Salman Rushdie’s Victory City as a Transmodern Novel

As a postcolonial writer, Salman Rushdie has vindicated the relevance of transmodernity by suggesting that “whole new academic departments could be set up with the terms ‘trans-colonial,’ ‘trans-modern’” (Shapiro, 2005). In his ninth novel, The Enchantress of Florence , he attempted to build an imaginary bridge between Moghul India and Renaissance Italy to offer a transmodern perspective on world history. In his latest novel, Victory City , though manifesting his usual preoccupation with the meaning of history, memory, and fiction, Rushdie is more thoroughly transmodern insofar as he fictionally builds a transmodern world and makes reading into a transmodern experience. He offers the story of the Vijayanagara Empire in Southern India, set in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, as an alternative to the European Renaissance narrative by putting Southern India at the center stage of world history and relativizing the position of Europe as the original site of modernity. My article begins by distinguishing modernism from transmodernism. After briefly touching upon the transmodern critical concepts that Rushdie coined in his previous novels and the transmodernist turn that his last novel took, it explores the historical and fictional, magical and real worlds colliding in Victory City and reads the figure of Pampa Kampana, the epic poetess who embodies a complicitous and at the same time conflictual relationship between dynasty and history, as an allegory of the time of empire. Finally, it decodes the transmodern poetics at work in the novel, such as cross-pollination, contesting and complex points of view, and repetition, and highlights the debates on gender relations and the relation between the state and the faith in the novel before concluding on the geodesic competence required of the reader to navigate the connectivity of transmodern literature. The narrative performance of Rushdie seems to suggest that the novel is not merely a Western literary genre but a transmodern one insofar as its origins lay in different lands and languages.