Art of the Moghuls:  Kashmir Shawls

Since time immemorial, the mountainous region of Kashmir in northwestern India has been a center of superior woolen textiles.  Although wool production from this area has been documented since the fifth century B.C. and shawls were woven there as early as the eleventh century, the soft, magically light mantle that we associate with the Kashmir shawl began with the Moghul conquest of the province in 1586.

Under Moghul Emperor Akbar (1526-1605), the arts blossomed and the manufacture of shawls flourished.  Famous as an empire builder, Akbar also took a keen interest in fashion.  He owned a large collection of shawls and conceived new ways to wear them.  Persian men had traditionally worn narrow waist girdles of shawl fabric, while Indian men wore them as wide shoulder mantles.  According to the sixteenth century text Ain-i-Akbari,   Akbar introduced the practice of wearing two shawls back to back so that the underside would not show.  He brought weavers from Eastern Turkestan and established imperial karkhanas or workshops in Lahore (Punjab), Agra, Fatehpur (Uttar Pradesh), and Ahmedabad (Gujarat).  With Akbar's encouragement, shawl artisans produced exceptionally beautiful pieces that the emperor presented as highly prized gifts to visiting foreign dignitaries.  

Shawl weaving soon became one of Kashmir's principal sources of income.  The best quality Kashmir shawls are woven from the wool of the wild "pashmina" goat - Capra hircus - that inhabits the high plateau of Tibet and central Asia.  During the severe winter months, the goats grow a layer of soft down on their underbellies, below their coarser wool coats.  During the spring, they shed the fleece by rubbing themselves on bushes and rocks.  The fleece is gathered by the local population and sold to merchants in the Kashmir Valley. 

Women then sort and separate the fleece according to its quality before spinning it by hand on a spinning wheel.  The best fleece is reserved for the warp threads and for the most expensive shawls.  

Kashmiri weavers - always men - work on often extremely complex patterns created by a designer - the naqqash - which are then transcribed into detailed instructions by a talim-guru, or pattern master.  The weaving process is an art which has been passed down over generations and requires enormous skill and a great deal of time.  A traditional Kashmir shawl from the eighteenth century required two men working 18 months at a loom, while a top notch example could take as long as three years. 

The Buta and its seeds

The principal motif associated with the Kashmir shawl is the buta or boteh.  This flame-shaped, curved-tip shape has complex origins going back to stylized representations of leaves, trees, and flowers found in the medieval textile traditions of India, Iran, Byzantium, Sicily, and Spain.  One plausible theory claims that the pattern goes back to ancient Babylon, where a tear-drop shape was a symbol representing the growing shoot of a date palm.  The palm provided food, drink and fiber for clothing and shelter.  It came to be regarded as the "tree of life," and to become gradually accepted as a fertility symbol.

The buta first appeared in its present form during the Moghul period, and its use in the earliest Kashmir shawls conveys the safety of a strong dynasty.  Like the Indian gardens of the Moghul period, the Kashmir shawl exemplifies luxury, comfort, and grace.  Originally worn by noble men, the shawl became an enduring women's fashion in the West, and the buta became known as paisley when, in the early 19th  century, the city of Paisley in Scotland became one of the most important centers for the manufacture of shawls imitating those of Kashmir.
 
Kashmiri embroidered shawls

The best Kashmiri embroidery is varied in form, rich in color, elaborate in detail, and exquisite in execution.  At its finest, the embroidery is beautifully finished on both sides, a quality much appreciated by shawl connoisseurs. 

Kashmir's natural beauty and rich religious and cultural heritage offer abundant inspiration for the embroidery patterns drawn freely by the naqqash for each shawl.  The sparkling lakes, snow-capped mountains, and spectacular color of the sky at sunrise and sunset are represented in stylized patterns of great complexity and beauty.  More common themes include floral borders, the ubiquitous buta, the leaf of the chinar  tree  -   a variety of plane or sycamore that has characterized Kashmir since Mughal times -  and other garden-related motifs.  

A finely-embroidered Kashmiri shawl takes countless hours of painstaking and highly skilled work.  Only one person embroiders a particular shawl because everyone stitches with a slightly different tension that must be maintained to ensure uniform work in the finished piece.  Today's Kashmiri embroiderers start work when they are 18 years old or younger, and most stop at about 50 or sooner, as their eyesight begins to weaken.