The shawl making industry in Kashmir is one that has existed for more than 700 years. The art of hand-making these shawls has been passed down from generation to generation. Zain-Ul-Ahadin introduced the art of weaving in the Kashmir Valley in the mid-14th century.
Shawls from Kashmir made of fine lustrous wool dominated the European fashion world from the late eighteenth century through the third quarter of the nineteenth. Empress Josephine received Kashmir shawls as gift from Napoleon. Claude Monet’s 1868 portrait of Madame Gaudibert in a large and colourful Kashmir shawl is one of the last of a long series of paintings of fashionable women wearing these garments.
The cloth used is of exceptionally high quality, made from the wool of several species of mountain sheep and goat found at high altitudes in Ladakh, Tibet and Xinjiang. The highest-quality wool is light, warm and glossy. It is so fine that merchants in Kashmir, even today, customarily pull a large shawl through a finger ring to prove that it is of premier quality. These shawls best known for their supreme intricacy and sublime quality.
Most high quality shawls are woven from the fleece of a Central Asian species of mountain goat, the Caprihircus, that lives in the mountains of Ladakh, Tibet and Chinese Turkestan. These domesticated goats produce a soft undergrowth beneath a coarse layer of outer hair. Shepherds comb the goats in the spring to harvest the soft lustrous under-fleece. These goats, referred to as changthangi by locals,live at altitudes above 10,000 feet, 5,000 feet higher than the Kashmir Valley, and are able to withstand temperatures of up to -40 Degrees Celsius. The changthangi’s eating habits set them apart from other goats, as they feed on not only grass but the roots of the grass as well. The Capri hircus is the goat known to Westerners as the cashmere goat, a name derived from old Kashmir spellings of Kashmir. Cashmere is, and was, also known as pashmina. The name pashmina literally translates to “soft gold” in Kashmiri, and is six times finer than human hair.
Raw pashmina wool is transported to the regions of Kashmir after the shedding season. After removing impurities and aligning the fibres, local craftsmen spin and weave the wool. The shawl is then hand-dyed with mineral dyes to produce its beautiful colours. Lastly, the craftsmen use a variety of needles to enhance elaborate embroidery on each piece. Most pashminas shawl take between 6-12 months to produce, with a total of approximately 180 hours spent on each piece.
Kashmir shawls were patterned in the intricate technique of interlocking twill tapestry, or kani as it was known locally. A complex Kashmir pattern required hundreds of tojis, tiny bobbins resembling eyeless needles that carried the coloured waft threads. In an account dating to the 1820s, it was observed that as many as 3,000 tojis were used in a single shawl. Weaving progressed very slowly; even with two men working long hours each day at the loom, a Kashmir shawl typically took eighteen months to complete, while a particularly complex shawl required up to three years.
The amli, or needle-worked shawl, has been attributed to Khwaja Yusuf, an Armenian shawl merchant who was sent to Kashmir in 1803 as an agent of a firm based in Constantinople. Yusuf worked with a needle-worker named Ali Baba to produce the first completely needle-worked shawls.
The earliest detailed account of the Kashmir shawl industry is that written by William Moorcroft between 1820 and 1823, preserved in manuscript at the Library of the old India Office (now the Commonwealth Relations Office), Whitehall, London. These reveal a situation in which division of labour was far advanced to the extent of twelve or more independent specialists being involved in the making of a single shawl – the spinners who separated the very dirty raw material into different grades of fleece, the dyers who used more than 300 different tints, the warp-maker, warp-dresser, warp-threader, pattern drawer (or naqqash), colour caller and pattern master and, finally, the weavers.
Even in Moorcroft’s account, the main profit-makers in the industry were not the weavers of loom owners, but the mokhuns or shawl-brokers, who were intermediaries between the producers and foreign merchants. The weavers were the most oppressed section of the industry, the majority being depicted as ill-clothed, undernourished, and permanently in debt. Moorcroft wrote that without the supplementary earnings of wife and children the average weaver could not even support a family.
This entire process of making the finest of shawls has been in decline due to the industrial revolution. More and more of these pieces are being produced in mass quantities in other nations as they utilise mechanised textile mills, although they are of inferior quality relative to hand-woven ones. Reviving this industry is of utmost importance as it provides livelihood to thousands of weavers in Kashmir.
