The Vijayanagara empire covered most of south India in the 15th and 16th centuries. Viewed from one angle, it was a seedbed for the globalised modern world, in that it became a haven for art and new ideas and an economic power-house that traded with China and Venice. Viewed from another, it was a thicket of intrigue, rocked by rival factions, foreign wars and palace coups. Which is to say it was everything: the noble and the vile, the progressive and regressive, the Hindu heaven of Svarga twinned with treacherous Game of Thrones’ King’s Landing. Only the most brilliant or foolhardy scholar would dream of tackling its history in a single volume.
According to Victory City, one such scholar was the demigod Pampa Kampana, the empire’s mother, midwife and general overseer, who documented the era in a narrative poem she then sealed in a pot and buried in the ground. Victory City, we are assured, is the abridged translation of Pampa’s epic Jayaparajaya (a compound word meaning victory and defeat), retold in “simpler language” and stripped back from its original 24,000 verses. And if the result, while involving and enjoyable, rarely troubles the realms of the divine, that’s probably what happens when a mortal rewrites a deity’s prose.
