[2977] How I learned to stop worrying and love Salman Rushdie’s Victory City

Reading Victory City, I found myself figuring out whether the places and persons mentioned in the book were real. It is like reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: fiction is weaved through real history and that blurs the line separating the two.

But Victory City is worse than that. It is fashioned as a casual modern translation of a supposedly ancient text detailing the rise and fall of the Bisnaga Empire, which is a reference to a real entity that was the Vijayanagar Empire that covered much of southern India.

My knowledge of the Indian subcontinent history is not as good as that of other areas. That shows when I know of Vijayanagar largely from playing Europa Universalis IV.

Already having a superficial understanding of southern Indian history, the novel did not help. Is Victory City, actually based on something like Sejarah Melayu, an actual document however fanciful the details are? At the back of the novel, the author Salman Rushdie, lists sources he referred to, giving an aura of seriousness (aura of non-fiction?) to his work of fiction. He was painting a picture of 14th-15th-16th century southern India on an un-blanked canvas belonging to another painting. I was worried that would give me the wrong impression of Vijayanagar.

So worried was I, that I tried ascertaining the real history behind names and places in the book. Google. Wikipedia. The usual places for a quick lookup. But that worked up as a distraction, slowing my reading pace and disrupting the rhythm set by the book. Reading became a chore by too much.

Realizing that, I stopped my side quests, and enjoyed the book as it is, tracking the fictional life of the founder of Bisnaga, the fantastical almost immortal sage Pampa Kampana, born just before the empire was founded, and died as the empire collapsed more than two hundred years later.