{"id":6628,"date":"2024-03-28T00:08:29","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T05:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/?p=6628"},"modified":"2025-05-11T16:40:02","modified_gmt":"2025-05-11T21:40:02","slug":"review-salman-rushdies-victory-city-defends-the-virtues-of-liberty-trade-and-tolerance-in-a-mythological-historical-fantasy-about-the-rise-and-fall-of-empires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/review-salman-rushdies-victory-city-defends-the-virtues-of-liberty-trade-and-tolerance-in-a-mythological-historical-fantasy-about-the-rise-and-fall-of-empires\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Salman Rushdie’s Victory City affirms virtues of liberty, trade and tolerance in a mythological historical fantasy about the cycles of civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Michael Grossberg<\/a><\/p>\n

Salman Rushdie, the courageous author acclaimed worldwide for both his fiction and personal courage in affirming libertarian values from artistic freedom and freedom of speech\/press to the right of dissent, has written a wise and haunting novel in Victory City.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\nRushdie’s historical fantasy – a Best Novel nominee for the next Prometheus Award – makes a poignant and powerful case for liberty as a key ingredient in the constellation of value and virtues that support human flourishing and the never-to-be-taken-for-granted rise of civilization.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rueful in its ideals, but also often cynical and realistic about human nature, Victory City<\/em>\u00a0fictionalizes and dramatizes the rise and fall of medieval-Indian empires – and with their fall, the mournful collapse of the emerging modern-liberal\/libertarian order of \u00a0free international trade, peace, tolerance, sexual equality\/diversity and religious liberty.<\/p>\n

Weaving mythological and supernatural elements into his well-researched tapestry of 1500s-1600s Indian and Asian history, Rushdie employs his modernist style of self-awareness and narrative ambiguity to explore the impermanence of peace and freedom and celebrate the temporary Renaissance-style eras that are the glorious fruits of liberty.<\/p>\n

Gradually, I came to understand Rushdie’s novel as a libertarian tragedy \u2013 mostly subtle and implicit, but occasionally explicit in its language and values – about the difficulty of sustaining civilization and liberty amid recurring cycles of war and peace, love and hate, progress and reaction, tolerance and witch hunts, given the baser and perennial aspects of human nature, especially the blind lust for power.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Salman Rushdie (Creative Commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How fascinating to read about a fictional medieval-India empire founded by Pampa Kampala, a young girl who becomes a long-lived goddess.<\/p>\n

She founds – actually, conjures up magically – the people and city of Bisnaga (the “Victory City” of the title) based on her intuitive appreciation for \u00a0the classical-liberal principles of freedom, pluralism, sexual equality, tolerance, peace and the rule of law. (Only at the end of the book, reading the post-script and list of history books Rushdie acknowledges researching, did I realize that some of the novel’s kings and characters are actually drawn from the history and politics of Asia in the 1500s and 1600s.)<\/p>\n

Through Rushdie\u2019s saga fictionalizing many aspects of medieval and India history with his distinctive style of magical realism, readers of all religions, ideologies and beliefs can\u2019t help but learn about the deep and intrinsic connections among liberty, equal rights, peace, trade, women\u2019s rights, and respect for different religious beliefs.<\/p>\n

As the story cumulatively makes clear, though never in a dogmatic way, such crucial aspects of the modern and cosmopolitan liberal\/libertarian order have emerged in fits and starts, yet remain perennially under threat from human irrationality, stupidity, venality and power-lust.<\/p>\n

Such a pessimistic view of history may be hard to reconcile with many libertarians\u2019 fondest hopes about achieving full freedom in the 21st\u00a0<\/sup>century, but Rushdie\u2019s bittersweet and picaresque saga offers powerful lessons for our troubled and darkening time.<\/p>\n

Steeped in a fanciful embroiderment of India\u2019s checkered past, Victory City<\/em> elegantly fuses classic and archetypal fables with Rushdie’s often-amusing self-awareness of language and narrative in weaving his tale.<\/p>\n

