When Mahum Shabbir began learning the art of the famed Kashmiri papier-mâché, she had a strange feeling that the miniature flowers, leaves and branches she was drawing were all dead. Shabbir, then 19, had just enrolled as a freshman at Harvard University and was home during the summer, attempting to deepen her ties with the Valley through this centuries-old art. But with every motif she attempted, the feeling of estrangement intensified. Kashmiri papier-mâché was filled with unblemished paradisiacal beauty, but Shabbir belonged to a generation that grew up with an ongoing strife in that ‘paradise on earth’.

“Everything on those papier-mâché boxes looked like an imitation of an imitation, and all of it was dead,” she says. “And it had nothing to do with the artist’s expression anymore. It all felt like a farce, a beautiful farce, and not art, which must have an ethical imperative and concern for social justice.”

Together with her friend Suhail Mir, an artist and newspaper cartoonist, she now runs an online shawl business — Crafted-in-Kashmir — that has radically changed the age-old Kashmiri shawl by contemporising the motif. Instead of blossoming branches, barbwires run through the Pashmina shawls, skulls take the place of chinar leaves, guns and paisleys face each other, and flowers in the colours of spring are imprisoned in loops and tangles of barbwires.

“We have heard about attempts to contemporise Kashmiri art, but contemporising does not mean brightening the colours and resetting prices; instead, it’s about making the art an expression of the artist and artisan. And that is what we wanted to do: to give the art a voice,” says Shabbir.

Together, they work with young artists and designers as well as senior weavers and spinners to create a shawl “that is not only a thing of beauty but also the voice of an artisan, the voice of a people”. So far, the site has sold shawls and sweaters mostly to foreign buyers, and their prices range from $400 for the ‘sada’ cashmere range to $1,000-plus for the exquisite kani range.

Although both these young Kashmiris grew up during years of political uncertainty and long for a peaceful and just solution, they come from very different backgrounds. Shabbir’s parents are both doctors, whereas Mir’s mother educated him with the money she earned from spinning yarn. They have been brought together by their common belief in art as a means of social justice and the voice of lived experience.

Rather than asking the weavers to replicate a design, as is routinely done, Shabbir and Mir design each shawl in consultation with the weavers and draw from their traditional knowledge system.

“I had been making kani shawls for 20 years but have never made or seen a shawl with a barbwire or gun in it,” says one of the weavers, Aashiq Hussain Dar. “But when I was making it, I knew that it was the same barbwire that I had seen through my life in Kashmir, around the Army camps and bunkers, in numerous curfews and crackdowns; and while I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to make it, it just came to me naturally.”

Dar is currently working on another shawl with just two motifs all over it — paisleys and Kalashnikovs. “Their (Crafted-in-Kashmir) shawls are pure quality, and the motifs are so different… no one has ever made shawls like these before. They are interesting and also say something about this place and the times we live in,” the artisan says.

Each Kashmiri shawl takes months to make and passes through several hands in the process. For centuries, it has remained a major source of income for thousands: the weavers, washers, dyers and spinners, who are almost always women.

Mir’s mother, Mehrunisa, has worked the spinning wheel for three decades now. One afternoon, during curfew, we walked across Srinagar to meet her at her house in Chattabal.

“When I got married, my mother gave me this spinning wheel as a gift,” says Mehrunisa. That, in turn, helped her give her children the gift of education. Today she believes spinners are a dying breed as there is little money in it. “I got one rupee for one knot 30 years ago and get the same today. Why would anyone do it?” she asks.

That one rupee includes the cost of the yarn, which the women have to buy themselves. “We used to buy 10gm of yarn for about ₹100 and, after spinning it over two days, sold it back for ₹140. The ₹40 we earned is nothing these days.”

Back when she was young, almost every second house in Srinagar had a woman spinning yarn to bolster the household income and fetch her financial independence; today, these women find less work due to the mechanisation of looms and spinners.

Mir has seen the ins and outs of this business since childhood, and was always struck by the gender inequality that denied his mother and hundreds of other women spinners in his neighbourhood their rightful share of income.

“When we went into this business, we decided to give the women yarn for free, so everything they earned was profit and we pay in advance,” he says.

Shabbir and Mir want to ensure that their shawl business goes beyond commercial interests and helps put the cottage industry back on its feet on improved social terms. The shawl’s engagement with the politics of the time is yet another of its raison d’etr e.

(Zahid Rafiq is The Hindu’s correspondent in Srinagar)

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