Shawls from Kashmir made of fine lustrous wool dominated the European fashion world from the late eighteenth century through the third quarter of the nineteenth. Empress Josephine received Kashmir shawls as gift from Napoleon. Claude Monet’s 1868 portrait of Madame Gaudibert in a large and colourful Kashmir shawl is one of the last of a long series of paintings of fashionable women wearing these garments.
The cloth used is of exceptionally high quality, made from the wool of several species of mountain sheep and goat found at high altitudes in Ladakh, Tibet and Xinjiang. The highest-quality wool is light, warm and glossy. It is so fine that merchants in Kashmir, even today, customarily pull a large shawl through a finger ring to prove that it is of premier quality. These shawls best known for their supreme intricacy and sublime quality.
Most high quality shawls are woven from the fleece of a Central Asian species of mountain goat, the Caprihircus, that lives in the mountains of Ladakh, Tibet and Chinese Turkestan. These domesticated goats produce a soft undergrowth beneath a coarse layer of outer hair. Shepherds comb the goats in the spring to harvest the soft lustrous under-fleece. These goats, referred to as changthangi by locals,live at altitudes above 10,000 feet, 5,000 feet higher than the Kashmir Valley, and are able to withstand temperatures of up to -40 Degrees Celsius. The changthangi’s eating habits set them apart from other goats, as they feed on not only grass but the roots of the grass as well. The Capri hircus is the goat known to Westerners as the cashmere goat, a name derived from old Kashmir spellings of Kashmir. Cashmere is, and was, also known as pashmina. The name pashmina literally translates to “soft gold” in Kashmiri, and is six times finer than human hair.
Raw pashmina wool is transported to the regions of Kashmir after the shedding season. After removing impurities and aligning the fibres, local craftsmen spin and weave the wool. The shawl is then hand-dyed with mineral dyes to produce its beautiful colours. Lastly, the craftsmen use a variety of needles to enhance elaborate embroidery on each piece. Most pashminas shawl take between 6-12 months to produce, with a total of approximately 180 hours spent on each piece.
Kashmir shawls were patterned in the intricate technique of interlocking twill tapestry, or kani as it was known locally. A complex Kashmir pattern required hundreds of tojis, tiny bobbins resembling eyeless needles that carried the coloured waft threads. In an account dating to the 1820s, it was observed that as many as 3,000 tojis were used in a single shawl. Weaving progressed very slowly; even with two men working long hours each day at the loom, a Kashmir shawl typically took eighteen months to complete, while a particularly complex shawl required up to three years.
The amli, or needle-worked shawl, has been attributed to Khwaja Yusuf, an Armenian shawl merchant who was sent to Kashmir in 1803 as an agent of a firm based in Constantinople. Yusuf worked with a needle-worker named Ali Baba to produce the first completely needle-worked shawls.
The earliest detailed account of the Kashmir shawl industry is that written by William Moorcroft between 1820 and 1823, preserved in manuscript at the Library of the old India Office (now the Commonwealth Relations Office), Whitehall, London. These reveal a situation in which division of labour was far advanced to the extent of twelve or more independent specialists being involved in the making of a single shawl – the spinners who separated the very dirty raw material into different grades of fleece, the dyers who used more than 300 different tints, the warp-maker, warp-dresser, warp-threader, pattern drawer (or naqqash), colour caller and pattern master and, finally, the weavers.
Even in Moorcroft’s account, the main profit-makers in the industry were not the weavers of loom owners, but the mokhuns or shawl-brokers, who were intermediaries between the producers and foreign merchants. The weavers were the most oppressed section of the industry, the majority being depicted as ill-clothed, undernourished, and permanently in debt. Moorcroft wrote that without the supplementary earnings of wife and children the average weaver could not even support a family.
This entire process of making the finest of shawls has been in decline due to the industrial revolution. More and more of these pieces are being produced in mass quantities in other nations as they utilise mechanised textile mills, although they are of inferior quality relative to hand-woven ones. Reviving this industry is of utmost importance as it provides livelihood to thousands of weavers in Kashmir.