The Power of the Story

 Victory City by Salman Rushdie

It is amazing to see how much of real history finds its way into Rushdie's latest novel Victory City. Rushdie does his normal blending of fact and fantasy telling the story of the Vijayanagara empire that ruled over much of southern and central India between the 14th and 16th centuries. His Saleem Sinai in this case is Pampa Kampana, a nine-year girl who witnesses a mass Sati when the Kampili empire falls to Muslim invaders. As she watches her mother walk into the flames she vows she will never let something like that happen ever again. Her vow is backed by a divine power that gives her a life span exactly matching that of the Vijayanagara empire - and she proceeds to build it from the ashes of the battle of Kampili. We hear her story as she pens it down in her JayaParajaya epic and it is this creation that outlives her empire. It also forms the basis of the book, the author tells us.

Bisnaga is the name she gives the city she births, and we follow the story wide-eyed with wonder - from the first rulers Hukka and Bukka (Harihararaya I and Bukkaraya I), through the golden age of Devaraya II, the fall of the Sangama dynasty and the rise of the Tuluva dynast with Krishnadevaraya as the shining pinnacle of the empire. Through it all, Rushdie does his trademark magic - enchanted forests and talking animals, seeds that grow a full-fledged city, whispered stories turning real, metamorphoses and soothsaying. He also has wicked fun with his allusions - the three sons of Bukka are named after famous Karnataka cricketers, two brothers Narayan and Laxman, enter the story somewhere, Pampa Kampana cannot distinguish between the foreign travellers she falls in love with (all these white men look the same to her!), pink monkeys invade a forest after turning the native inhabitants against each other. Rushdie does Rushdie very well indeed.

And yet... this book feels different. For one, it is a linear story, unusual for a Rushdie novel. And while his writing continues to enthrall, I miss his incredible word play that can stop you in your tracks, marveling at his command of the language. It is far more sedate - in some ways a dilution of the classic Rushdie novel.

But I will not complain. His themes remain constant - the need for syncretism and tolerance for cultural differences, the love of art and poetry and architecture and everything that gives joy to human life, and ultimately the belief in the power of stories and words. We need the re-iteration of these themes in our polarized world and every Rushdie novel is one. Heck, his life is one.

Victory City makes me long to go see Hampi. It also makes me grateful that there is still a Rushdie in our midst, continuing to spin his yarns, making magic as he goes along.

Joseph Anton

 By Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has in some ways, become something more than a novelist. Khomeini’s fatwa ensured that. History will judge him not just for the overblown, over-rich, over-everything style of writing he brought into being, but also for being the polarising Galileo figure of the last few decades of the twentieth century.

I am a fan and I read Joseph Anton as one. Even if I could never finish his Satanic Verses, the book at the heart of all the controversy, having lost interest in it midway, I loved some of his others – Midnight’s Children, The Enchantress of Florence, Haroun, Fury.  I suppose it makes a difference. I can forgive almost anything of anyone, if he or she can tell me a good story. Rushdie can most certainly do that.

Joseph Anton is the name Rushdie went by in his years of hiding – a coming together of the names of two writers he admired – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. And this is an engrossing memoir, written surprisingly in third person, of all those years of dodging a bullet or a knife, a story told only the way Rushdie can –no holds barred, candid, humourous at times, starkly cruel at others. There is name-dropping of the highest degree – Thatcher, Blair, McEwan, Pinter, Hitchens, Clinton, Styron, Pynchon, Roy, Le Carre among others. There is intensely personal stuff – his four marriages and their coming apart, his love-hate relationships with his father and sisters, his love for his children and his fear for them, his own cowardice at times of great fear and stress. And then there is his sense of himself as standing for something more than himself, standing for a principle, representing the good fight, the fight against tyranny and fundamentalism, the fight for human heterogeneity and multiple identities, and the right to tell stories any way we want.

Rushdie makes that fight the base storyline that runs through the book. And anyone who stands on the other side of the line- Le Carre, Cat Stevens, The Telegraph, the British Government - come in for contempt and criticism. And that is as it should be. For Rushdie, as a story teller, there is nothing more fearsome than attempts to block the wellspring from which the stories spring – the myths of our race, the ability to see reality through different perspectives, the flexibility to twist our stories into whatever shape that is most interesting. Any religion’s or any ideology’s wont to suppress this is what he believes the world of art should fight against. Some people see this as another example of a rigid ideology too – an inability to see the side of people with faith, who believe in the absolutism of the One True God. And there have been not-so-flattering reviews of the book in this light.

But it is a good fight that Rushdie fights. There can be no two ways about it, in my book. The moment we agree to let someone else censor our words, we let ourselves create an Orwellian world. Joseph Anton should be read if only to keep that fight alive.

