"All that remains is the city of words. Words are the only victors."

In Victory City, Rushdie blends historical fact, religion, and fiction into this story of Bisnaga, the victory city, created by and with history told by the poet Pampa Kampana. In the end we are left with the question of what is truth and what is history. We cannot truly know what people thought, did, or experienced. We only know the words and evidence they left behind.

I really liked this book. It was thought provoking and left me wanting to research the historical events. It seems to me that it has a lot to say, not only about history, but about story-telling as well. ( )

I have never once managed to finish a Salman Rushdie book - not even this one - but audiobooks have revolutionised accessibility for me and this author. Victory City is the perfect story to listen to as it is framed by the narrative of being an epic poem, sealed in a jar and buried for centuries and now discovered and translated and simplified for all of us. I am not sure if it is a fairy tale but it certainly has many of the elements: animals who talk; magic; heroes and villains; and snippets of 'threeness' running throughout.

At the age of nine, Pampa sees her mother burned to ashes and vows that she will work to stop this ritual. Through this promise, she is seen by the gods and given an extended life and several magical qualities to enable this to happen. This trauma drives much of the tale and gives it its feminist view.

Pampa Kampana obtains some seeds, bean and okra, which she scatters across the land and out of them creates a city, Bisnaga, and its people. She breathes life into the people and then whispers their history to them until it becomes theirs. Her one aim is to become a monarch, her divine promise - gender equality.

Despite her extended life, Pampa eventually tires: she has had three husbands; built and overseen a city; kept an eye on her complicated extended family and finally had her eyes poked out. There have been wars and drought and dealings with many chauvanistic or mysoginistic men who have made the wrong decision. She has been revered as a goddess, despised as a witch, admired as a poet and feared as a warrior. And so she meets a scribe who can help her record her story.

Religion is a backdrop to this story. At one point as the first Princes are building an army they wonder whether it matters if the soldiers are circumcised or not. It turns out it doesn't really matter. A soldier is a soldier. But later on in the story, Kings are corrupted by religion and their views on women become dictatorial and confining. We see this feminism and chauvanism playing out time and time again across the centuries, ebbing and flowing like a tide along with creation and destruction.

There are many references to other texts: people turning into birds as in Metamorhphoses and at one point Pampa falls asleep surrounded by a thicket of brambles reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty. The story could also be read as a post-colonial text with the idea that 'we will no longer allow foreigners to tell us who we are' and the pink monkeys who bring the need for cash and buying and selling are seen off after a particularly large battle. At one point it is also remarked that 'fictions could be as powerful as histories'.

But whilst this is supposedly an ancient story, it is also a portal into current times as well. India is presently undergoing a nationalistic moment (as are many countries) with Modi and the Hindu Nationalists, where faith and power 'have grown too close together'.

So, what is left at the end? Destruction of Bisnaga but

All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors.
End of the audiobook ( )

