Artificial intelligence may be changing how stories are created and consumed, but storytellers at the Mumbai International Storytelling Festival (MIST) 2026 believe it could also make oral storytelling more valuable.

At a panel on the future of narrative, poet Ameen Haque said every dominant trend eventually produces a counter-trend. The growing use of AI, he suggested, could lead audiences back to oral storytelling.

“Every dominant trend gives rise to the counter. The rise of colour photography is what made black-and-white photography special,” said Haque, founder of the Storywallahs organisation.

Haque was speaking at a discussion titled The Art of Narrative: Multiple Storytelling Forms, moderated by Usha Venkatraman, founder of the Mumbai Storytellers Society (MSS). The panel also featured Kenyan-Scottish storyteller and author Mara Menzies, Sowmya R Srinivasan and Hema Subramanian. The two-day MIST is being organised by MSS at the National Theatre for Performing Arts.

Referring to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Haque said a new medium does not necessarily replace an older one. Instead, it can change how people experience it.

Haque noted that people may complain that attention spans are shrinking, but will still spend hours watching series such as Game of Thrones or The Family Man. A compelling story, he argued, can command attention even in an attention-deficit world.

The panel also explored why storytelling can be such a personal experience. Srinivasan, who runs Soul Story Mandala, spoke about using folktales to help people connect with their own memories and experiences.

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“In Soul Story Mandala, a story is told and people connect to how they feel about the story. The images and the memories take them on a journey. You choose to take what you want from that story and that becomes your point of transformation,” she said.

According to expressionist Hema Subramanian, the way a story is told depends on the character and the emotion at its centre.

“As a storyteller, you don’t remain yourself. You actually get into the story, you understand the character, you try to live the space the character is living in,” she said.

Menzies spoke about moving between live performance and the written word. Her book Blood and Gold: A Journey of Shadows began as a live performance and toured 27 countries before becoming a novel.

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Turning the performance into a book meant finding words for things that had previously been conveyed through gestures and facial expressions. But the written form also allowed her to take the story beyond the limits of an hour-long performance.