Tradition · shawl weaving tradition · India
Kani shawl weaving and pashmina
Also known as kani shawl, pashmina, talim, Changthangi, Paisley
The twill-tapestry shawl of Kashmir, woven not with a shuttle but with dozens of small wooden kanis, each carrying one colour, worked from a coded pattern chart called a talim that a reader calls out to the weavers. A full kani shawl can take two or three years on the loom.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 34.084, 74.797
Worth knowing
The wool is pashm from the Changthangi goat of the Ladakh plateau, combed rather than shorn and carried down to Srinagar to be spun. European demand from the 1780s made the shawl a fashion and then produced the mechanical imitation at Paisley that took its trade and its name — so a Scottish town is named for a Kashmiri pattern, and a Kashmiri industry was destroyed by a loom.
Connections (4)
- AnaloguePattu weaving of Jaisalmer and Barmer
Pattu in the Thar and the kani shawl in Kashmir are the two Indian wool traditions worked on pit looms for a cold season, and they are opposite ends of a market. Pattu is sheep and camel wool woven for a household's own winter and dowry; the kani shawl is combed pashm from the Ladakh plateau, two years on a loom, made for a court and then for Europe.
- Craft tradition ofChangthang and the Changpa
The pashm the kani shawl is woven from is combed, not shorn, from Changthangi goats on the Ladakh plateau above four thousand metres, and carried three hundred kilometres over the passes to Srinagar to be spun. A Kashmiri luxury industry rests entirely on a Ladakhi pastoral one, and when the Changpa's winter grazing is squeezed the looms in Srinagar feel it.
- Trade routeBaramulla
Shawls left the valley through the Baramulla gap and went down to Amritsar, Lahore and the Company ports, and European demand from the 1780s turned a court cloth into a fashion. The mechanical imitation woven at Paisley then took both the trade and the name, so a Scottish town is called after a Kashmiri pattern and a Kashmiri industry was destroyed by a loom.
- Site withinSrinagar
Kani shawl weaving and pashmina processing are the Srinagar crafts — the pashm wool is combed from Changthangi goats in Ladakh and carried down the Zoji La to Srinagar's spinning and weaving workshops, where the twill-tapestry shawl is woven on kani looms by families whose chain of practice runs back to the Mughal workshops. The talim pattern-chart system is a Srinagar invention, and the Paisley name itself is a Scottish mimicry of a Srinagar motif.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kashmir shawl”. Moorcroft's 1823 account of the Srinagar shawl looms; Frank Ames, The Kashmir Shawl and its Indo-French Influence (1986).
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