Salman Rushdie is still best remembered for his book The Satanic Verses, which was published in 1988. While it earned him global notoriety and made him rich, it also garnered a fatwa issued against him from Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini, calling for his murder.
For decades, Rushdie lived in fear, and last summer, a young Lebanese-American man stabbed the Indian-born British writer as he was delivering a lecture at New York’s Chautauqua Institution. Luckily, Rushdie escaped the assassination attempt but lost his eye in the attack.
But apart from the drama associated with his controversial book and attempt on his life, Rushdie is a masterful storyteller. While The Satanic Verses was never translated into Arabic, his other books were.
His most renowned work was the Booker Prize winner Midnight's Children of 1981 and the novel that followed it, 1983’s Shame.
Fast-forward to 2015, and Rushdie—who was at the peak of his career wrote—Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, captivating readers anew as a gracefully ageing writer.
His most recent novel, Victory City, was released in February 2023, a few months after the assassination attempt. He wrote a big chunk of the novel in quarantine while he was fighting for his life after contracting COVID-19.
Surely, it was a tumultuous time in Rusdhie's life, having come close to death twice. Doctors told him that it was nothing short of a miracle that he survived the stabbing attack.
In an interview with the renowned French critic Augustin Trapenard, Rushdie pointed out the irony that a man who didn't believe in miracles was the recipient of one.
Blending myths and legends
In this article, Al Majalla reviews Rushdie's latest novel, Victory City. In it, Rushdie weaves together dozens of Indian myths and other legendary tales related to creation and builds an imaginary city and civilisation.
Rushdie’s imagined world fits with the idea outlined by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran in his book The Fall into Time, in which he wrote, “A civilisation begins by myth and ends in doubt”.
Rushdie’s story of his equivalent world follows this pattern exactly. Victory City breaks away from the rational and logical world to such an extent that it feels like science fiction—at least at first. But that impression is soon shattered.
The extravagant use of imagination in the story provides the backdrop for an idea that gradually evolves and matures within the narrative and subtly takes centre stage. All the while, it eloquently reflects the author's perspective on contemporary and pertinent themes.
In typical Rushdie fashion, it takes readers into his imagination without a preamble, going straight to the narrative.
This is the novel’s epic opening: “On the last day of her life, when she was 247 years old, the blind poet, miracle worker, and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga and buried it in a clay pot sealed with wax in the heart of the ruined Royal Enclosure, as a message to the future."
"Four and a half centuries later, we found that pot and read for the first time the immortal masterpiece named the Jayaparajaya, meaning 'Victory and Defeat,' written in the Sanskrit language, as long as the Ramayana, made up of twenty-four thousand verses, and we learned the secrets of the empire she had concealed from history for more than one hundred and sixty thousand days.”
It starts in the 14th century, after a brutal clash between two forgotten kingdoms in Southern India that robs young Pampa Kampana of her mother, who is gruesomely burned alive in a scene of unparalleled horror.
Yet, fate takes an unexpected turn as the celestial forces, embodied by an ancient goddess, decree that Pampa shall be a monarch, prophetess, and the mouthpiece of the deity, destined to reshape the course of history.
