Kashmir Carpet In Gordian Knot

Global recession, machine-made cheap copies and low tourist inflow push homespun magic into a tailspin.

- Naseer Ganai

Nimble fingers pass a string of silk through a warp of vertical threads, tying intricate knots and often comb-beating them to a tight finish. The weaver varies the colours of the weft to create figurative images, occasionally glancing over the talim—a piece of paper, the blueprint of motifs and layout decided before the loom was strung at the kharkhana.

The routine continues for at least five months, kind of like a gestation until the child is born. The outcome of this lab­ our of love: the handmade Kashmiri silk carpet, around Rs 87,000 apiece. Their beauty, of course, is priceless.

However, the 700­year­old Kashmiri carpet industry, which remained largely unaffected by the insurgency scarring the Valley since 1989, is spinning into decline because of the international economic crisis. In the turbulent 1990s, when the Valley faced large­scale crack­ downs and shutdowns, the artisans wove carpets, embroidered pashminas and handpainted papier mache boxes in their homes. Exports brought good money. The industry grew.

At the peak of its business, with a cli­entele spread over Europe, the US and West Asia, there were around 100,000 weavers in nearly 30,000 handlooms creating expensive silk and fine Cashmere carpets. But over the past four years, business nosedived. Many weavers were retrenched; some wouldn’t get salaries for months on end. Some began working as construction labourers to make ends meet.

Today, in a gloomy room of an old house at Bagwanpora in the old city neighbourhood of Srinagar, two tired artisans are weaving a carpet. No one is sure if it will ever get a buyer. “The busi­ ness is over. There is no profit,” says one of the weavers, Gulzar Ahmad Bhat. The owner of loom, 45­year­old Nazir Ahmad Dar, agrees. “He is right.”