An expansive book on Kashmiri shawls presents the history of the craft and the wretched condition of the weavers who create these prized pieces
By: Hilal Mir
The most poignant greeting on my late marriage 12 years ago came from a neighbour, Abdul Hamid, who was in his early 50s. A better part of his life had gone into needle embroidering expensive shawls for his employers for about 12 hours a day. “Congratulations. You can’t imagine how happy I am. Now pray to Allah to open the doors of matrimony for me too”. It was heartening that he still harboured hope. Shawls had been his curse. He could neither give up the craft nor earn enough to start a family. A year later, he finally abandoned embroidery and became a salesman at a hardware store. I imagine him liberated, if not happy, handing sledgehammers to customers, a world away from the back breaking art that couldn’t afford him a married life.
Nearly two decades years ago, as a reporter, I saw, in a central Kashmir village, a large room overflowing with children hunched over shawls. Some were embroidering and others were learning the craft. There was hardly any space for them to even manoeuvre their tender bodies. Most of their parents were indebted to shawl traders and they were repaying the money with their childhood.
Many other such encounters have permanently coloured my opinion about the fabled handicrafts of Kashmir. I would rather people haul river sand to earn a living than perpetuate a craft that has historically been synonymous with gut-wrenching exploitation and cruelty.
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When asked about the most pervasive mood during the Nazi occupation of France, a man who had been with the French resistance, pithily remarked, “The sorrow and the pity”. This expression gave the documentary its name. If the chequered history of Kashmiri shawls and craftsmen were to be similarly described, you could say, “The splendour and the misery”.
Abdul Ahad, a former Kashmiri bureaucrat and author of several books on the history of Kashmir, juxtaposes this splendour and misery on the pages of his expansive Shawls and Shawlbafs of Kashmir: Legends of Unsung Heroes. Pictures of insanely intricate pashmina shawls are followed by a chapter on the tragic conditions in which these masterpieces were created. A European traveller to nineteenth-century Kashmir writes that he saw an entire family busy weaving a pair of shawls, estimated to value ₹3,000 each, in a room “close enough to poison a dog”.
The wretchedness of shawl weavers’ lives escaped the eye of no foreign traveller. Richard Temple, one such chronicler, writes that “weavers formed a numerous and withal a miserable class, badly paid, badly nourished and badly housed, and therefore physically and morally wretched”. A medical missionary, William Jackson Elmslie, writes that the conditions in a shawl factory were so terrible that they caused “chest infection, rheumatism and scrofula”. No wonder, a woman, who wished her neighbour ill, said, “May you get a shawl-maker for a husband”.
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Throughout the book, the author laments in somewhat baroque prose that the misery was entirely man-made. Wars and natural disasters like floods only made it worse. Although historians and writers have gone to great lengths to describe the finesse and the magic of a Kashmiri shawl, the weavers have been relegated to “the black ghettos of history”.
Every one of the rulers of Kashmir – the sultans, Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs and Dogras – monopolised shawl manufacturing. Their lust for maximising revenue was matched by the greed of officials, traders, karkhana owners and middlemen. Foreign invaders were drawn to Kashmiri more because of its lucrative shawl industry and less because of its natural beauty. One of the key motives behind the Dogra annexation of Ladakh was to ensure the uninterrupted supply of pashmina to Kashmir.
Afghan rulers, notorious for heavy taxation on their Kashmiri subjects, created dag-e-shawl, ostensibly an excise and quality control department that, in reality, was a ruthless machine that ensured a weaver remained tethered to his craft and could never escape from Kashmir. A karkhana owner faced imprisonment if he failed to furnish beforehand the design that his workers intended to weave into their shawls.
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During Sikh rule, of the four annas (25 paise) that a weaver earned in a day, two went to the government. The shawl weaver did not receive the remaining two annas in cash. Instead, he was given food grains at a rate that was 50 percent higher than the market price. A weaver couldn’t change his employer either. Many foreign visitors were baffled by the treatment meted out to the weavers as it amounted to “killing the goose that laid the golden eggs”. Despite the stranglehold, many did escape to Punjab and other places.
The exploitation reached its tipping point during the reign of the Dogras. British official Robert Thorp wrote that “nothing but death can release him from his bondage, since the discharge of a shawlbaf would reduce the Maharaja’s revenue by 36 chilkees (rupees) a year”. A “half blind or otherwise incapacitated” shawlbaf couldn’t abandon his profession unless he found a substitute first. Even cow dung was taxed and forced labor was rampant.
For the first time in history, the weavers observed a complete strike on 12 June 1847 and put forward demands before the government. Risking their lives, nearly 4,000 are believed to have migrated to Lahore and other parts of undivided Punjab. At an open durbar, Gulab Singh, the Dogra Maharaja, sweet-talked the weavers and promised to look into their demands and announce new regulations. None of the promises materialised.
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On 29 April 1865, Dogra troops charged nearly 1,500 protesting shawl weavers in the Zaldagar area of Srinagar. They fired at the protesters who were crossing a wooden bridge, which collapsed, forcing scores to jump into the waters. Bodies of 28 people, some bullet-riddled, were recovered downstream. This was probably the first workers’ revolt in South Asia.
Shawls and Shawlbafs of Kashmir lacks the coherence and rigour of an academic history or the lucidity of a journalistic narrative. At times, it is repetitive, and the author’s sudden forays into the wider social, political, historical and economic aspects of the place in an attempt to place the hardships of shawlbafs in perspective are a bit of a strain. Such detours should have been fleshed out for readers unfamiliar with Kashmir’s history.
Yet, these are but minor hiccups. The book more than rescues shawlbafs from the “dark ghettos of history”. Drawn from a diverse set of sources, it describes how the shawl industry developed and how Buddhist Ladakh was religiously bound to keep supplying pashmina wool to Muslim Kashmir, a relationship that still continues. Besides illuminating the dark annals of the Kashmiri shawl industry, it brings to the reader some interesting facts about shawls: thieves preferred to pilfer shawls from government stores instead of gold or silver; the Mughals organised monthly khushroz or fancy bazaars for the sale of shawls; Akbar started the trend of draping shawls by throwing them over the shoulders; imitations of Kashmiri shawls were made in France, Japan and Russia and the British even took Kashmiri master craftsmen to England to train their people in the art; and captivated by a shawl gifted to her by Napoleon Bonaparte, Empress Josephine ordered 400 more.
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For centuries, a Kashmiri shawl has been the perfect gift, even a tool of diplomacy: Emperor Shahjahan gifted it to rulers of Rome, Persia and Egypt; last year, they were gifted to G20 delegates in Kashmir; nearly 4,000 artisans made it possible to deliver 70,000 pashmina shawls for guests at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Quatar. The invitation card to the grand Ambani wedding had, among other items, a two-faced Kashmiri pashmina shawl. Shawls and Shawlbafs of Kashmir duly registers these spectacles of splendour, albeit with a reminder: a Kashmiri shawl is more than a piece of warm apparel. It is a splendid testimony to the resilience of Kashmiri shawlbafs.