From Mahabharata to Microbharata

India’s longest epic will now be told 140 characters at a time.

Chindu Sreedharan, a journalist-turned-academic researcher, has started narrating the Mahabharata via Twitter. There will be no more than  four  tweets a day, says Sreedharan, giving fellow ‘tweeters’ enough time to digest the simple updates in the account ‘epicretold’  (twitter.com/epicretold). The tale will be told from the perspective of Bhima, the second-oldest Pandava.

Sreedharan says the narration is an experiment rather than an attempt to draw in an audience. “The fun in social media is that it is free-flowing, you don’t quite know where it will take you. My thought was it could get people interested in playing with microfiction,” he said in an email interview.

However, using Twitter for story-telling can be cumbersome. For instance, the latest updates are listed first, so if one wants to read the story from the beginning, one has to go back to the first page and start from there. Sreedharan, however, doesn’t think that should affect the quality of the narration. “The crude way is to read from bottom up, to catch up at one go — once that’s done, what comes next will just be updates,” he said.
He had no eureka moment about a Twitter-based narration. In fact, he says he didn’t really “think through every aspect, every twist in the narrative”. “I decided to treat this as what it is — fiction on the go. This is not a retelling of the great epic purporting to capture its philosophical richness, but an experiment in social media, if/how full-length works can be narrated on a medium like this. I don’t have the answers. I am trying to figure it out, make mistakes, learn,” he says.

You can find the ‘Microbharata’ at twitter.com/epicretold.