Last month, the Jammu and Kashmir home department decreed that 25 books would be forfeited from the public. “Credible intelligence” had established they were conductors of “false narratives” and “secessionism”. Since then, the police have spread out across bookshops in the Kashmir Valley, seizing the titles on the list. Many of them are books on Kashmir’s history. This is only the latest attempt to censor history-telling in the Valley. It may not be the last. But buried histories, driven underground, tend to rise again in spectral form. That is how the raantas came to haunt Kashmir.

There have always been stories of a demonic woman who lives in the forests of Kashmir. Her hair reaches all the way down to her feet. Her feet are turned backwards. When she sways her hair from side to side, she can make most men do her bidding. They sometimes call her a daen; and sometimes a raantas. These stories are told half jokingly. Then someone will say they had an uncle or a neighbour taken by a raantas. That is no joke.

This spectral figure comes from Kashmir’s folktales. Almost every child in Kashmir has been warned about the raantas at bedtime. She catches men who go out at night. She is punishment for straying, lying in wait outside the bounds of happy homes and villages filled with ungovernable desires. Young women complain that if they talk too loudly or leave their hair open or disobey, they will be called a daen.

But when militancy spread, the old folktales changed. With the rapid militarisation of the Valley, the woman in the woods shapeshifted into something else, a new and terrible fear that could not be named.

Here’s how the raantas turned into a modern ghost. In 1993, one of the bloodiest years of the insurgency, there was mass panic in Kashmir. Rumours spread that the raantas was prowling about at night, attacking anyone who dared to venture out. Every locality set up a night watch; bands of men patrolled the streets. Others kept vigil inside homes, rattling canisters filled with stones to raise an alarm. Some raantas sightings ended in comedy — nervous brothers had mistaken each other for the spectre in the dark; a girl had caught her braid in a door latch and thought she was under attack. But in several cases, the raantas was reported to have drawn blood.

Local newspapers carried rival theories about the spectral visitations. Government and security sources quoted in reports insisted the raantas had been sent by Pakistani intelligence to do their haunting by proxy. But the reports also reflect a growing public consensus that the raantas was a creature of the Indian security forces. It was said that the conjuring was a tactic to stop militants from moving around at night and local residents from giving them shelter. It was also whispered that the raantas
had distinctly military features: metal talons, a body of steel cloaked in a black sheath, and weapons-grade, gravity-defying ‘spring boots’ that enabled it to leap to
the height of second-storey windows. When given chase, she often disappeared near a military vehicle or a bunker.

In that frenzied time, a time of daily crackdowns, disappearances, shootouts and grenade blasts, it did not seem so absurd that ghostly creatures should be sent out to do battle. Newspaper articles in 1993 seethed with rage that Kashmiri folktales should be used to terrorise Kashmiris. But folktales could also be made to speak of other anxieties. Long after public opinion had ruled that these were not supernatural ghosts but ‘psy ops’ to put down rebellion, people invoked monsters to talk about the growing military presence in the Valley. The mass panic of 1993 died out in a few months. But for years after that, there would be stories of ghostly visitations in isolated pockets of the Valley.

In 2017, the year after anti-government protests in which about 100 civilians were killed, the Valley saw a new haunting in the form of braid choppers. These spectral beings apparently attacked women to cut off their hair. The rumour had started in the plains of North India. But once it entered Kashmir, it acquired new life, spreading like wildfire in a grieving Valley. The raantas seemed to have been resurrected, once again, in stories about braid choppers. Shared patterns emerged in some accounts: figures veiled in black, spring boots. Only now, the spectres were specifically attacking women in the Valley whose minds and bodies had suffered some of the worst ravages of the conflict.

Across the world, places torn apart by conflict have reported similar hauntings. Ghosts have walked in the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia. “Grease devils” have roamed in a Sri Lanka still recovering from civil war. Not all hauntings are recognised as ghost stories though. The scholars, Bruce and Martha Lincoln, have set down a “typology of hauntings” to better understand apparitions in conflict zones. They define “primary hauntings” as spectral sightings where ghosts appear as ghosts to people who believe in them. Then there are “secondary hauntings”, where ghostliness becomes a metaphor, often for suppressed histories that surface as habits of language, as illnesses, as the work of memory. Sometimes, it is a metaphor used quite consciously to draw attention to past injustices. For instance, in a speech made on the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Nguyen-vo Thu-huong, an anthropologist from the Vietnamese diaspora, invoked the ghosts of the war dead. “May we be haunted, without end,” she said, urging the people not to accept the past as resolved.

It may never be known whether the ghosts of Kashmir were psy-ops or whether they rose out of repressed traumas. But they did come to embody secret histories of a conflict under censorship. With its new book ban, the government would expunge from written record all histories that do not fit neatly into the official narrative of Kashmir as a matter resolved. Yet Kashmir has long traditions of storytelling where the past is preserved despite censorious governments.

The raantas in Kashmir stands at the edge of recorded history, casting a shadow. Lately, her shadow has lengthened. If you are in Kashmir, you may no longer read A.G. Noorani’s magisterial account of the geopolitical dispute or Victoria Schofield’s inquiry into the roots of the conflict. You may no longer read Hafsa Kanjwal’s monograph on the contentious project of State building in the 1950s and the 1960s or Sumantra Bose’s exploration of a new generation drawn into fresh cycles of unrest in the 21st century. And you may certainly not read Anuradha Bhasin’s chronicle of the how the autonomy guaranteed under Article 370 was revoked or the investigation into an army raid and alleged mass rape that took place in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in February 1991.

The raantas grows larger with these forbidden histories that join other stories which cannot be told aloud. They will return to haunt the Kashmiris precisely because these tales are buried. But what of readers and audiences across India? The book ban may not apply to us but we are increasingly entreated not to look outside officially sanctioned histories of Kashmir. May the raantas reach us too, troubling our notions of the past and the present.

Ipsita Chakravarty is the author of Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir's Conflict and teaches at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication