Epic Retold: The Mahabharata in Tweets

E P I C

#M
AHABHARATA
#T
WITTER
F
ICTION
#
BHIMA
#140C
HARACTERS

R E T O L D

HarperCollins
Publishers
India

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

24 July 2009.

My very literary colleague Bronwen Thomas turns to me, pointing to her computer screen.

‘Seen this, Chindu?’

‘What?’

‘This article about mobile fiction?’

The article is about novels being written in SMS in Japan. Keitai shosetsu. Apparently, teenagers are crazy about it.

Bronwen emails me two other stories. The first is by
New York Times
reporter Matt Richtel (@mrichtel), on tweeting a ‘real-time thriller’.

The second speaks about how, elsewhere, some people are posting similar bursts of fiction—again, on Twitter.

Interesting!

Most of what I read that day was difficult to classify. In a sense, it could sit under the broad umbrella of ‘flash fiction’.

But where flash fiction is usually seen as stories told in a few hundred
words
, these were shorter still—not more than 140
characters
each.

Richtel’s ‘Twiller’ was the exception. His narrative did not end in 140 characters. It was told episodically, as a series of tweets.

As someone with an avid interest in digital storytelling, I found Richtel’s work exciting. It posed two interesting questions:

Could a long narrative work on Twitter, the platform that celebrates brevity?

How can such a story be structured so that it holds the reader through what would undoubtedly be very fragmented storytelling?

This was the time I was devouring
Bhimsen
, a serialized reimagining of the Mahabharata, posted—as it happened—on a blog.

The blog in question was ‘Smoke Signals’, and
Bhimsen
was the work of a former colleague, the well-known journalist Prem Panicker.

Prem had based
Bhimsen
on
Randamoozham
, a masterful novel from Bhima’s point of view, by the revered Malayalam writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair.

I had read
Randamoozham
more than once as a child; MT’s wonderfully nuanced retelling of the Mahabharata had mesmerized me ever since.

It occurred to me the Mahabharata was perfect for an experiment on Twitter.

For one, it catered well to my scholarly side: besides dawdling in digital media, I study how war is narrated to justify my paycheque.

War narratives, thus, were of academic interest to me. And in a rather reductionist way, I had begun to see the Mahabharata as a war story.

From that vantage point, I could see the storyline offered plenty of ‘conflict’, plenty of opportunities for dramatic tension.

Surely that would help hold the reader?

There was also the irony—and challenge—of fitting the world’s longest epic into a micro-blogging site. That appealed to my wicked side.

27 July 2009.

I write my first fictional tweets.

I have dubbed the project ‘Mahabharata on Twitter’ and am playing with the idea of posting it as @epicretold.

I have even bullied my designer friend, Sunil Krishnan, to work on an illustration to grace the Twitter handle.

Quickly, I draft ten tweets. I read them out aloud. They sound good. Pleased, I email them to Bronwen and Prem.

Bad news pings in my inbox. The tweets are not as hot as I thought. They do not ‘connect’. They are ‘too clinical’. ‘No authentic voice.’

Ouch.