Interview: author who narrated Indian epic The Mahabharata in 2,628 tweets

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Published: 10:48pm, 14 Feb 2015

It's the world's longest poem, with more than 100,000 couplets and running to 1.8 million words. The Mahabharata , held to be one of India's two great epics, has been told and retold in oral and visual form for centuries across the country. In July 2009, Chindu Sreedharan, senior lecturer in journalism and communication at Britain's Bournemouth University, began to narrate his version on Twitter (@chindu). Over 1,065 days and 2,628 tweets, he unfolded the story of two warring sets of cousins, and the moral discourses contained within the larger thread. Sreedharan's collection of tweets is now out as a book, Epic Retold . He talks to .

Epic Retold is an experiment, actually. At that point, I was reading a fascinating retelling of The Mahabharata. So it was the story foremost in my mind. When I began seriously thinking about it, I became more convinced The Mahabharata was a great choice. To keep the readers interested across weeks and months, I needed a powerful story, one rife with drama, strong characters and conflict. The Mahabharata had all those. Also, war narration in the media is one of my research areas and, in a rather reductionist way, I had begun to think of The Mahabharata as a war story. So there was added resonance for me as an academic as well.

When I began this in 2009, Twitter was getting big. It was acquiring a variety of audiences, readers who engaged with it differently, more proactively. There were a few writers experimenting with fiction, mostly short stories in 140 characters - what have come to be known as "Twisters". The question that came to my mind was, could you actually tell a longer story here, in a stream of micro-episodes? This was already happening in Japan. People were writing fiction as text messages. If it could work as a series of texts, why not as tweets?