Victory City

The Blessing

When Pampa Kampana is nine years old, her mother walks into a fire. The goddess Pampa appears to the child and makes her an offer: she will live for two hundred and forty-seven years, and in that time she will create and record an empire. She breathes the city of Bisnaga into existence with her breath — literally, populating it with people by speaking their names and their natures into seeds that grow into human beings.

Victory City is the record Pampa makes of the Bisnaga empire’s rise and fall — the kings and queens and wars and conspiracies that fill the two and a half centuries of its history. It is based on the actual Vijayanagara Empire of south India, which flourished from the 14th century until its destruction by a coalition of Deccan sultanates in 1565.

The Context

Rushdie published Victory City in February 2023, less than eighteen months after being stabbed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in August 2022 — an attack by a man who had read accounts of the fatwa against him and decided to act on them. The attack left him blind in one eye and with permanent damage to one hand.

The novel written and revised during his recovery has a specific quality: a joy in storytelling for its own sake, a delight in the inventiveness that is Rushdie’s characteristic mode, and a sense — in Pampa’s insistence on recording even as empires fall — that the act of writing is itself the argument against those who would silence it.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Rushdie’s most playful recent novel and, in context, his most personal: a celebration of storytelling’s power to outlast the forces arrayed against it.

Reading Guides

• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie — Full Review
• The Satanic Verses — Full Review

The Vijayanagara Empire

The Bisnaga of Rushdie’s novel is based on the historical Vijayanagara Empire, which dominated southern India from the early 14th century until its decisive defeat at the Battle of Talikota in 1565. At its peak, Vijayanagara was one of the largest empires in the world, with a capital city — also called Vijayanagara, “City of Victory” — that contemporary travellers described as one of the most impressive urban centres they had ever seen. The Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes, writing in the 1520s, compared it favourably to Rome.

The empire’s history — its succession of dynasties, its relationships with the Deccan sultanates to its north, its patronage of Sanskrit and Kannada literature, and its eventual destruction — provides Rushdie with the material for Pampa Kampana’s chronicle. He does not reproduce this history faithfully but uses it as the factual skeleton around which the mythological flesh grows.

Pampa Kampana as Protagonist

Rushdie has described Pampa Kampana as his most fully realised female protagonist, and there is a case for this claim. She is not defined by her relationship to any male character — the kings and princes who pass through the novel are in some sense her creations — and her longevity, which is both a gift and a burden, gives her a perspective on power that no single reign can contain. She outlives the men who rule, the dynasties that succeed each other, the languages in which the empire’s story is told.

Written After the Stabbing

Victory City was written and substantially completed before the August 2022 attack at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, where Rushdie was stabbed on stage. It was published in February 2023, as he was recovering from injuries that cost him the sight in one eye and caused permanent damage to his right hand. The novel’s concern with storytelling as a form of survival, with the imagination that persists after the body is attacked, and with the written word as the only thing that outlasts empire — all of this takes on a biographical dimension that Rushdie could not have intended when he began the book but that he has acknowledged in interviews since.

Where This Sits in Rushdie’s Career

For readers approaching Rushdie for the first time, Victory City is among the most accessible entry points — more linear in structure than Midnight’s Children, less politically fraught in its reception than The Satanic Verses, and grounded in a mythological mode that gives his characteristic linguistic exuberance a clear vehicle. It is not his greatest novel, but it is the one in which the joy of telling stories is most purely and directly on display.

Storytelling as Power

Victory City (2023) is framed as Rushdie’s modern translation of a buried Sanskrit epic, the Jayaparajaya, composed by Pampa Kampana, a woman who lives for two hundred and forty-seven years and witnesses the entire rise and fall of the Bisnaga Empire — Rushdie’s fictionalised Vijayanagara, the great medieval South Indian kingdom. Having seen her mother walk into a funeral pyre, Pampa is filled by a goddess and granted the power to whisper whole populations into being: she literally narrates a city and its citizens into existence from a handful of seeds. The conceit lets Rushdie restate the argument that runs through all his work — that stories, not swords, are the durable source of power, and that the teller who outlives every king is the one who finally wins. Completed shortly before the 2022 attack that cost him an eye, the novel reads as a serene late summation: empires crumble, dynasties betray themselves, but the words survive the bonfire.