Django: Passing HTML string to template

Problem solved. Wasn't as dramatic as I thought. It so happens that django was converting html tokens such as '<' and '>' to '&lt' and '&gt'

This resulted in a correct output on the page, but inability to create the corresponding DOM objects.

the fix:

 {% autoescape off %}
    {% for book, book_desc in bd.items %}
       books_description["{{ book }}"] = "{{ book_desc|escapenewline }}"
    {% endfor %}
 {% endautoescape %}

Took me a while. If anyone comes across a similar issue here's some intel on autoescaping

autoescape filter

In case someone lands here for recent django versions, use: {{ your_context_entry|safe }}