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Most admirably, throughout his novel Rushdie consistently shows that freedom is vastly preferable to tyranny \u2013 yet always remains in danger of being undermined, taken for granted or actively destroyed by foolish and egotistical rulers \u2013 an all-too faithful reflection of world history.<\/p>\n

Pampa Kampana, a young woman who attains her real but limited powers amidst suffering, does what she can to create and nurture a truly free and modern world, with equal rights for women, sexual freedom (including for gays and lesbians), freedom of speech and a rich culture based on international free trade that paves the way for greater education and knowledge.<\/p>\n

Although Rushdie is too wise to deny that nothing lasts forever, he powerfully and sympathetically shows again and again the manifold fruits of freedom during the best eras of the \u201cVictory City\u201d that Pampa Kampana returns to nurture and lead when and as she can, given the limits of politics and human folly.<\/p>\n

Enjoyable and surprising to read in its scope and variety of stories and characters but never ideological, Victory City<\/em> implicitly explores recurring questions about society, government, politics and human nature.<\/p>\n

Several are close to our libertarian hearts:<\/p>\n

Why does tyranny arise so often?<\/p>\n

Why do civilizations rise and fall?<\/p>\n

What are the factors in social collapse?<\/p>\n

Why do so many people get resigned to tyranny and war?<\/p>\n

Why does tyranny recur even after people come to appreciate eras imbued with the benefits of liberty, civility, tolerance and peace?<\/p>\n

Well into the novel, Rushdie explicitly references the positive value of liberty, as a sort of counterweight to the grim realities of political power, tyranny, war, slavery and the manifold other abuses systematically committed by governments throughout history:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe transformation wrought by Pampa Kampana stood revealed in all its marvelous force. This was the birth of the New Remonstrance, as it came to be known; no longer anti-art, against women, or hostile toward sexual diversity, but embracing poetry, liberty, women and joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rushdie describes his civilizing world in almost libertarian terms at its highest point of progress and culture: \u201cTrading ships from Bisnaga were traveling everywhere and spreading the news of its wonders, and now foreign visitors \u2013 traders, diplomats, explorers \u2013 thronged its streets, applauding its beauty and comparing it favorably to Beijing and to Rome.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery man may come and go and live according to his own creed. Great equity and justice is observed to all, not only by the rulers, but by the people, one to another.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

At several different points, this picaresque novel underlines its drama and episodic history with occasional additional explicit references to liberty and its related constellation of values:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t take long for the city to calm down. Bisnaga was no primitive civilization. In her early creative whispers Pampa Kampana had imbued its newborn citizens with a strong belief in the rule of law, and taught them to value the freedoms they would enjoy under the law\u2019s umbrella…. (and)… the diversity of cultures, faiths, and races to be found in those streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, mostly, the lessons remain implicit in the stories and characters that Rushdie conjures so gracefully and yes, magically, from his own rich imagination.<\/p>\n

Neither does Rushdie\u2019s storytelling leave in doubt the coercive and brutal nature of most government:<\/p>\n

When the three younger Sangama brothers, who \u201chad been earning a dishonest living for some time as highway robbers and cattle thieves,\u201d found that their criminal business was becoming even more dangerous after ruthless Tamil gangs moved into the area…,\u201d they feared for their lives and started looking for something \u201cless life-threatening\u201d to do…<\/p>\n

\u201cTake us to our brothers at once,\u201d Chukka Sangama said in his most commanding tones.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to explain to them why there is no difference between thieves and kings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed.<\/p>\n

As I read Victory City,<\/em>\u00a0I found similarities to past Prometheus winners \u2013 most notably, Neal Stephenson\u2019s The System of the World,\u00a0<\/em>which focuses on the emergence of the modern liberal\/libertarian order in the West, just as Rushdie focuses on it in the Asian East).<\/p>\n

Yet, in some ways, I also noticed parallels with \u00a0Terry Pratchett\u2019s Nightwatch<\/em> and other Discworld stories, which weave in often-humorous insights and parallels drawn from the actual history of economic and social progress.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet, Rushdie is never as funny as Pratchett, since his humor is more rueful and world-weary and cynical, while his consistent appreciation for true classical liberalism \u2013 so close to modern libertarianism in its values and roots \u2013 seems tempered by the more fatalistic rhythms of the East.)<\/p>\n

