Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(5 /5 stars)
Introduction
Ipsita Chakravarty’s Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict weaves together reportage and narrative to immerse readers in the everyday realities of Kashmir. The title itself, taken from the Kashmiri word dapaan—“it is said”—captures the uncertainty of rumour, half-truths, and contested realities that define life in a region fractured by decades of conflict.
Drawing on her years as a journalist, Chakravarty assembles a mosaic of voices and experiences, each fragment contributing to a larger picture of a society scarred by violence, displacement, and militarization. What distinguishes Dapaan is its resistance to simplistic binaries.
Instead of offering easy conclusions, it foregrounds shifting perspectives, showing how memory and history collide, how truth morphs depending on the teller, and how the weight of conflict reshapes identity, belonging, and the act of remembering itself.
Narrative Style and Structure
Chakravarty’s writing moves fluidly between the lyrical and the journalistic. Each chapter unfolds like a finely crafted vignette, where reportage shades seamlessly into storytelling. Drawing on oral traditions and blending them with contemporary testimonies, she constructs what feels less like a conventional chronicle and more like a collective oral history captured on the page.
A particularly striking choice is her framing of uncertainty through the word dapaan. “Dapaan: it is said”. But who said it? What do they say? And why does it matter?. Dapaan establishes the book’s tone at once—acknowledging the fragility of truth in a landscape where rumour often stands in for fact. By leaning into this ambiguity instead of trying to resolve it, Chakravarty builds a narrative that reflects the fractured and contested texture of Kashmir itself.
Themes
1. The Multiplicity of Truth
At the heart of Dapaan lies the recognition that truth in Kashmir is never singular. Every community—whether Kashmiri Muslim, Pandit, Dogra, or soldier—carries its own story. These narratives frequently collide, overlap, and at times cancel each other out. Chakravarty demonstrates how memory is not neutral but actively policed, reshaped, and erased, making the very act of storytelling a deeply political gesture.
“But almost every official history is entrenched in its own certainties. Perhaps that is where war begins”.
2. Memory, Trauma, and Silence
Themes of exile and displacement recur throughout the book. The forced migration of Kashmiri Pandits in the early 1990s is placed alongside the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims living under militant threats and state repression. Their stories often run in parallel, marked by grief, but seldom converge.
“Our sufferings would fill a book. When this is over, it will become written history”. Such testimonies reveal how truth in Kashmir is mediated not by evidence but by power, rumor, and loss.
3. Women’s Voices in Conflict
Chakravarty also foregrounds the gendered dimensions of the conflict, bringing forward women’s voices often silenced in mainstream political narratives. Mothers, widows, and daughters testify to absence, survival, and the labor of living amid violence. By centering such perspectives, the book resists reducing Kashmir to a singular narrative and instead highlights the intimate, everyday burdens borne by women.
4. The Interplay of Myth and Reality
Chakravarty also underscores how folklore and rumor intertwine with lived experience. Legends of spirits lingering on battlefields, lakes that conceal secrets, and ancestral curses coexist with accounts of real violence. This fusion demonstrates that in Kashmir, myth can be as palpable as history—both serving as ways to make sense of trauma.
Style and Impact
Chakravarty’s prose is lyrical but never indulgent, avoiding melodrama in favor of quiet intensity. She allows the words of Kashmiris—ordinary and extraordinary, named and anonymous—to bear the emotional weight of the narrative. While her journalistic precision is evident in the meticulous detail, the book often reads less like reportage and more like a carefully assembled oral history.
The repetition of dapaan threads through the text like a refrain, lending the work both rhythm and resonance. It embodies uncertainty while also suggesting continuity, echoing how stories circulate and survive in Kashmir. Each chapter closes with a sense of unease, reminding readers that in a land of fractured memories and contested truths, certainty itself is elusive.
Strengths
- Polyphonic Narrative – The book’s greatest achievement lies in its ability to capture a chorus of voices and perspectives without collapsing them into a single, authoritative truth.
- Fusion of Journalism and Storytelling – Chakravarty balances the discipline of reportage with the intimacy of oral history, creating a text that is both credible and deeply human.
- Emotional Resonance – Through carefully chosen testimonies, the book evokes empathy without slipping into sentimentality.
- Centering Women’s Voices – By foregrounding women’s experiences of grief, absence, and survival, the narrative broadens the lens of Kashmir’s conflict.
- Literary Craft – The interplay of myth, rumor, memory, and fact renders the book not just informative but hauntingly evocative.
Limitations
While deeply compelling, the book can at times feel overwhelming in its density. Its non-linear, vignette-driven structure—though true to the fragmented nature of Kashmir’s reality—may disorient readers seeking a more straightforward narrative arc. Chakravarty also assumes a degree of prior knowledge, occasionally offering minimal historical context, which could make the text challenging for international audiences or readers unfamiliar with Kashmir’s complex past.
Moreover, her refusal to privilege one version of truth over another leaves the narrative without clear resolution. Yet this ambiguity may be deliberate, reflecting Kashmir itself—where closure is perpetually deferred, and certainty remains out of reach.
“Silence was so valued that it found its way into a popular saying. Tshopt chey ropt stu[n]z, karakh tey sont stu[n]z. Silence is silver; if you keep your silence, it turns golden”.
Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict stands as a vital addition to the growing body of literature on Kashmir. Its most enduring strength is its ability to capture the multiplicity of voices that shape the region’s fractured identity. By embracing ambiguity, rumor, and myth, Chakravarty resists the temptation of tidy explanations and instead compels readers to dwell in the discomfort of uncertainty, grief, and contested memory.
This is not a book that seeks to resolve Kashmir into a single narrative; it is a book that listens. In doing so, it demands that readers listen as well—with patience, empathy, and a willingness to confront unease. For those searching for definitive histories or political clarity, Dapaan may prove frustrating. But for readers open to inhabiting its layered, unsettled world, the book offers profound insights into the enduring human cost of conflict—and the fragile, flickering truths carried in stories.
As literature that finds its root in a conflict region, this book refuses to simplify. It offers no clear opinions but reports the truth and truth is rarely simple; Dapaan!