A FAMILIAR DISRUPTION threatened to snowball into a crisis. The gas in Khursheed Ahmed Ganai’s house had run out. On a crisp winter morning in February this year, the 38 year-old resident of Kanihama in Kashmir stood near the irrigation canal that snaked through the village, flanked by his two adolescent sons. Ganai’s pheran hung loosely over his tall frame as he dialled numbers on his mobile phone with increasing urgency. An empty cylinder lay nearby. I was there to meet him for an interview, but it was evident that our conversation would have to wait.

For nearly two decades, Ganai has handwoven hundreds of kani shawls. Made from the fine undercoat of the Himalayan mountain goat—also called the Changthangi, after the region in Leh in which they are found—these shawls are prized for their gentle texture and cocoonish warmth. Crafting them is a labour-intensive endeavour that involves multiple stages spread across several months: harvesting and processing the wool, sorting the fibres, weaving the fabric. Ganai’s village, where this weaving technique is believed to have originated, derives part of its name from the process—in Kashmiri, kani refers to the wooden bobbins, also known as tujje needles, which are used to wind multi-hued weft threads.

Ganai was a reluctant entrant to the craft. Growing up, his heart was set on cricket. But the political turmoil in Kashmir steered the course of his future. In the late 1980s, when elections in Jammu and Kashmir were reportedly rigged to help the central government maintain its grip on the state’s politics, the region morphed into a tinderbox. A surge in militancy followed. The state responded with a brutal and repressive military campaign. By the early aughts, tens of thousands of people had been killed. As conflict engulfed the land, employment opportunities dwindled.

Youthful wishes jostled with adult responsibilities. In 2004, when Ganai’s family underwent financial hardships, he immersed himself in the intricate artistry of weaving for ready income. Kani shawls were witnessing a revival of sorts at that time, which owed itself, in large measure, to the efforts of Ghulam Mohammad Kanihama, a member of the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly from Beerwah in Budgam district. Many young men, Ganai recalled, were taking up the profession in hopes of eking out a living. As violent confrontations between the armed forces and militants became routine and police checkpoints sprang up at street corners to apprehend those suspected or accused of being rebels, the work at the karkhana—workshop—felt like a refuge from the world outside.

The pay was low even then, about Rs 400-500 per day. On the day that Object met Ganai, it was clear that little had changed. The frenetic calls had been to the local gas dealer, he explained. “We ran out of cooking gas the other day, and I had no money to buy it,” he said, “Luckily, I managed to work as a labourer at a construction site yesterday.” He was paid Rs 900 for a day’s work. His family could afford to refill their cylinder now.

ACROSS THE WORLD, feather-light pashmina shawls have gilded the wardrobes of the rich and powerful through several centuries. The French emperor Napoleon’s wife Josephine overcame her initial distaste for the presents he sent to her after his conquests in Egypt from 1798-1801—“I find them hideous,” she wrote in a letter to her son—and went on to own anywhere from sixty to hundreds of pashmina shawls, an estimate that varies according to the source you read. Under the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, through which the British sold the territory of Kashmir to the Dogra ruler Gulab Singh for Rs 75 lakh, the colonial government demanded, among other tokens in acknowledgement of its so-called supremacy, three pairs of cashmere shawls every year. In 2009, when Manmohan Singh, then India’s prime minister, visited the United States, his gifts to President Barack Obama’s family included a pashmina shawl. More recently, when India hosted the G20 meet, the wives of the heads of state from Australia and Brazil received shawls from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government as well.

Yet, even as these shawls changed hands between the elite of the time, their splendour eluded their makers. Object spoke to a dozen weavers across Anantnag, Srinagar and Bugdam districts in Kashmir, many of whom belonged to families in which multiple generations had practised the craft. Most of them barely made ends meet. The strenuous work took a toll on their eye-sight and left them with chronic back issues.

