Narrating nature in the digital age: exploring Indian eco-electronic literature
Simran Bhimjyani, Mehulkumar Desai, T. Shanmugapriya · New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia · 2025
Traditional Indian literature has often celebrated human-nature relationships, reflecting nature's prominence in Indian culture, yet electronic literature's multimodal storytelling has the potential to foster a deeper ecological consciousness in the readers. This paper seeks to explore Indian eco-electronic literary works by applying an ecophenomenological and ecohermeneutical approach, calibrating Indian digital narratives’ potential to foster an empathetic understanding of contemporary Indian environmental concerns. The study involves a critical analysis of three Indian electronic literary works: Simran Bhimjyani’s Blue Is My Favourite Colour, Priti Pandurangan’s Meghadutam, and Shanmugapriya T’s Lost Water! Remainscape? All three works are centred around nature and have been created by women artists. These works depict a shifting perception towards nature, from reverence to commodification and extinction. This study addresses key questions like, “How do Indian eco-electronic literary works raise environmental consciousness?” and “How do eco-electronic literary works create an interactive, immersive environment where the reader/player becomes intertwined with nature?” This study seeks to answer these questions by demonstrating how the integration of kinetic images, visualisation, sound, and haptics provides an immersive experience akin to the Keatsian Negative Capability. This paper also aims to contribute to the discourse on the emerging scholarship on electronic literature in India.