I have witnessed many singular adventures, both in the East and West. I have been the envied inhabitant of harems, palaces, and bagnios. I have shaded the brows on Sultans, Pachas, Omrahs and Khans. I have girded the waists of Sultanas, Princesses, Khanums and Bayaderes…”— so claims The Cashmere Shawl, a novel written in 1840. The Kashmir shawl has been swaddled in much Orientalist fantasy through the years but expect all of that to be conclusively busted by Janet Rizvi and Monisha Ahmed’s handsome new coffee table book.

While ‘pashmina’ strictly refers to the delicate fibre sheared from goats in the high altitude pastures in Tibet and Ladakh, the generic ‘cashmere’ has floated free of its origins, and can be sourced from China and Mongolia.

Collected by the Changpa people in Ladakh and Tibet, the raw pashm travels to Kashmir, where from a greasy mass of wool it is woven into light and exquisite twill tapestry by Kashmiri craftspeople. Traditional design ranged from floral meanders to lahriya zigzags and pictorial ‘hunting shawls’. With sumptuous photographs of antique shawls and fragments, Rizvi traces how the pashmina look-book changed over the years, from the sere fields with slender, decorative buta panels at the edges to the rococo designs prized by 19th century Europe, when embroidery ran riot over the field. She also picks at fascinating threads, like how the cypress design came to Kashmir — was there possibly an Iranian connection?

The book is clearly meant for dedicated textile enthusiasts. It is not so much a cultural history of pashmina and what it reveals about its times as much as a straight telling of the shawl’s glory days, the conditions of its production and trade. Rizvi has exhaustively researched pashmina weaving and trade from Mughal times to British and later. She follows the yarn from oppressed, debt-ridden weavers in Kashmir to Central Asian merchants and finally, European salons where they were worn. “It’s a story that could stand as a template for the whole history of European economic imperialism” writes Rizvi, of the way Asian markets were systematically destroyed by the import of cheap imitations, and how finally, the feather-light fabric came to exclusively drape fashionable shoulders in Europe.

... contd.