Kashmiri Papier-Mache: Persian Gardens on Paper

Six Hundred Years of Kar-i-Kalamdani in the Kashmir Valley

Kashmiri papier-mache is not really papier-mache. It is kar-i-kalamdani, the work of the pen case, and it arrived in Srinagar in the fourteenth century from Samarkand in the luggage of a Sufi saint and a visionary sultan. For six hundred years two hereditary crafts, the sakhtsaz who moulds pulp and the naqqash who paints it, have covered wood and paper with Persian gardens, thousand-flower patterns, and gold leaf mixed with gum arabic. This lesson walks you through a workshop in downtown Srinagar, a 2014 flood that nearly ended the craft, and the institutional revival that is keeping it alive.

A Workshop in Zadibal, 1968

In a narrow lane behind the Jamia Masjid in downtown Srinagar, in the winter of 1968, a seven-year-old boy named Maqbool Jan crouches on the floor of his father's workshop and watches a lump of grey pulp become a garden. The pulp is paper. His father has soaked strips of mulberry bark and old rags in warm water for three weeks until the fibres dissolve into a soft porridge. Now he presses that porridge around a wooden core the shape of a long pen case, smooths it, and sets it to dry. Nine more steps will follow before a brush ever touches the surface. Then the real work starts. Gul-andar-gul, flower within flower, painted in iris blue and saffron yellow and a gold dust so fine it has to be mixed with gum arabic so the breath does not scatter it. The finished piece will take six months. The apprentice's first task is to sand the base. He is paid four rupees for the job and keeps the pen case for the rest of his life.

Maqbool Jan died in 2020 with a Padma Shri in his pocket. The craft he was learning that winter came to his street six hundred years earlier from Samarkand, carried over the Hindu Kush by a Sufi saint named Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani and a Kashmiri sultan named Zain-ul-Abidin. It has nearly died twice in a single lifetime. Once to plastic and factories. Once to a flood nobody saw coming. It is still alive because people like Maqbool kept layering paper on paper until something beautiful appeared.

What the Craft Actually Is

The English name for this tradition, papier-mache, is French for "chewed paper." French traders in the eighteenth century saw Kashmiri pen cases and tried to reverse-engineer them by pulping paper in their mouths. The real name, still used on the streets of Srinagar, is kar-i-kalamdani, "work of the pen case," because the object that defined the craft for centuries was the long lacquered pen case used by scribes and court officials across the Persianate world.