Indian Electronic Literature Database (IELD)
A shared record of born-digital literature from India and its diasporas: hypertexts, video poems, SMS novels, Instagram narratives, games and interactive fiction, and the scholarship that reads them.
Choose a state on the map to see the works made there and the research written from there.
Newest entries
Works
Born-digital and digitally published literary works, drawn from the Indian Electronic Literature Anthology, the dra.ft lists, the New Media Writing Prize and works discussed in scholarship.
Scholarship
Critical writing on electronic literature in India and by Indian scholars: articles, chapters, anthologies, reviews, interviews and conference talks.
Scholars
People researching Indian electronic literature, with their current institution and the records credited to them.
Timeline
From the first SMS novel in 2004 to the prize lists and special issues of 2026. Each dot is one record; select it to open.
Collections
The anthologies, lists, prizes and special issues this atlas is built from.
About the Indian Electronic Literature Database (IELD)
The Indian Electronic Literature Database (IELD) gathers Indian electronic literature into one searchable place so that it can be read, taught, cited and kept.
An ICIDN project
The Indian Electronic Literature Database (IELD) is a project of the Indian Consortium for Interactive Digital Narratives (ICIDN) developed by Mehulkumar Desai and Shanmugapriya T., which brings together artists, scholars, designers and technologists working on electronic literature, games, digital storytelling, visual arts and digital theatre in India. It sits alongside ICIDN's workshops, the LitBit blog, the Indian New Media Writing Prize and the consortium's archive of creative and scholarly works.
Corrections, new entries and collaboration proposals are welcome at contact.icidn@gmail.com or through the submission form.
What counts as Indian electronic literature
We use the term for literary work that depends on digital media to be what it is: works that move, branch, generate, respond, circulate on platforms or ask to be played, watched or clicked as well as read. A work belongs here when it is made in India, in an Indian language, by Indian or diasporic writers, or when it takes Indian life as its material.
Recent scholarship treats this as a plural field, “India, digital, literatureS”, so the atlas keeps hypertexts, video poetry, SMS novels, Instagram and YouTube narratives, games, blogs and platform writing side by side, and records what each one is instead of ranking them.
Where the data comes from
Works come from the Indian Electronic Literature Master Dataset, compiled by Mehulkumar Desai and Shanmugapriya T from the Indian Electronic Literature Anthology (Vols. I and 2), the dra.ft lists, the New Media Writing Prize and works discussed in recent articles.
Scholarship comes from the Indian Electronic Literature Scholarship Repository, a bibliography of critical writing from 2017 onwards, including every article in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia special issue “India, Digital, LiteratureS” (2026).
How to read the map
Works are shaded by the region recorded for them. Most entries do not yet record a place, so the count of unplaced works sits beside the map. Scholarship is placed by the current institution of its authors, so it shows where the field is being built today rather than where each piece was written. Adding a place to a work is one of the most useful contributions you can make.
Boundaries come from DataMeet’s open India maps, simplified for the web. They use the state divisions before 2019.
Status of records
Some records are marked as flagged: dates, pages or links that still need checking against the original as the platform is still under the developmental stage.
Licence
Metadata is shared for research and teaching. Individual works keep their own licences, shown on each record where known.
Submit a work
Describe a work that belongs in the atlas. The form builds an entry in the Indian Electronic Literature Database (IELD)’s record format. Copy it or download it and send it to the atlas editors; they check each entry before it is added.