Victory City, Salman Rushdie, author, Sid Sagar, narrator
Centuries ago, when Pampa Kampana was 9 years old, in India, she watched, horrified, as her mother entered the funeral pyre, following other women who had gone before her. It was the common practice of the day for widows, but Pampa was unprepared for what she witnessed. As her mother self-immolated, in what was the common practice of suicide for widows in those days, the spirit of a goddess entered Pampa. This Goddess called Parvati, speaking directly through her, told her of her future. She would live for an additional 200 years after she created a magnificent city and future empire. After her death, her story would remain hidden for 450 years. She would not have the power to prevent any of this from happening. It was her fate. After this possession of her spirit by Parvati Pampa did not speak for the following 9 years.
Suddenly, Pampa discovered she was literate. She was given a bag of seeds by the Goddess which she passed on to two brothers. They become the architects of her city, simply by planting them. As they watched the magical rising of a city from seeds, like plants, the magic astounded them. Suddenly they were filled with thoughts of grandeur and decided that they would become the heirs to the throne in this city, and so they became the future rulers, beginning the march toward Pampa’s end. Although the city would rise and become spectacular, with hopes for a world of beauty and love, the human frailties of greed and the desire for power would bring about its demise.
The tale, often requiring the suspension of disbelief, as it uses magical realism, anthropomorphism and transmogrification to illustrate and mock the shallowness and pettiness of the values we live by and cherish, often foolishly, our similarities and differences appear in stark contrast. The novel will demonstrate how our stubbornness to adhere to destructive desires will bring about the eventual end of what was meant to be a utopian world, that instead, descended into a world filled with injustice, and man’s inhumanity to man.
Because the prose is so beautiful, and the narrator reads the words with such feeling, it is difficult to stop listening, even when the tale gets so entangled in ideas, unknown places and characters that it grows confusing. As the author presents a fantasy that mocks our world, a world often rife with petty grievances, it is often humorous and often sarcastic. The readers cannot help thinking about the situation in our current culture that causes unrest and wars as they watch Pampa Kampana’s life reveal itself.
Pampa does not age and is forced to watch as her lovers, husbands and children age before her, eventually dying and leaving her behind. Using real cities and people from history, Rushdie blends facts and fiction to create this allegory. His message about the moral decadence of our world is obvious although it is hidden in this very creative, if not always easy to read, fantasy. Rushdie mocks our religious beliefs, and our social and cultural mores as he exposes, among other things, the racism, xenophobia, conflicting religious practices, sexual deviance, homophobia, greed, jealousy, and hunger for fame, fortune and power that humans are heir to. He deftly reveals the cracks in our own society that he seems to feel will eventually destroy us, as well, because of our human frailties. Sometimes crude, sometimes outlandish, it is always on point exposing society’s ills. It is very provocative as it questions every value we cling to, values that are often self-destructive and condescending. Sexual behavior is often exaggerated or stressed as Pampa suffers the consequences of the exigencies of her life. Occasionally, the language seems unnecessarily crude, but I expect that the author is also mocking our use of language to hurt others. Words can cause destruction. The allusion to pink monkeys warring with monkeys of other colors, is obviously an illusion to racism and the use of elephants reminded me that there are many elephants in the room that we ignore. ( )

This book mixes magic and history to produce a gripping story, a delight to hear that becomes compulsive as it nears its end. I won't synopsize the story: many other reviewers (and reviews) have done that. Rather, I will note the beauty and gaiety of the prose -- for me, the book was never heavy nor "difficult". The main character dominates, with the other characters realized through their relationships with her. The other dominate force is history, the child of human nature, which revolves endlessly. In the end, the central character says (and Rushdie must believe) all that matters is the word. ( )

The Vijayanagar Empire ruled large parts of southern India from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. It comes up in the margins of foreign travellers' accounts of India from Ibn Battuta to Portuguese and Venetian merchant adventurers, and it seems to have experienced a revival of interest lately from historians who see it as a model of Hindu resistance to the military and political advance of Islam.

Rushdie takes the history of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar as the framework for a magic-realist historical novel in which he is setting out quite a different kind of agenda. His narrator (through a Long Lost Manuscript), the prophet and matriarch Pampa Kampana, whose adult life corresponds exactly to the two hundred and fifty year life of the city she founded, has a vision of her creation as a liberal paradise founded on principles of equal opportunity and religious toleration. Well, we all know how that's going to end, don't we...? Bigotry, ambition, and (male) selfishness undermine her ambitions time and time again, and in the end the city is destroyed by a coalition of enemies.

In the circumstances, this somehow felt like a far less bitter and pessimistic book than the one Rushdie might have written. He may not have much faith in humanity's competence to run a city or a planet without messing up, but he is prepared to give a lot of credit to individuals for trying to make the world less awful. Especially if they happen to be ninja princesses. And he peppers the narrative with his usual half-buried literary jokes where we least expect them — I particularly enjoyed the little nod to R K Narayan which popped up out of nowhere at one of the darker moments in the story. ( )