Arts Commentary & Writing, No. ❶❺
RISD Museum
January – September, 2021
Kashmir // Cashmeer
Tracing a lineage from the bitter winters and nomadic looms of Kashmir to European courts, industrial appropriation, and museum vitrines.
Project advised by Kate Irvin
The Past: An Anthology
Kashmir, the northernmost part of the Indian subcontinent, has long been a space of cultural confluence. Nestled where the rugged passes of Afghanistan meet the great rivers of India, it has served for centuries as a living bridge between South Asia and Central Asia. Against a backdrop of staggering beauty—snow-laden peaks of the Himalayas, walnut groves heavy with mist, and a thousand lakes that shimmer like molten silver—some of the world's most exquisite textiles were born.
CARTOGRAPHIC DRAWING: Political Sub-Divisions of Pre-Partition India. National Geographic Magazine, 1946; CASHMERE. IN THE SCINDE VALLEY. Photograph by Francis Frith, 1850s–1870s. Victoria & Albert Museum, London E.208:892-1994.
The map demarcates the political sub-divisions of pre-partition India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is one of the last few maps that shows undivided Jammu and Kashmir during the British Raj, just before the Independence of India and Pakistan.
Among Kashmir’s most celebrated creations are its shawls, masterpieces that emerged from an aesthetic blending arabesque intricacy with Indic exuberance. This fusion of worlds—Persian gardens and Indian forests—breathed life into motifs of curling vines, blossoming flowers, and stylized trees of life, rendered in colors as vivid as the landscape itself. These designs were not merely imagined; they were painstakingly woven into being through techniques that demanded a lifetime of learning.
Foremost among them is kani weaving, a method so complex that it defies mechanization. Here, every thread of weft color is guided across the warp by a tiny wooden bobbin called a tuji—one tuji for each color and motif. To trace even the slender outline of a petal, the weaver must pick up and pass a tuji through just a few strands of warp yarn, repeating the movement again and again, stitch by invisible stitch, until the form emerges. A small section of weaving might take days. A complete shawl could take years—or, in rarer cases, decades.
KANI WEAVING WITH TUJI. Image courtesy of Kashmir Box.
The result is a fabric of astonishing qualities: unbelievably strong due to the double-interlocking twill that binds the structure together, yet almost impossibly light in the hand. Unlike ordinary tapestry weaves where yarns run continuously across the breadth of the cloth, in kani weaving, the colored yarns travel only where needed, appearing just at the surface where the design demands. This technique not only minimizes excess bulk but allows for the creation of patterns with breathtaking intricacy and vibrancy. A single shawl might contain hundreds of distinct hues—each carried by its own slender tuji, each requiring a separate movement of the weaver’s hand—creating a fabric that feels less made than conjured, shimmering with the shifting light like the valley from which it comes.
SPINNING SHAWL WOOL. Drawing by John Lockwood Kipling. Circa 1870. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The value of a Kashmiri shawl, however, lies not only in its labor but in its extraordinary materials. True pashmina, the soul of these shawls, begins high in the windswept plateaus of Ladakh, over 15,000 feet above sea level. Here, the Changthangi goats, huddled against freezing winds, grow an undercoat of the finest fiber in the world: pashm. Each spring, as the goats naturally shed, nomadic herders gently comb out the fibers—an act of care as much as harvest. The raw pashm is painstakingly cleaned by hand, spun into the thinnest yarns without the aid of machines, and carried down from the mountains to Srinagar. There, in workshops perfumed by dye vats and the crisp air off Dal Lake, the yarn is dyed, dried under open skies, and finally prepared for weaving. Crafted from such origins, a Kashmiri shawl carries the labor of countless hands, the migrations of herders, and the unbroken memory of place.
MARKET PLACE ON THE DAL LAKE: Photograph taken from a shikara (wooden boat) on the Dal Lake, Srinagar, before dawn. Image courtesy of Aswin Chand, 2021
Despite the heavy toll on the craft, there has been a palpable effort to revive this tradition. However, this revival cannot fully replicate what was once produced in Kashmir’s weaving houses. While techniques are being revived, the social, cultural, and economic conditions that once supported them are no longer present. Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu & Kashmir, became a focal point for this revival movement, and in 2022, the city was inducted into the UNESCO Creative Cities Network for its contributions to textile heritage. Villages like Kanihama, Batpora, and Manzhama once again echo with the patient clicks of the handloom. Today, kani weaving enjoys protection under a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, safeguarding its authenticity against imitation.
