“Dapaan.”
It is said.
That is how many stories begin in Kashmir. Not with facts. Not with certainty. But with a word that sits at the edge of rumour and memory. It’s how legends pass through generations — and how dangerous truths are sometimes told when it’s too dangerous to claim them directly.
In The Storyteller’s Tale, journalist Ipsita Chakravarty travels through a Kashmir that rarely makes it into official reports or newspaper columns — not the headlines of border skirmishes or diplomatic spats, but the spaces in between: home interiors, long silences, radio plays, buried songs, and whispered jokes. Through these fragments, she pieces together a haunting and humane portrait of a land that has learned to speak without saying too much.
What emerges is not a linear history of conflict, but a layered chronicle of storytelling itself — and how the act of remembering can become an act of resistance.
A Radio Play, a Pop Song, and the Beginning of Loss
The book opens with a memory from a Srinagar businessman — one that has lived in his mind since the 1980s. He remembers a radio play, Myean Jigraki Daade Wath (“Let My Heart’s Ache Lift”), about two Kashmiri children — a Muslim boy, Nika, and a Pandit girl, Sahaba — separated by fate and reunited years later at a bustling fairground. It’s a classic tragic romance, stitched with longing and accident. But it’s not just the story he remembers — it’s the cassette.
That same cassette also contained Hawa Hawa, the Pakistani pop hit by Hasan Jahangir. Both tapes had to be buried when the “haalaat” began.
The Haalaat: More Than Conflict, an Atmosphere
Haalaat — literally meaning “conditions” — is the word Kashmiris use to refer to everything that followed the armed insurgency in 1989: counterinsurgency, crackdowns, house raids, disappearances, curfews, surveillance, and the suffocating fear that entered homes like weather.
Photographs of sons who had crossed over the border had to be destroyed. Old issues of Urdu sports magazines — particularly those with Pakistani cricketers — became suspect. Even knowledge of mountain trails could mark someone as guilty. A pair of ornamental swords? Suspicious. A book of sermons? Confiscated.
Entire households began editing themselves. Not just for safety — but for survival.
Chakravarty writes, “Two things can change at any time in Kashmir — the weather, and the haalaat.” But she also makes a subtle case that haalaat is more than political. It is psychological climate, collective trauma, and ongoing derangement of daily life. It’s a rupture so deep that it even changed how people told stories.
Dapaan: Truth Without Attribution
One of the book’s most powerful motifs is the word “dapaan.” In Kashmiri, it means “it is said” — a culturally rooted oral storytelling device, but also a kind of shield. As Chakravarty notes, it allows the speaker to avoid taking responsibility for the claim. It invites ambiguity. It protects the speaker.
In post-1989 Kashmir, dapaan became more than a folktale intro — it became a lifeline.
“It is said, a boy was taken from the bus stop.”
“It is said, there will be a raid tonight.”
“It is said, the man who disappeared was seen across the border.”
This is where Chakravarty’s book excels: not in stating what is known, but in showing how knowing itself has become suspect. In a place where facts can endanger lives, stories become elliptical. Truth is whispered, not declared. Memory is coded into folklore, jokes, riddles — and when none of that is safe, into silence.
After 2019, Silence Deepens
While The Storyteller’s Tale surveys decades of Kashmiri storytelling, it is acutely aware of the most recent rupture: the revocation of Article 370 in 2019, which stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special constitutional status. The political move, widely celebrated in many parts of India, felt like a humiliation in the Valley.
Before 2019, Chakravarty notes, Kashmiris still shared their stories with journalists and researchers — perhaps with the hope that being heard could shift something. But after the abrogation, even that hope seemed to vanish. Distrust grew. Some refused to speak to her, not out of fear, but from a profound sense of betrayal.
“I have stories,” one young man in Anantnag told her. “But who are you to tell them?”
It’s a fair question. And it sits at the ethical core of the book.
Listening Without Ownership
Chakravarty does not pretend to be a voice for Kashmir. She does not center herself. She acknowledges, repeatedly, that she is an outsider — a mainland Indian, someone whose government has stripped Kashmiris of rights, someone who has never lived under occupation.
But that is where The Storyteller’s Tale becomes something rare: a book built not on interpretation, but on listening. She makes no grand claims. She offers no final word. What she does offer is presence — quiet, consistent, human presence — as Kashmiris tell stories that straddle the line between myth and reality.
Absences and Erasures
Throughout the book, certain silences loom large — especially the absence of Kashmiri Pandits, who were forced to flee the Valley in the early 1990s. Their stories are remembered not with animosity but with ache. Sahaba, the Pandit girl in the radio play, becomes a symbol of what was lost: shared culture, neighbourhood friendships, entire histories of co-existence.
Chakravarty also notes that some perspectives are underrepresented in the book — Gujjars, Paharis, migrant workers, and others who remain outside the dominant political subjectivity of the Valley. She doesn’t gloss over this. She names the limits of her access — and in doing so, respects the complexity of the region.
The Power — and Cost — of Storytelling
The Storyteller’s Tale reminds us that in Kashmir, storytelling itself is risky. To name a person, to recall a raid, to describe a checkpoint, to say a song was once sung — all of this can endanger someone.
Yet, Kashmiris still tell stories.
Through jokes about soldiers. Through ghost tales about haunted bunkers. Through riddles about escape routes. Through cassette tapes that are long gone. Through the simple, stubborn act of remembering.
And in that remembering, resistance lives on.
Final Thoughts
At a time when Kashmir is often seen only through the lenses of geopolitics or security, The Storyteller’s Tale gives us something much more intimate — and far more unsettling. It reminds us that what we call “normal life” is often the first casualty of conflict.
This is not a book of policy or protest. It is a book of people. And what they carry in silence. What they bury to survive. What they whisper, even now, in the shadow of the haalaat.
And above all, it is a book that understands a simple but devastating truth: sometimes, the stories you can’t tell are the ones that define you.
BOOK INFO
📘 The Storyteller’s Tale
🖊️ By Ipsita Chakravarty
📍 Published by: Westland Books
🕯️ Genre: Oral History, Memoir, Cultural Journalism
⭐ Verdict: Essential, haunting, and quietly radical.
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