Kashmir Carpets: Knotted Dreams of the Valley
A six-hundred-year-old hand-knotted carpet tradition that a Kashmiri sultan imported from Persia in the 1440s, that Mughal emperors collected in their karkhanas, that almost died in the 1990s, and that a British textile historian named Jenny Housego walked back into a Srinagar courtyard to rebuild in 1998.
The Kashmir hand-knotted carpet tradition is one of the oldest and finest in the world. It was founded in the 1440s when Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin (remembered in Kashmir as Budshah, the Great King, reigned 1420 to 1470) invited Persian and Central Asian master weavers from Samarkand, Bukhara, and Herat to settle in Srinagar on the banks of the Jhelum river. Within a generation Kashmir had its own hand-knotted carpet industry, built on Ladakhi wool, valley walnut and madder dyes, and the Persian ghiordes knot. Under the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Srinagar workshops produced some of the finest silk carpets in the world, pieces of which now hang in the Jaipur City Palace, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Kashmir's signature contribution to the Persian-rooted tradition is the talim, a coded script in which every knot of a carpet is notated, chanted out loud by a designer called the naqash, and tied by weavers who work in rhythm like an orchestra following a conductor. The tradition almost died in the 1990s under the pressure of insurgency, tourist collapse, and a flood of Iranian and Chinese machine-made imitations. In 1998, the British textile historian Jenny Housego and the Kashmiri textile producer Asaf Ali founded Kashmir Loom Company in Srinagar, which rebuilt the craft at the highest level of quality for the global design market. In 2008, Kashmir hand-knotted carpets received a Geographical Indication tag from the government of India. This lesson walks into a Srinagar courtyard workshop in 1998, back to Budshah's court in the 1440s, and forward again to the looms still working on the banks of the Jhelum today.
A Courtyard in Srinagar
On a grey morning in 1998, in a courtyard workshop in the old quarter of Srinagar, Jenny Housego bent over a wooden frame loom and watched a master weaver tie the first knot of a new pashmina carpet. Rain pattered on the tin roof. The workshop smelled of wet wool, walnut dye, and woodsmoke from the kangri braziers the weavers kept near their feet. Housego was a British textile historian in her late fifties. She had spent decades studying tribal rugs across Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, and she had walked into Srinagar because she wanted to see whether one of the oldest hand-knotted carpet traditions in the world was still alive. It was. Just. The workshop had seven looms. Five were empty. The two that were working belonged to a family whose grandfather had woven for the Jaipur court. Housego and her co-founder, a Kashmiri textile producer named Asaf Ali, were about to spend the next twenty years trying to keep that family and several dozen others at their looms.
A Sultan Brings The Weavers In
The story of Kashmir carpets begins almost six hundred years earlier, with a Kashmiri sultan who is still remembered in the valley as Budshah, the Great King. Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin ruled Kashmir from 1420 to 1470, fifty years of peace, reform, and craft-building in a valley that had been wrecked by earlier invasion and famine. Budshah invited master artisans from Persia and Central Asia to settle in Srinagar: paper-makers from Samarkand, shawl weavers from Turkestan, tile-workers from Kashan, and carpet-weavers from Bukhara, Khorasan, and Herat. The Persian weavers he brought to Srinagar set up their first looms on the banks of the Jhelum river and began teaching young Kashmiris the Persian technique of the ghiordes and senneh knots. Within a generation, Kashmir had its own hand-knotted carpet industry, built on the wool of Ladakhi sheep, the water of the Jhelum, and the dyes of the valley's walnut, madder, and saffron fields.