polyamorous fighter who does not age, lives for centuries and sees her lovers and children die from generation to generation, is a character of immense literary power.
The fact that the world she created keeps collapsing is also due to her radical nature. For example, she excludes three of her sons from the line of succession, challenging the medieval Indian world of toxic masculinity. The way Rushdie narrates this parable, which can confidently be read in the present day, between historiography, myth and fairy tales – all narrative styles that he has perfected over the almost fifty years of his writing – is masterful.