The industry appears to be flourishing. According to government data, shawls and rumals—handkerchiefs—worth over Rs 300 crore were exported from Kashmir in the fiscal period ending January 2023, almost double the exports it recorded in the previous year. Depending on the quality, the price of a single pashmina shawl can go up to several lakhs. But none of the weavers I met earned even the minimum wage they were entitled to as skilled workers: Rs 483 a day. The increasing mechanisation of weaving processes and the availability of cheap substitutes, often masquerading as the original, also posed a mounting threat to their livelihoods.

From time-to-time, government interventions, such as central and state schemes to avail loans, promised better futures. But their success had been limited at best. Sameer Ahmed Wani, a 38-year-old weaver from Jamalatta in Srinagar, pointed out that many initiatives, such as the move to introduce Geographical Indication (GI) tags—an official acknowledgement of a product that is grown or manufactured in a particular region—for shawls had benefited workshop-owners and businesspeople, but the condition of the weavers had not changed.

“Our wages haven’t improved in any way, in fact the workshop owners sometimes pay us late saying they haven't been able to sell the shawls. We can’t even question them,” he said, “These schemes don't help us. We can’t even take a loan, and even if we do, it becomes a financial burden as our wages are not fixed.

Through twenty years of weaving, Ganai came to appreciate the dexterity demanded by the craft, taking pride in the dedication it extracted. But it was not the future he dreamt of for his three children. Both his elder sons studied at a government school nearby; the youngest, about five-years-old, was going to be enrolled soon . Education, he was convinced, held the key to a different destiny—one that was liberated from the unrewarding tedium of a weaver’s life. “I wouldn’t wish this work upon anyone, not even my worst enemy,” he told me.

ALTHOUGH KASHMIR'S SHAWLS are woven into its history, their exact origins are shrouded in myth and legend. “When the Kashmiri took to the industry is not known, but it is certain that from ancient times Kashmir was famous for its shawls,” Pandit Anand Koul wrote in his 1915 paper on shawl trade in the region.

Some historians trace its roots to Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, who ruled the region from 1420 to 1470. Many narratives credit him with introducing the craft to the valley by bringing artisans from Samarkand in Uzbekistan. In oral histories that have traversed generations, the sultan, fondly remembered as budshah by the locals, and Sufi mystic Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani are often lauded for establishing the shawl industry in the region. Elders in the weaving community told me of stories that detailed how the sultan had sent Kashmiris to kingdoms in Central Asia so that they could learn various crafts.

More recent scholarship approaches some of these claims with scepticism. Others also argue that shawl-making is an indigenous craft that existed in Kashmir long before Islam came to the land. On the sultan’s role for instance, a 2018 study published by Oxford University’s Global History of Capitalism project noted that while he “did not bring the shawl trade into existence, he nevertheless energised it with enthusiastic patronage.” Koul characterised Hamadani’s contribution similarly in his paper. “It is said that Mir Sayid Ali of Hamadan (Persia), alias Shah Hamadani, who visited Kashmir for the second time in 1378 AD and stayed here for over two years, revived the shawl industry, which had long died out.”

By most accounts, the shawl industry thrived under the Mughal monarchs who presided over the region from 1585 to 1752. “After that, it has been a downhill journey for shawl weavers in Kashmir,” said Amit Kumar, an assistant professor at Azim Premji University and the author of Precious Threads and Precarious Lives: Histories of Shawl and Silk Industries of Kashmir, 1846-1950.

Profits from the trade provided lucrative returns for middle-men, workshop owners and presiding regimes. The weavers who laboured over the shawls languished at the margins.

Soon after Afghan rulers assumed control of the land, from 1753 to1819, a new system was introduced. Shawls could no longer be sold unless they bore an official stamp, which could only be obtained after the payment of a steep amount in duties. In Languages of Belonging, a book on the socio-political and economic history of Kashmir, the historian Chitralekha Zutshi wrote “the industry received its first setback as a result of the establishment of the Dagh-Shawl department during the governorship of Haji Dad Khan (1776-83), who imposed a crushing excise tax on shawls.”

