In his recent New Yorker portrait, Salman Rushdie summons the figure of E. Mr. Forster, met during his studies at Cambridge. The author of With a View of the Arno (which inspired James Ivory’s film Room With a View) encouraged the young Indian to write, assuring him that “the great Indian novel would be written by an Indian who had been educated in the West “.
“I really admire Route des Indes,” Rushdie continues of the British novelist’s latest work, “because it was an anti-colonial novel at a time when being anti-colonial was not at all fashionable. But I rebelled against Forsterian English which was very cold and meticulous. I thought to myself, if there’s one thing India isn’t, it’s cold. It is a hot, noisy, crowded, excessive place. How do you find a language that expresses this? »
Victory City is Salman Rushdie’s answer to that question. A novel that is never “cold and meticulous”, but on the contrary bubbling and excessive, a story where men fly and birds talk, a book steeped in Indian history and culture where we meet gods with names grandiose sketched in burlesque silhouettes and whose heroine – we know it from the first pages – will live 247 years (or – approximately – the lifespan of the kingdom of Vijayanagara).
The text is presented as the translation, intended for ordinary mortals and therefore stripped of its rhymes and its chastised language, of a poem in Sanskrit of 24,000 verses entitled Victory and Defeat and found in a terracotta pot. Its author, Pampa Kampana, the heroine of the novel, is an unforgettable figure, the soul of this text which exalts the power of female creation.
Because in the first pages, the little orphan Pampa is entrusted with a mission by a goddess: that of transforming society so that no more woman must die like her mother, who threw herself into the fire after the defeat of her kingdom. . It is necessary, says the goddess, that “men consider women in a new way” and make room for non-violence, in a violent age. The task is not small. Endowed with magical powers, Pampa creates from scratch a city – Bisnaga – and its inhabitants, establishes rules of life respectful of all and offers herself a few gifts along the way, in particular an irresistible Portuguese merchant for a lover.
Despite her near divine nature as a “prophetess”, Pampa is also a character of flesh and blood, prone to anger and jealousy despite the lofty ideals within her. She initially succeeded in her bet. In her realm, no woman lives veiled or hidden. Tolerance and good intelligence of the sexes are required. But the enemies of Pampa and her so different society are not lacking. Perhaps the most dreadful is time – a recurring motif in Rushdie’s work since Midnight’s Children.
The utopia that Pampa Kampana has built cannot resist the work of erosion and its cruelty… It doesn’t matter, since his words remain, Rushdie seems to tell us, whose tone remains joyful, full of humor and fantasy, throughout the book. By signing his sixteenth novel since the fatwa that hit him and the first since the attempt on his life last August (the manuscript had already been returned to the publisher), Salman Rushdie shares this victory with his beautiful Pampa.
Victory City, chez Penguin Random House.
