(de)colonial cartographies and epistemic reimagining in Francis Itty Cora

Abstract

This paper examines TD Ramakrishnan’s Francis Itty Cora (2009) through the dual theoretical lenses of Walter D. Mignolo’s “border thinking” and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “rhizome,” situating the novel as an appraisal of the poiesis of decolonization. By framing the remote Malabar village of Kunnumkulam as a site of epistemic centrality, the narrative resists Eurocentric historiographical paradigms, assembling a transhistorical matrix that spans the 15th to the 21st century. The novel collapses conventional temporalities and spatial hierarchies, revealing a world where the terrestrial and maritime intersect, and where local and global histories are mutually entangled.

Mignolo’s border thinking illuminates the novel’s strategy of disrupting colonial epistemologies, reframing Kunnumkulam not as a peripheral outpost but as a nodal point of alternative knowledge production. Meanwhile, Deleuze’s rhizomatic thinking provides a framework for understanding the novel’s non-linear narrative structure, which eschews centralized authority in favor of a multiplicity of connections across histories, geographies, and epistemologies. Together, these perspectives underscore how Ramakrishnan’s work conceptualizes decolonization as an ongoing process rooted in relationality and fluidity.

The novel’s intertwining of the politics of land and sea emerges as a rhizomatic assemblage, where perceived “margins” are sites of negotiation rather than division. By embedding global histories within the lifeworld of Kunnumkulam, Francis Itty Cora enacts a poetics of decolonization that destabilizes colonial cartographies and asserts the epistemological agency of seemingly marginalized spaces. This paper argues that the novel exemplifies how fiction can engage with border thinking and rhizomatic dynamics to reimagine decolonial futures.