Consequently, shawl weaving became financially unviable. There was a decline in both weavers and looms. George Forester—a merchant in the East India Company who visited Kashmir in 1783—noted in his travelogue that the Kashmiris he spoke to told him that there had been about 40,000 looms in the region during the reign of the Mughal empire. The number had reduced to less than 15,000 when he visited.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, according to Zutshi, business prospered despite the imposition of the taxes. By then, there was an “increasing European, particularly French, demand for these prized articles of fashion.” This also led to the introduction of designs that were meant to cater to international tastes. But alongside, imitation centres in Europe undercut the weavers’ efforts by replicating the shawls at lower quality and costs.

Power changed hands by the turn of the nineteenth century once again, this time in favour of Sikh rulers. Taxes skyrocketed. Shiraz Ahmad Dar, an assistant professor at the school of social sciences at Kashmir University, said that during the first decade of Sikh rule, taxes on shawls were at 26 percent initially, and brought down to 25 percent by 1832. “However, in the latter end of the Sikh rule, taxes went as high as 40 percent” he added.

With the arrival of the Dogras in 1846, the weavers’ plight intensified. “The Dogra rule was particularly oppressive with high taxation policies and slave-like conditions of weavers,” Kumar said. Many were pushed to economic collapse, even as they toiled for long hours.

The weavers couldn’t even transition to better opportunities with ease. Robert Thorpe, an officer of the British Indian Army, noted in his 1868 book Kashmir Misgovernment, “the most detestable piece of oppression committed against the shawl bafs”—shawl weavers—“is, however, this, that none of them are permitted to relinquish their employment without finding a substitute; which, of course, it is almost always impossible to do!”

Thorpe summarised the predicament of the workers in considerable detail and with evident anguish. “The shawl baf may become half blind, as many of them do from the nature of the work; he may contract other diseases, which sedentary life and the foetid atmosphere of the low rooms, engender and ripen; he may long to take up some other employment, which will permit him to breathe the fresh air, to recruit the unstrung nerves, the cramped sinew, and the weakened frame, and to prolong the poor boon of existence, which the fearful toil of the loom is hurrying to its close—no! nothing but death can release him from his bondage.”

Given the prevailing conditions, Kumar told me, “many weavers migrated to Punjab in those years to escape the tough regulations in Kashmir.” But these movements were heavily regulated and in many instances, harshly penalised.

Those who stayed rose up in revolt. The simmering discontent boiled over on 29 April 1865. Dozens of weavers took to the streets to assemble against Pandit Raj Kak Dhar, the contractor who oversaw the Dagh-Shawl department and collected taxes. Thorpe recounted the incident thus: “In bitter and despairing mood, they”—the shawl weavers—“made a wooden bier, such as the Muslims use to carry their dead to the place of internment, and placing a cloth over it, they carried it to and fro in procession, exclaiming: ‘Raj Kak is dead, who will give him a grave?’”

The weavers asserted their rights to better working conditions and higher wages. They demanded an end to the restrictions on their choice to migrate to another region or change professions. In response, they were met by the Dogra regime’s army and attacked with guns and spears. According to various historians, 28 people lost their lives—their bodies were recovered in a nearby river—while scores were seriously injured.

These protests, remembered as Shawl Baf Tehreek, or the shawl weavers’ uprising, likely signify the first ever organised workers’ movement in the world. The labour demonstration at Chicago in May 1886—commemorated internationally on 1 May as Labour Day—took place two decades later.

ONCE KHURSHEED AHMED Ganai procured the fuel for his house, he assigned the task of ferrying the delivery home to his sons, and ushered me into a tiny lane. “Let’s sit at the karkhana” he murmured as he briskly led the way, “We can talk there.” We entered a modest room, packed with six handlooms and an ageing wooden stove that had been lit for heat. This is where Ganai worked on a contractual basis along with colleagues, Hilal Ahmad Dar and Ahmed Dar. Both of them had also been weaving kani shawls for over two decades.

