Ipsita Chakravarty on resistance, remembrance and storytelling in Kashmir: Southasia Review of Books podcast #30
Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the award-winning journalist Ipsita Chakravarty about her new book, Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict (Context, July 2025 / Hurst, June 2025).
“Haalaat” is a word used in Kashmir to describe the time after 1989, the conditions under which the armed resistance for freedom gained momentum. When the journalist Ipsita Chakravarty first visited the Valley in 2016, she found the haalaat was constantly being turned into stories.
These stories often begin with the word “dapaan” – “it is said” – a signature that links them to Kashmir’s long traditions of storytelling. In a place where the conflict has seeped into homes, language and culture, everyone seemed to be telling stories of the strange conditions that had overtaken their lives.
These narratives – by turns intimate, satirical, surreal – express a kind of public understanding, a distinctly Kashmiri memory of events so often narrated from elsewhere.
In her new book, Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict, Chakravarty listens closely to these stories — not as a chronicle of the Indian nation, but as a way of seeing Kashmir on its own terms. She brings together dark humour, songs of grief and blood maps of memory that reveal how storytelling itself became a form of survival and resistance in Kashmir.
This episode is now available on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts
Episode notes:
Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict by Ipsita Chakravarty (Context, July 2025 / Hurst, June 2025)
In Karimabad, three graves and a surrender - Ipsita Chakravarty & Rayan Naqash (Scroll.in, July 2017)
The legend of Burhan Wani: How the new militants of South Kashmir have become local heroes - Ipsita Chakravarty and Rayan Naqash (Scroll.in, July 2016)
Singing Kashmir: Rappers and musicians are trying to speak of an altered reality post Article 370 - Ipsita Chakravarty (Scroll.in, November 2019)
Tehreek History Writers of Kashmir: Reconstructing Memory at the Margins of Postcolonial Empire by Mohamad Junaid (Routledge, 2022)
Kashmir’s Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination by Chitralekha Zutshi (Oxford University Press, July 2014)
Bhand Pather, Kashmir’s indigenous theatre that has thrived on pungent social and political satires, in now an endangered tradition - Mehboob Jeelani (The Caravan, September 2011)
Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir by Ather Zia (University of Washington Press, June 2019)
Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics by Suvir Kaul (Duke University Press, February 2017)
The Legend of Himal and Nagrai: Greatest Kashmiri Folk Tales by Onaiza Drabu (Speaking Tiger, December 2019)
No place for picnics: Kashmiri women tell their stories of the conflict - Freny Manecksha (Himal Southasian, May 2013)
Against forgetting. Against erasure: On meaning, storytelling, and memory-making in Kashmir - Shivangi Mariam Raj (Himal Southasian, November 2021)
Shards of memory: The harsh light of Kashmir reflected in new fiction - Freny Manecksha (Himal Southasian, October 2018)
And you shall fail at your peril: The breathtaking obfuscations that form the viscera of India’s impunity in Kashmir - Nawaz Gul Qanungo (Himal Southasian, September 2014)
The Ganderbal exhumations - Patrick Hoenig (Himal Southasian, March 2007)
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