who offers this version for the simple entertainment and possible edification of today’s readers.” Fortunately for us, Rushdie is a terrific raconteur.īisnaga is an exaggerated, occasionally Marvelesque rendition of Vijayanagar, the historical empire that covered a significant swathe of South India between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its author, we are informed, is “neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns. Pampa’s “immortal masterpiece” in verse, the Jayaparajaya, survives to tell the history of Bisnaga “from its creation to its destruction.” Victory City is presented as a retelling of the events recorded in Pampa’s poem. Bisnaga thrives, falters, picks itself up again, enjoys a few golden ages (some long-lived, others transient), and then wastes away beyond repair. In that time, the kingdom, known to all as Bisnaga, will pass through the hands of a series of rulers, some progressive, others bigoted, all of them men. Women treated on a par with men, the flourishing of the arts, religious tolerance in perpetuity. Pampa Kampana, the demigoddess of Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s incredible new novel, envisions the kingdom she builds from enchanted seeds and whispers as a first-rate utopia.
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