It happened in April 1835. Rama Varma, the eldest son of Veera Kerala Varma, the Maharaja of Cochin, took a boat from Tripunithura to Fort Cochin. There he was met by his friend Ananthan, a Gowda Saraswat Brahmin. Together they went to St. Francis Church where Rama Varma was baptised and converted to Christianity. He was named Constantine Rama Varma and Ananthan came to be called Yohannan.
There’s little information on the life of Rama Varma. The speech he made at the time of his ordination, which was later published in the journal Keralopakari and in book form by Basel Mission Press, Tellicherry, remains the only historical evidence of this prince.
Ramachandran’s debut novel Papasnanam , takes off from the point of conversion and explores the inchoate spiritual journey of Rama Varma. Here, history and fiction are inextricably intertwined, lives are entangled and Kerala history is deconstructed, as the novel moves through an eventful period in 19th century.
“Conversions in Kerala have always interested me. Right from the time of the Portuguese there have been numerous instances and reasons for conversion. In fact, there was an unsuccessful attempt to convert the Maharaja of Cochin, Unniraman Koyikal (1503-1537) to Christianity in 1510, just before the Portuguese shifted their capital from Cochin to Goa, under General Alfonso de Albuquerque. History also records the conversion of a Tanur Maharaja and a nephew of the Zamorin. But Rama Varma’s case was unusual,” says Ramachandran, journalist, whose short stories in Malayalam had won wide critical acclaim.
More than being attracted to Christianity it was power intrigues in the royal family, disillusionment with his religion, blatant theft in temples and corruption that resulted in Rama Varma’s conversion.
Divided into two parts and two geographical zones, the novel moves back and forth through different realms of time.
After his conversion, Jacob travelled to Madras where Rev. John Tucker helped him get admission to Bishop Corrie’s Madras Grammar School. He spent three years here before moving to Belgaum. The novel begins at Belgaum.
“Choosing to start from Belgaum was deliberate. It was here that Rama Varma committed the ‘biggest sin’, which he mentions in his autobiography. In fact, this is the first autobiography in Malayalam, though history has other names. There is no specific mention of what the sin was, which gave me the freedom to imagine what it would have been.”
Taking a cue from Nikos Kazantzakis, Ramachandran builds up the ‘sin’ of Rama Varma beginning from Belgaum. “The sin, I assume, must have been the sin of the flesh. In his Report to Greco , Kazantzakis makes a mention of the ‘ascetics’ disease.’ This seems to have affected Rama Varma too.”
Through Rama Varma’s life in Belgaum, which involved teaching Rev. Joseph Taylor’s children and speaking Tamil in the church on Sundays, Ramachandran shuttles through time zones to touch upon Rama Varma’s life and times before the conversion.
“The conflict between Advaita and Dvaita philosophy intrigued me. My views on this have been voiced through Rama Varma. It becomes relevant to the novel because Rama Varma was born at a time when the Cochin Royal Family had ‘converted’ to Madhvaism and accepted the Dvaita philosophy. Shaktan Thampuran had expelled the leaders and followers of this faith from his state. After Shaktan Thampuran’s death his cousins Rama Varma and later Veera Kerala Varma, the father of my protagonist, adopted this faith. This explains the influx of the Embranthiris to Tripunithura. The novel provides space for the history of the Embranthiris (Tulu Brahmins), Konkanis and also that of the Christian missionaries.”
The scene in the novel shifts to Kannur, specifically Thalassery, in the second part. This is a crucial phase in Rama Varma’s life. “Not being able to bear the pain of sin, not being able to confess, Rama Varma flees to Thalassery. Here he meets Hermann Gundert, Samuel Hebich and Hermann Friedrich Moegling; it is here he is ordained and given the name Jacob. And it is here he confesses, gets married, and dies of small pox.”
Since the details of his marriage are not known Ramachandran creates a character and names her Mary. “I have consciously named all the female characters that cross Jacob’s life as Mary, like those in Jesus Christ’s life.” And appropriately Ramachandran uses Charles Baudelaire’s poem To A Woman of Malabar , to describe the woman in Jacob’s life. “I thought there’s a connect. Baudelaire’s Malabar woman was a slave from Mahe, not very far from Thalassery.”
Ramachandran considers his work as a tale of numerous travellers whose journeys are left incomplete. It is not the tale of a glorious prince but that of a loser. “Jacob is a loser. This is the story of his incomplete spiritual journey. Every winner has frailties but history always gives only one side of the story. History, for me, records past events of human life but very often it is only well-written fiction. Information pieced together by historians are often just personal opinions.”
An attempt is made in the novel to correct historical details. “I have made mention of them in footnotes. There are many inaccurate historical details that I thought needed to be set right. Even the Cochin State Manual has wrong dates and details.”
It took Ramachandran 25 years of research for Papasnanam but only ‘25 days to write’ it. The author of two short story anthologies, he has also authored Nakshatravum Chuttikayum on the history of the Communist movement and numerous other articles. Ramachandran has completed work on two books — a political biography of CJ Thomas and Klavu Pidicha Kapattiyam , an expose on Swadeshabimani Ramakrishna Pillai. “I’m also working on the possibility of a historical fiction based on the very interesting characters of Jesus Christ and Marthanda Varma,” says Ramachandran.