Though the shawls produced today are magnificent in their own right, they reflect the compromises of the modern world. The current revival speaks to a bittersweet truth: we are not merely restoring a craft, but attempting to reconstruct a world that no longer exists.
Most of the original handwoven shawls no longer remain in the Indian subcontinent. Those that do are often inaccessible, locked behind closed doors or buried within institutional archives. The finest examples now lie in international museums or private collections, many acquired through colonial exploits or the slow violence of cultural dispossession. Yet among these museum holdings is another kind of “Kashmiri” shawl—one that was never made in Kashmir at all.
JACQUARD LOOM, PAISLEY MUSEUM. Jacquard loom used for weaving Paisley shawls after about 1840. Taken circa 1960. Image courtesy of “cessna152towser” on Flickr.
By the late 1700s, Kashmiri shawls had begun to circulate in Britain, brought back by soldiers and administrators of the East India Company. At first, British manufacturers tried to imitate them, but something always got lost in translation: the fiber, the drape, the soul. Early copies used silk warps; later, when spinning technology improved, they shifted to all-wool versions. Even the shape of the shawl adapted to European fashion: in the 1820s, as silhouettes changed to favor narrow waists and wide skirts, shawls were folded into triangles, draped around women's shoulders to emphasize the new hourglass ideal.
Around this time, a new "Kashmiri" shawl emerged — one woven not by hand but by machine. The Jacquard loom, invented in France, made it possible to mass-produce imitations at a fraction of the time and cost. Punch cards replaced human hands; industrial wool or cotton replaced rare, hand-spun pashmina. What appeared visually similar lacked the weightlessness, warmth, and intimacy of the originals. Through this machine logic, what had been a centuries-old practice of craftsmanship became an aesthetic up for grabs.
SWATCH BOOK. 19th century (likely mid- to late-1800s), Britain. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This book compiles a range of woven textile samples, including patterns influenced by Scottish tartans, South Indian Madras checks, and Kashmiri boteh motifs (which evolved into the European "paisley" pattern). It reflects the global entanglements of industrial weaving and colonial trade networks during the 19th century.
The theft of Kashmir’s aesthetic identity was perhaps most visible through the transformation of the paisley motif. This iconic teardrop shape traces its origins to the Persian boteh pattern, woven into Kashmiri shawls as early as the 17th century. Symbolizing life and eternity across various cultures, boteh evolved within Kashmiri craftsmanship into an emblem deeply tied to both material tradition and spiritual meaning. As Kashmiri shawls traveled to Europe, especially to France and Britain, the paisley motif became synonymous with luxury, elegance, and exoticism. It became so central to the imitation shawl aesthetic that it eventually took on the name “paisley” after the Scottish town where Jacquard looms were first employed to mass-produce these designs.
The industrial reproduction of Kashmiri designs—especially paisley—ushered in a dramatic shift in medium and meaning. The art of handweaving, once imbued with cultural memory and intimate connection to material, was replaced by the mechanical efficiency of the loom. Through Jacquard technology, paisley was reinterpreted not only on shawls but across a range of European textiles, from silks to wallpapers, expanding into an aesthetic trend detached from its cultural roots.
PAISLEY IN JAMAWAR SHAWL. Courtesy of RISD Museum.
By the 1840s, Queen Victoria’s embrace of rectangular plaids—India’s madras checks—shifted popular taste again. Printed shawls on cheap fabric made the aesthetic even more widely accessible, further diluting its original context. Meanwhile, the bustling Paisley textile industry leaned heavily on Australian worsted wool and chemical aniline dyes, replacing the pashmina fibers and natural colors of Kashmiri tradition. Industrial production didn’t just copy Kashmiri designs; it re-engineered them into something colder, flatter, detached from the hands and histories that had once shaped them.
PAISLEY MOTIF. Kashmiri Shawl. Courtesy of RISD Museum.
For a time, the Paisley weavers were among Britain’s best-paid artisans, but mechanization eventually devoured their craft too. The arrival of powerlooms — unable to reproduce the intricate patterns by hand — and the changing tides of fashion sounded the death knell. The last Paisley shawl was woven in 1903; the final loomshop shuttered in the 1940s.