But there are other reasons to read it too. Prurience, for example. Salman Rushdie writes of his encounter with William Styron – “His main memory of that trip would be of William Styrons genitalia. Elizabeth and he visited the Styrons at their Vineyard Haven home and there on the porch was the great writer in khakhi shorts, sitting with his legs splayed and wearing no pants, his treasures generously and fully on display. This was more than he had ever hoped to know about the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice, but all information was useful, he supposed, and he duly filed it away for later use.” Or the insight it gives into the writer’s craft – “”You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t – you shouldn’t – tell their story.” Or prurience again, the instinct for gossip all of us carry in our hearts. Here is Rushdie talking of Padma Lakshmi, his fourth wife “…and as he watched her pose and pirouette for the human wall of screaming photographers, burning with the bright flame of her youth and beauty, he looked at the expression on her face and suddenly thought, She’s having sex, sex with hundreds of men at the same time, and they don’t even get to touch her, there’s no way any actual man can compete with that.”

But beyond it all – the gossip, the encounters with famous people, the flaws in his own personality - Joseph Anton needs to be read for the passionate defence of free speech that it truly is. “Compromise destroyed the compromiser and did not placate the uncompromising foe… The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace. Good men would give in to fear and call it respect.” It is a thought worth remembering, especially for us liberal sorts, who can be quite apologetic about individual responsibility in the face of religion and the rage against America.

Joseph Anton is more than a memoir of a famous man.

The Enchantress of Florence

Salman Rushdie

A new book from Rushdie always promises to be a treat. This is one, albeit with a slightly confusing aftertaste.

The book has all the requisite elements to make it a Rushdie block buster – fabulous storytellers and their stories within stories, unbelievably beautiful princesses and kings who are all too human, history and magic, the Arabian Nights feel. There is the sensory overload of the colour and enchantment of places that have come to signify the magic of the East – Tabriz and Samarkand, Ferghana and Herat, Sikri and Stamboul. And of course the constant attempt to make connections between the East and the West.

Renaissance Florence and Akbar’s court in Sikri are the West and the East. And in the travels between the two, we make excursions into the Ottoman empire and the Safavid, encountering figures that we know through history books and most of who in Rushdie’s skilled hands come alive as real people.

A stranger comes to Akbar’s court in Sikri to tell him a tale of a lost princess’ a woman extraordinarily beautiful and enchanting. She is Qara Koz, Babar’s little sister, a princess of such unearthly beauty, kings and conquerors would kill and die for her. Yet she is someone ‘history forgot’. She is passed on as bounty in the battles between Babar, the Saffavid ruler Shah Ismail and the Ottoman Sultan Selim. Each of the battles is historical fact, Babar was indeed driven out of Samarkand by Shah Ismail, who in turn was beaten at the battle of Chaldiran by Sultan Selim. And when Sultan Selim’s mercenary Florentine commander Argalia claims Qara Koz, her path to Renaissance Florence is paved. The Mughal princess becomes Angelica, the enchantress of Florence.

At the heart of the stranger’s tale is the story of 3 friends in Italy, Machiavelli (yes, the same one), Ago Vespucci (a cousin of Amerigo) and Antonino Argalia; each of whom has a special role to play in the Enchantress’s life. It is Argalia who brings her to Florence and Vespucci and Machiavelli who help her escape it once her enchantment fades.

The stranger claims to be Qara Koz’s son, yet Akbar knows it can’t be true - a son of his great aunt cannot be young enough to be his. Yet he hears him out, and in the hearing, is enchanted by his great-aunt himself. This enchantment is worse than his infatuation with Jodha, his imaginary perfect queen (Rushdie makes Jodha a figment of Akbar’s imagination) and when the spell breaks, as it did in Florence too a generation ago, there is disaster. Sikri has to be abandoned when the lake runs dry as the river in Florence did when the enchantress was forced to flee the city.

Akbar’s court and Florence during the Renaissance are filled with intrigue and betrayal, yet are inexorably colourful and talented and rambunctious and magical. There is a lot of Akbar in the book, yet for me, he does not come alive in the way Argalia and Machiavelli do. Akbar is the philosopher-king and he does seem way ahead of his time in his doubts about religion and kingship. Yet his portrait reeks of the text book, as if the sterile words in Class 5 history have just been superficially garbed in the rich clothes of the miniature moghul paintings we are so familiar with. Maybe Akbar is just too well-known to us and it is difficult to see him as an ordinary mortal.

The book is a good read; how can anything Rushdie writes not be one. Yet not all is well. There is better historical fiction I have read (Nagarkar’s Cuckold with Babar in the distance bearing down towards India, comes to mind) and there are times when the magic grates. One of the great things about Rushdie’s writing has to be the joie de vivre that infects it; that is an integral part of it. Is that missing in this particular piece and has tedium crept in? Has the fabulist somehow lost his own enjoyment of the fable? I wonder.