While respecting his story and allowing his characters to speak for themselves, Rushdie overall makes clear where his preferences lie: the best civilizations (or perhaps, more realistically, our semi-barbaric attempts so far at building civilizations within recorded history) tend to be freer, more peaceful and more tolerant and become so when rulers or the ruling class restrain the perennial temptations we all face as human beings to abuse power.<\/p>\n

I must admit I’d never read Rushdie before (a sad oversight, in retrospect), so Victory Cit<\/em>y was a pleasant surprise, with wonderful storytelling, believable and fresh characters and many unfolding riches and manifold moments of insight, wit and imagination to savor.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m now eager to read more of Rushdie\u2019s internationally acclaimed works.<\/p>\n

But I also feel impelled to urge other LFS members to give this somewhat unusual Best Novel nominee a chance – since many of us are accustomed to reading mostly sci-fi, but sometimes give short shrift to fantasy.<\/p>\n

Beyond its libertarian themes favoring peace, free trade, human rights, sexual equality and tolerance as alternatives to empire and war,\u00a0Victory City<\/i>\u00a0certainly fits the genre focus of our award as a historical fantasy framed by mythological and supernatural dimensions.<\/p>\n

Yet, Rushdie’s novel (published by Random House) is very different in tone, flavor and structure from most other speculative fiction that LFS members and other sf\/fantasy fans typically read. So it may take a while to get used to its epic and episodic focus and unusual style melding traditionalist myth-making and modernist, self-aware ambiguity and humor.<\/p>\n

Overall, Victory City <\/i>offers a richly woven and poignant allegory about the perennial struggle to preserve the liberties and related values that make it \u00a0possible to enhance human flourishing and sustain civilization itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Note: Victory City<\/i>\u00a0is one of 17 2023 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel. The slate of finalists will be announced by mid-April, so stay posted to the Prometheus Blog.<\/p>\n

* Check out the full list<\/a> of this year\u2019s 17 Best Novel nominees and read the Prometheus Blog\u2019s recent five-part series offering a guide to each nominee with capsule descriptions. Here are the links to\u00a0Part One<\/strong><\/a>, Part Two<\/strong>,<\/a> Part Three<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Part Four\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>of the guide to the nominees for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.<\/p>\n

* Libertarian Futurist Society members, Prometheus-nominated authors and other libertarian sf\/fantasy fans are welcome to submit reviews of relevant literature to the Prometheus Awards. Contact Michael Grossberg, one of the Prometheus Blog editors, at bestnovel@lfs.org<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

* Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant elements of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Watch\u00a0 <\/strong>videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt),Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog\u2019s\u00a0Video page.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>*\u00a0Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n

Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital, and in some ways even more powerful than politics in the long run, by sparking innovation, better ideas, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights, individuality and human dignity.<\/p>\n

Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread better visions of the future that help humanity overcome tyranny, end slavery, reduce the threat of war, repeal or constrain other abuses of coercive power and achieve universal liberty, respect for human rights and a better world (perhaps eventually, worlds) for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Michael Grossberg Salman Rushdie, the courageous author acclaimed worldwide for both his fiction and personal courage in affirming libertarian values from artistic freedom and freedom of speech\/press to the right of dissent, has written a wise and haunting novel in Victory City. Rushdie’s historical fantasy – a Best Novel nominee for the next Prometheus … Continue reading Review: Salman Rushdie’s Victory City affirms virtues of liberty, trade and tolerance in a mythological historical fantasy about the cycles of civilization<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2353,2423,8],"tags":[343,1026,2157,2159,536,20,1920,922,1267,341,350,2158,2156],"class_list":["post-6628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-fantasy","category-review","tag-discworld","tag-empire","tag-historical-fantasy","tag-india-mythology","tag-liberty","tag-neal-stephenson","tag-nightwatch","tag-power","tag-salman-rushdie","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-the-system-of-the-world","tag-tolerance","tag-victory-city"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-1IU","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6628"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9116,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628\/revisions\/9116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}