As the paisley motif moved across cultures and industries, it became part of a larger aesthetic shift: one captained not by the weaving traditions of Kashmir, but by the demands of mass production. The beauty of paisley, no longer tethered to pashmina fiber, patient handwork, or spiritual symbolism, became commodified—a sign of wealth and taste in Europe, divorced from the histories and hands that had once given it life.
The Present: Kashmir // Cashmeer
The journeys of the Kashmiri shawl stretch far deeper and longer than the ones we often recount. Long before they were packed into trunks in Bombay, Calcutta, or Surat—long before they crossed oceans to reach the West—their stories were already centuries in the making, rooted in the bitter winters of Ladakh, the careful harvesting of pashm, the mastery of generations of weavers, and the living traditions of Kashmir’s craft communities.
Yet in museums, their recorded histories usually begin much later: at the moment of trade. We have receipts, shipping records, insurance papers. That is when their journeys are most often seen as commencing. In the archives, the story starts not with the shepherd or the loom, but with the sale.
PORT OF BOMBAY. Image courtesy of James Kerr.
These shawls once traveled from the valleys of Kashmir down to the bustling ports of Bombay, Calcutta, and Surat—wrapped in muslin, layered in trunks, and lashed tight against the monsoon air—before embarking on ships bound for Britain, France, and beyond. It stirs something unexplainable in me to imagine these shawls crossing oceans and empires, silent bearers of memory, their fibers steeped in the sweat of weavers, the salt of the sea, and the imprints of countless hands.
The Kashmiri shawls housed at the RISD Museum are no different. Most traveled with Miss Lucy Truman Aldrich, embarking on long journeys from Bombay in the early twentieth century.
I vividly remember the sensation that washed over me one chilly January evening in Providence, as I sat wrapped in my nani’s booti-dar pashmina and first encountered the original receipts for Miss Aldrich’s South Asian textiles. The receipts themselves felt like relics: paper softened by age, edges curled like dried leaves, the surfaces rippled with faint traces of hands long gone. They reeked of old ink and were embellished with the delicate curlicues of colonial-era calligraphy, listing beautiful "Kashmere Shawls" purchased from sellers across pre-Partition India. Each shawl’s passage unfolded in brittle script—carried by the sturdy shoulders of coolies through the steaming streets of Bombay, packed with care into the dark bellies of cargo ships, ferried across the Indian Ocean’s churn to New York, and finally carried by rail and carriage to Miss Aldrich’s stately home in Warwick, Rhode Island.
CUSTOMS RECEPIT. From Ms. Aldrich’s purchases of curios and antiques from Bombay (now Mumbai). Image courtesy of RISD Museum.
While my own travels from Bombay—or rather, Mumbai—today involve a brisk plane ride to New York and a car ride to Rhode Island, Lucy Truman Aldrich’s shawls made a far more arduous and precarious crossing. They moved at the mercy of tides and tracks, at the patience of human muscle and machine, arriving not just as purchases, but as precious, heavily insured cargo, imbued with the textures of displacement and longing.
Lucy Truman Aldrich (1869–1955), eldest daughter of Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich and beloved sister of philanthropist Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, lived a life shaped by quiet resilience. Congenitally deaf, privately educated, and never married, she carved her own path through the often suffocating expectations of her time, finding solace and adventure in the world of art and travel. Between 1920 and 1930, she made five collecting trips to Asia—journeys that spanned Japan’s misted mountains, Korea’s courtyards, China’s riverways, India’s labyrinthine bazaars, Indonesia’s temples, and Egypt’s endless sands.
LUCY TRUMAN ALDRICH. Image courtesy of Dawna Westbrook.
Her collection, amassed over three decades, became a tapestry of the sensory worlds she encountered: the rich smells of dyeworks, the rhythmic clack of looms, the bright sting of indigo against sun-scorched fabric. Between 1935 and 1955, she gifted over 700 costumes and textiles to the RISD Museum, forming the heart of its renowned Asian textile collection. They are still displayed in the gallery she dedicated to her sister Abby in 1951. Among her donations was a rare and comprehensive collection of Kashmiri shawls, each displaying a mastery of craftsmanship and splendor that could rival any museum’s holdings worldwide.
Bought from prominent dealers of the time, such as Abdul Khalik and Imre Schwaiger, Miss Aldrich’s shawls were part of a larger, often uneasy economy of exchange—objects prized for their beauty, but separated from the cultural ecosystems that had sustained them for generations.
RECEIPT FROM ABDUL KHALIK. Courtesy of RISD Museum.
