Francis Itty Cora is longing to visit Kerala, a land entwined in memory as a link in his family legacy. An American military veteran, Cora has set his mind on the journey after stumbling upon a website that claims to rejuvenate the mind and body in a new school of learning. Malayalam writer TD Ramakrishnan sets a feverish pace in his novel Francis Itty Cora, first published in Malayalam more than a decade ago, from the word go.
Ramakrishnan’s titular character is a young Italian-American man in New York, whose planned travel to Kerala opens a Pandora’s box of hidden history and unanswered questions. In a curious mix of the past and present, Francis Itty Cora builds a fictional world to revisit the fabled history of Malabar and its links with the rest of the world. Set in present times, the novel provides a peek into the past through a host of characters around the world, all working to unmask the mystery behind a man who lived five hundred years ago.
That man from the 15th century is also called Francis Itty Cora, the novel’s fictional hero whose giant wooden ships helped create a flourishing market for Malabar’s spices across the world. It turns out that the 15th century Cora was born in Kunnamkulam, a small town of traders in northern Kerala lying in close proximity to the Arabian Sea. Helping Malabar kings earn money and trust through spice trade with the outside world by lending them his fleet of ships, the merchant Cora quickly rises to the status of a legendary hero. He is warmly welcomed into their palaces by the kings and princes in the West and eventually marries an Italian woman.
Shift to the present and the energetic emails of Francis Itty Cora from New York to the mind and body rejuvenation school in Kerala causes its own founders to begin a hunt to trace the history of the Cora family in Malabar. Francis Itty Cora is also drawn into the hunt elsewhere in the world as other interests emerge with links to the mysterious 15th century man from Malabar. Also hidden for centuries, it is soon revealed, is a book that can clinch the origins of the mysterious Malabar legend.
Ramakrishnan, who went to school in Kunnamkulam while growing up in Thrissur district of Kerala, taps the town’s folklore status of producing fake goods for the real world. Historical characters tumble out of Francis Itty Cora, which followed the author’s 2005 debut novel, Alpha, that centered on a human brain experiment. The lead character’s cannibalistic tendencies appear along with pioneering works in mathematics by Malabar scholars in Francis Itty Cora, which gathers a host of historical and fictional figures to give life to its roller-coaster narrative.
Francis Itty Cora aligns his fable of a Malabar merchant with the arrival of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in Calicut (now Kozhikode) in 1498 to discover a sea route to India from Europe. Cora, the pepper merchant in Malabar in the 15th century, incidentally reaches Italy only a decade before the Portuguese explorer’s arrival in Calicut in 1498. Ramakrishnan also places Cora’s 21st century relative in contemporary history associating his military tenure in Iraq as a member of a foreign torture team in the infamous Abu Gharib prison. The novel extends the curious interest in Malabar’s history that has become a pursuit for many contemporary scholars.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
Book details:
Title: Francis Itty Cora
Author: TD Ramakrishnan
Translated by: Priya K Nair
Publisher: HarperCollins
Number of pages: 312
Price: Rs 399
