Vijaya Nagara directly translates to Victory City. Since I was born, the tales of Vijaya Nagara has been the stuff of folklore. The exploits of Krishnadevaraya and his antics with his court jester, Tenali Ramakrishna, have acquired the status of legends and have been told time and again in different forms. The veracity of these stories are only like that of the legends. Did King Arthur actually pull a sword named Excalibur. Who knows! Likewise, was Tenali Ramakrishna really such an intelligent courtier that Krishnadevaraya showered him with diamonds all the time, who really knows! What matters is the humanity in these legends. Through Arthur we see a potential in us to do the difficult tasks. Through the latter we are entertained and remind ourselves of what a secular and rich country India was before colonisation.
Rushdie walks this line between fiction and humanity and doesn’t really succeed in either. The fictional part is pure Rushdie, the magic realism takes up right from the first chapters and has their imprint in every subsequent chapter. But the legend of Vijaya Nagara is so dense and well documented that even without resorting to magic realism, the magic could have been effectively brought out. What I mean is, in Midnight’s Children, or Shame, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the violence surrounding everyday events is so incomprehensible that magic realism seems to be the only way to make sense of it. Here, it is an addendum. It comes across as if Rushdie is trying too hard to leave his imprint on his work. Nothing wrong with that. My criticism is just that Rushdie doesn’t devote himself to the story and here and there you see glimpses of his personality coming out in an inorganic manner. A great example of this is the pink monkeys. Rushdie nearly bends time to show us in the future there’d be colonization by white invaders. Ok, but why did we need that reminder at such a point in the story? No answer. Is the subplot atleast developed properly? It’s dealt with in 3 lines. So why did Rushdie feel compelled to insert it there? Only he knows.
The characters are the weakest point in this novel. No character leaves their imprint on us, especially Pampa Kampana, who is supposed to be a stand-in for Rushdie himself. We never get a glimpse into her psyche, her real feelings, what makes her tick and so on. It’s all just shallow writing. Even when she loses her eyes, which the author went through the agony himself, and you can see where he is coming from – the pain and despair – it still doesn’t register. It’s as if Rushdie has himself undergone a second hand experience of losing his own eye. Other characters are just caricatures to drive the plot forward. Even Krishnadevaraya comes across as a meat puppet who listens to everyone who manages to whisper in his ear with no rationale of his own.
Having said all this, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that Rushdie still has the ability to keep me hooked. His new style of prose, a simplistic, barebones language is a late, great feature to an illustrious career. So, I leave you, my dear reader, with the conflicting feelings that I myself had when I finished this book. Go read it. Read between the lines, and see how you feel.
by KindlyKey1243