THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The country’s first ‘Twitter fiction,’ the book form of a story told in hundreds of tweets spread over years, will be released by Harper Collins this week.
Written by Kerala born British journalist and academic Dr Chindu Sreedharan, ‘Epic Retold,’ as the title suggests, is the retelling of the great Indian novel, the Mahabharata, from the point of view of Bhima and loosely based on Jnanpith recipient M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s classic ‘Randamoozham.’
The 278-page book is a compilation of tweets Dr Sreedharan had posted as @epicretold for 1605 days, from July 27, 2009, to December 20, 2013.
The choice of Mahabharata for the country’s first Twitter fiction seems both appropriate and incongruous. Incongruous because the writer has to catch hold of the world’s mightiest epic and manage to pass it through a literary needle-hole called Twitter.
But, as Dr Sreedharan says, “Mahabharata was perfect for an experiment on Twitter.” For one, it appealed to the scholar in him. Dr Sreedharan is senior lecturer in journalism, faculty of media and communication, Bournemouth University, who specialises in conflict reporting.
“The storyline offered plenty of ‘conflict’ and opportunities for dramatic tension,” he said. Then, there was the challenge of fitting the world’s longest epic into a micro-blogging site.
“That appealed to my wicked side,” the writer said. While on Twitter, to keep the notoriously fickle new-age reader hooked, each tweet had to work as a bait.
Each one of them had to be profoundly austere but still had to hold all the seductions. This schizophrenic skill had to be employed tweet after tweet, for all the 2,628 of them.
“Breathless urgency,” Dr Sreedharan says. The writer, in short, is a long-distance athlete running the entire distance at the speed of Bolt.
Still, the tweets in book form don’t seem to pant. They have a measured, settled quality. “I don't think Twitter limited me really the brevity is what’s natural for Twitter, and possibly it got me to write, think, in a different way,” he says.
Dr Sreedharan’s influences were many: Prem Panicker’s ‘Bhimsen,’ S.L. Bhyrappa’s ‘Parva,’ Chitra Divakaruni’s ‘The Palace of Illusions ’ and Shashi Tharoor’s ‘The Great Indian Novel.’ “And I read and re-read MT,” he says.
But he strays from all his influences at crucial plot points. Draupadi, for instance, is not Bhima’s biggest love. But Bhima’s lineage will perhaps be Epic Retold’s most cataclysmic twist.