The names of dealers like Abdul Khalik and Imre Schwaiger surface again and again in the archives of early twentieth-century collecting. Working within the layered economies of colonial India, they supplied objects to an eager Western clientele, navigating a world where artisanship and cultural heritage were increasingly commodified for foreign consumption. While these transactions provided livelihoods for some, they also hastened the departure of priceless cultural artifacts from their places of origin. As I sit with these shawls today, I am struck by the ethical ambiguity of their journeys: acquisitions made legally within their time, yet shaped by histories of domination and displacement. Reckoning with these complexities is not about dismissing the value of preservation—it is about telling a fuller, truer story of how these objects came to be here, and what they continue to carry with them.
Yet even as these histories endure, the way we tell them must evolve.
Museums, in particular, are spaces where these objects are often framed in ways that perpetuate colonial narratives. The labels we use—often written in the language of imperialism—do not reflect the richness of the cultures and traditions from which they come. For example, the term “cashmere” has long been used to describe the fiber of these shawls, but this word is a colonial mispronunciation of Kashmir itself, a linguistic distortion that turned a sacred practice into a global commodity. Later, scholarship shifted toward calling it "goat’s hair," an attempt at greater objectivity. But in doing so, it flattened the richness of meaning even further—reducing pashm to a sterile biological fact.
PASHMINA FIBER. Courtesy of Anoop Negi.
However, pashm is not simply goat’s hair. It is the downy undercoat that grows during the bitter winters of Ladakh and Kashmir, combed by hand, spun with patience, woven with generations of memory. It lives not only in the body of the goat but in the bodies of the people who raise, harvest, and transform it. To call it pashm is to acknowledge that it is more than a material—it is a history embedded in people, place, and practice.
In the world of museums and markets alike, the terms “cashmere” and “Kashmiri” are often tangled together, yet they refer to profoundly different things. The word cashmere itself is a colonial mispronunciation of Kashmir—a linguistic slip that hardened into a global commodity brand. Cashmere, as we encounter it now, usually refers to the fiber: soft pashm spun and knit into lightweight goods like sweaters, scarves, and gloves, most often produced far from Kashmir. By contrast, Kashmiri refers not to the fiber, but to a weaving tradition: a complex, highly skilled craft rooted in Kashmir’s valleys. Kashmiri shawls were never knit. They were painstakingly woven.
PERSIAN SOCKS ca. 1830. Courtesy of RISD Museum
In rare cases, however, the boundary between fiber and tradition blurred. By the early twentieth century, as industrial knitting machines advanced, a few European manufacturers began producing knit accessories—gloves, socks, small shawls—that imitated the densely patterned kani jaamwars of Kashmir. Knitting, with its flexible loop structure, allowed these makers to replicate the visual richness of jaamwar shawls without the time and technical mastery demanded by hand weaving. These knitted pieces mimicked the allover boteh patterns that once took years to weave, offering a faster, more accessible version for foreign markets. Yet while visually striking, they lacked the hand, drape, and embodied knowledge that true Kashmiri woven shawls carry.
Over my years of research at the Museum, I have come to understand that language is never neutral. The words we choose shape the worlds we see.
JOURNEY OF THE JAMAWAR: An exhibition at the RISD Museum’s Aldrich Galleries exploring the roots of Kashmiri weaving using native terminology and engaged scholarship. Image courtesy of the RISD Museum.
Through our efforts at the RISD Museum, we changed the labels on these shawls to reflect the peoples and places they belong to—to name kani as kani, sozni as sozni, and pashm as pashm. These terms carry centuries of knowledge, held in the hands and histories of Kashmir’s weavers. Acknowledging them is not just about accuracy; it’s a political and ethical act. In an inherently colonial space like a museum, using native terminology, amplifying native voices, and foregrounding community narratives dismantles the illusion of objectivity. It creates room for more layered, truthful histories to emerge, resisting the long history of erasure that anglicized traditions and severed them from the communities that shaped them. It restores, however imperfectly, the systems of meaning and belief that colonialism sought to dismantle. It allows emotion, reverence, and oral memory to breathe within scholarship—reminding us that craft communities are not mere artifacts to study, but living traditions to engage with, honor, and learn from.
This work continues today: tracing the migration of words and textiles, honoring their transformations without losing sight of their roots, and creating spaces—both physical and intellectual—where craft is seen as a product of embodied knowledge, ancestral care, and collective memory.