How Salman Rushdie prophesies his terrible fate in the new novel

In his new novel, Salman Rushdie anticipates the horrific act of which he fell victim shortly afterwards. It tells of a woman who is blinded by an evil ruler.

Eight months ago, when work on the novel was finished, an American with Lebanese roots attacked and seriously injured Rushdie with a knife during a lecture in upstate New York. The killer is said to sympathize with extreme Islamism and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Since then, 75-year-old Salman Rushdie has lost one eye.

In 2012, the Indian-British writer wrote in his autobiographical book Joseph Anton that he always knew there was no such thing as “absolute security”: “There were just varying degrees of insecurity. He would have to learn to live with it.”

Rushdie defends the Middle Ages in the new novel

The fatwa of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeny has been in force for 33 years. She calls on Muslims all over the world to kill the writer because of his book The Satanic Verses. It almost worked. The religious zealots increased the bounty on his head to $3.3 million last year.

In an interview in “Zeit”, Rushdie now makes serious accusations against the American organizers, who “unfortunately did nothing” to protect him. He was “extremely lucky”. If the assailant had “hit him elsewhere on the body, my story would have ended.”

How the Iranian regime and its willing accomplices continue to use brute force to suppress freedom of speech and religious tolerance can only be described as a throwback to the Middle Ages. But that’s what Rushdie objects to. In “Victory City” he tells of a golden middle ages in the historically authentic South Indian kingdom of Vijayanagar, a highly civilized kingdom that was largely forgotten before the author rediscovered it in literature.

Caustic criticism of Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalism

Between the 14th and 16th centuries there was an astonishing tolerance between the most diverse religions and gender equality. In some ways, then, that medieval kingdom was more liberal, tolerant and progressive than today’s India, where right-wing Hindu nationalists under Prime Minister Narendra Modi are in power and are renaming key cultural sites to dispel any reference to the country’s Islamic heritage. to delete. .

One of the domestic political tendencies of Rushdie’s novel is directed precisely against this erasing of traces of the coexistence of the great religions of India. His role model is the cosmopolitan Bombay of his childhood, where he grew up in a Muslim family and where people of all different religions gathered and discussed peacefully.

As he likes to do in his books, Rushdie mixes mythology and reality in “Victory City”. Its protagonist is a fictional hybrid creature, half woman, half goddess. While the two great Indian national epics, “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana”, are male heroic stories, he was tempted to add “a female perspective” to his novel, says Rushdie.

A matriarchy on Indian soil

Pampa Kampana, as his heroine is called, grows up an orphan after her parents die tragically. Initially, a guru, who is revered in Fundi circles for his supposedly ascetic way of life, takes her to his cave. But at night he abuses the girl. He preaches ideals that he does not adhere to and embodies the counter-principle of the cosmopolitan pampa.

She barely ages and lives as long as the kingdom she founds, which is 250 years. Pampa Kampana strives for a kind of matriarchy, thinks politically and sexually open-minded, strives for a separation of religion and state. And art is very important to her. She herself works as a poet. She disinherits her three sons because they are arrogant idlers. She gets on better with her daughters, whom she fathered with an immigrant from Portugal. The tragedy of Pampa Kampana is that she outlives all her children.

She eventually marries a king who rules according to her instructions. As he fights his battle, the power is completely in their hands. But for years she has forced into exile rivals who denounce her as a witch, and in between she has allowed her empire to become rigid in patriarchal structures and religious orthodoxy.

Salman Rushdie has made many trips to South India for his research, especially to Hampi, where the ruins of the ancient Vijayanagara kingdom are located. But he also read historical works and thoroughly studied Hindu mythology. With noticeable pleasure and a lot of humour, he mixes reality and miracle stories.

There is no aloof, bigoted tone of legend that predominates, as is often the case in stories involving saints. Rushdie captures the full, colorful, sensual life and tells without taboos. Religious fanatics will once again be horrified at the blasphemous celebration of the cosmopolitan, polygamous and free movement.

A plea for «hybridity, impurity, mixing»

Rushdie once described his controversial work The Satanic Verses as a “love song for our half-bloods.” In it he celebrates “hybridity, impurity, mixing”. The same goes for «Victory City»: the author wildly mixes cultures, ideas, religions and political orientations. Nothing is sacred to him.

It’s not a utopia he draws in «Victory City». Pampa Kampana has a vision of a peaceful, prosperous realm where women have equal say as men. But she always faces setbacks. Orthodoxy and fanaticism, as well as machoism, periodically strike back. Despots and queens come to power who are trapped in the old caste system and tolerate neither religious freedom nor sexual generosity.

Eventually their empire will fall. What remains are ruins and pampa epic, which ends with the phrase: “Words are the only winners.” She consistently emphasizes storytelling as a sacred calling. At one point it also says: “History is not only the result of our actions, but also of our forgetting.”

Without the power of literature, what has been forgotten would remain in the dark. Words as the only victors: That is a motto tailored to Salman Rushdie himself, who, despite the fatwa and assassination attempt, does not let his words be cut short and continues to stand up courageously for freedom of expression.

With “Victory City” he returns to his ancient homeland India with the means of a magical or rather mythological realism, picking up his earlier novels such as “Midnight’s Children” or “The Satanic Verses”, thus his masterpieces. (aargauerzeitung.ch)