Ritaja Biswas: The Voice Behind Kahaniya
Ritaja Biswas, a journalism graduate and aspiring filmmaker, founded Kahaniya during the 2020 lockdown—a creative audio channel born from a short-film experiment and sustained by her passion for storytelling. From Bengali audio tales to poetic monologues, Kahaniya (also known as Kontho Kahini) has grown across Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify, offering listeners a heartfelt escape into narrative worlds.
Here’s Ritaja’s story, in her own words.
Kahaniya, Aisi toh hoti hain Kahaniya!
That one line started a journey of 5 and more years now. Hello, this is Ritaja Biswas, and you are reading a story, for the essence of stories to regain their spirit of being the story of the hour.
Around the time when Covid19 hit all across India, there was an untitled creative renaissance, where people started to interact with the cultural specifics of our country. Everyone amidst the chaos wanted to create and curate as much as possible. This time was one of a kind.
During 2020, when lockdown crashed the normalised way of living a life, this paradigmatic shift saw a turning point, where hundreds of artists started curating content based on their niches. Thus the origin of Kahaniya.
At that point, there was a certain page which was hosting a youth festival digitally. They were also taking registrations for a short-film making contest. One of my acquaintances gave me the idea that we should register and make one short film from scratch and enter the said contest. And there’s the cut, the primal cut as to what Kahaniya is today.
As a founder of the page, I have always inculcated learning and methodologies that help us act, in any way possible. Whether it be a voice over or a 20 minutes long shot on the camera. We shot the whole short-film from our own houses with our phone cameras.
Though we didn’t make it as big as we thought in the contest, we created something even bigger, we created a page, to release that final cut of the film. And, that page is Kahaniya, which started on 4th of September, 2020.
The whole process took us around weeks to make it big on Instagram, as that remained our sole platform to make it better. Slowly, after acquiring some promotional partners, we released the short-film on 15th September 2020. The name of it goes like ‘Icche Pakhi’- as in the ‘wish-bird’.
Icche-Pakhi was an instant hit amongst the audience, we only had around 200 people as followers by then, but the film was viewed by 2181 viewers. That still remains as one of the best achievements till date.
After the film’s success, we started working on various audiobooks, and there have been many apocalypses but, I feel if you hold on to
something and let your manifestations cure the biases within, someday the struggle will pay off.
We mostly worked on Bengali audio-stories, mostly original ones and people heard and commented, how they felt throughout the storytelling sessions. Our big audiostory hits compile various different series like Pujo Pala Path’, 2020 Scripted, Monologues in May and many more.
Throughout the journey, I have had connections with various kinds of people, few stayed with me even when the story-telling took a pause, and few went their way and left a lesson behind.
There has been a block in between, where no works were published, because the whole team got placed at different locations, few went for a job, few felt it’s better to not work creatively anymore, few are still left. I intend to follow up with these few and gather a new set of people who would again love to explore what storytelling has to give.
Even shayaries are also a part of narrative when it comes to storytelling, I am also working actively to make it into the chime of sher-o-shayaris and its working really great.
Kahaniya has a Bengali nick-name, Kontho-Kahini, which demarcates the audio-story part. We are available on Facebook, Instagram and Spotify, although the content lineups different from platform to platform.
At this point, I am holding on and manifesting, working and rewriting my course of action towards the page, hopefully, I would be able to regain the momentum with which it started, as there’s no end to stories. Fullstops are just checkpoints, we would make it into a home where Kahaniya, tells you stories from every part of the world.
