New Delhi: After the 2016 protests triggered by the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, journalist Ipsita Chakravarty kept returning to Kashmir, gathering stories of its people. Many of these accounts remained unpublished, but they stayed with her, stories she felt needed to live beyond the pages of a reporter’s notebook.
Years later, she has woven them into a book, Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict. By the time she began compiling the book, the abrogation of Article 370 had altered the Valley’s landscape. Chakravarty chose to sit with local people, listen, and retell their experiences in her book.
“Along with autonomy, land protection and guarantees of livelihood, there was a complete silence of communication and no way to carry these stories,” she said on 26 August at New Delhi’s Jawahar Bhawan. The conversation took place between Chakravarty, Kashmiri independent journalist Safina Nabi and academic Nishita Trisal.
Her book arrives at a fraught moment: on 5 August 2025, the J&K home department imposed a blanket ban on 25 books about Kashmir. Among them were Arundhati Roy’s Azadi (2020), journalist Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State(2022), constitutional expert AG Noorani’s The Kashmir Dispute (2013), and Australian political scientist Christopher Snedden’s Independent Kashmir (2021).
Despite such clampdowns, Chakravarty persisted. “I wanted to record the work of memory, and I didn’t want to stick to a particular journalistic register,” she told the audience. Some stories belonged to folklore: tales of a djinn helping a militant escape, or of a demonic woman haunting neighbourhoods.
“I can’t fact-check these stories,” she said, “but they revealed something about how life was experienced and narrated in Kashmir. These stories shaped public life, and it was important to listen to them.”
A shared code
The title of Chakravarty’s book comes from a Kashmiri word Dapaan, that simply translates as “it is said,” and remains an essential part of Kashmiri conversations.
According to the author, the word carries deep weight in Kashmiri storytelling traditions and often acts as a register of memory, grief, resilience, and survival. “It’s not a code itself, but it points to a code, or points to a hearsay,” she said.
She added that when a Kashmiri storyteller begins with Dapaan, they deliberately step back from taking responsibility for what follows. “One word here or there could be the difference between life and death,” she noted.
For instance, people might say, “Dapaan, there will be a curfew soon,” a cautious way of pointing to the halaat – the ever-shifting circumstances in Kashmir. “Stories of the halaat are part fact, part rumour. But that does not mean they cannot be true.”
Where one word can mean the difference between safety and danger, Dapaan becomes both a shield and a vehicle for truth-telling.“There are advantages to the word Dapaan, because the storyteller refuses to take responsibility,” she explained to the audience, most of whom were non-Kashmiri speakers.
Chakravarty noted that the term also reflects her own position as an outsider, adding that while writing the book, she had in mind that she was not speaking for Kashmiris but was simply a listener narrating what had been narrated to her.
“No matter how hard I try to imagine the lives of the people I spoke to, I have not had the experiences that they have had… It’s this tragic, unbridgeable gap that defines our lives, our political lives, certainly,” she said.
Later, during a phone conversation with ThePrint, Chakravarty also talked about how humor shaped the stories she recorded. And though she herself could not speak the language, she found that the language, with its idioms and cadences, lent the book texture. “I realised in conversation that there is this very dark humour… it grows out of suffering. It’s a kind of courage,” she said.
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‘Can’t write in binaries’
During the book discussion, Chakravarty was asked by an audience member if she’s scared of her book being banned, given the government’s recent move.
“I think it is not going to matter anymore. Banning books only gives them more hype. This is an age of digitization and AI. The same day the order came, people were already sharing links to download all 25 books. It’s a bizarre order, a bizarre concept,” Safina Nabi answered for Chakravarty.
But Chakravarty is apprehensive about it. “I was a bit scared it (her book) might also be on the list (of banned books). But what can you do? You can’t live in fear. You write what you write, and then see what happens,” she told ThePrint.
For Chakravarty, Dapaan is following the tradition of recording oral histories, countering the “dominant narrative of Kashmir outside Kashmir.”
“One can’t write only in binaries. Then the book loses complexity.”
(Edited by Ratan Priya)