Distinguished by their elaborate designs and the meticulous twill-weaving technique that is used to make them, kani shawls are believed to be the earliest versions of Kashmiri shawls. Each kani shawl is a labour of love. Skilled artisans dedicate months, if not years, to weave the intricate patterns by hand.

As Ganai recounted his foray into weaving, his words were punctuated by the steady clattering of handlooms. It took him nearly two years to learn the ropes, he recalled. Ganai devoted himself to studying and reproducing the talim, a mysterious language comprising numerals and pictographs that guide the weaver on the motifs and design patterns they are to create. “It’s not easy to learn the craft of weaving unless you are dedicated to it. One needs patience and a skilled hand to weave these shawls,” Ganai told me. Most weavers now use computer-generated graph diagrams for their work, but he continued to follow the traditional talim. His expertise was sought-after. He was often called to other workshops to correct the errors of other weavers.

The karkhandaar—workshop owner—that Ganai and the others worked with supplied the pashmina yarn for their shawls and paid them per shawl for their craftsmanship. A pink kani shawl that Ganai was going to weave over the next three-five months, he told me, would fetch him about Rs 25,000. It was gruelling work that required complete attention. A single misstep could jeopardise the entire shawl.

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“Despite putting in the hard work and daily labour, we depend on workshop owners and middle men for payments. When they give an advance, the rest of the payment can take months or even years to come through,” Ganai told me, “Even when we need the money we hesitate to ask. What if he turns down the request? It is a very embarrassing situation to be in,” he added. 

Hunched over his loom, Hilal interjected, raising his voice ever so slightly, as old ghazals played from a radio perched on a windowsill. “It boils down to Rs 200-300 a day,” he said, “How’s anyone supposed to make ends meet with that these days?” This was a fraction of the price that the shawls tended to command in the retail market, often selling for Rs 1-1.5 lakh.

Hilal recalled an incident from a month before, when a middle-man from the city approached him for help. “I arranged the shawl he needed and he paid me Rs 2000 as commission. That’s just for taking him to the right people,” he told Object. Hilal was sure that the middle-man had sold the shawl in Srinagar for a much higher-price than what he had paid for it. “Just imagine the price of that same shawl when it reaches Delhi or some European country,” he said.

Like Ganai, Hilal’s financial condition was precarious. “I don’t even have Rs 500 in my pocket,” he said, “If someone from my family falls sick, I don’t know what to do. We are surviving at Allah’s mercy.”

According to a 2022 notification by the labour and employment department of Jammu and Kashmir, shawl weavers fall under the category of skilled workers, which would entitle them to a minimum wage of Rs 483 per day. None of the twelve workers Object interviewed made more than Rs 300 daily.

When I met Mehmood Ahmad Shah, the director of the department of Jammu and Kashmir handloom and handicrafts, at his office in Srinagar, I asked him about this discrepancy. By way of response, he described the weavers as seasonal workers who didn’t work for fixed hours every day. “It is difficult to implement minimum wage for them since weaving isn’t their full-time profession. Most of them tend to their fields and do weaving in their spare time,” he said.

Ganai vehemently disagreed with this characterisation. “Only after spending eight-nine hours at the loom every day, can we complete around two centimetres of the shawl,” he said, “There is hardly any energy left for anything else.” He paused his work on the loom. His hands had developed a slight tremor from years of being engaged in the craft. Ganai owned a small parcel of land, about two kanals—less than one-fourth a hectare—that he cultivated rice on. He worked on the land for  only a couple of weeks every season. “If shawl weaving was only a part-time vocation, why do ministers and bureaucrats put in so much effort on reviving the industry,” he asked.

Such distortions bear the fingerprints of a colonial legacy. Amit Kumar notes in his book that in the mid-1890s, when Messr Hadon & Co—a British textile company that sourced carpets from Kashmir—was asked by the governor of Kashmir about its compliance with factory regulations for workers, it found a cunning way to bypass prevailing laws. “In our factory we employ no labour, as our entire carpet work is done under contract system, with certain adult weavers…” they replied. The question of fixed hours didn’t arise, the company claimed. “We further have no working hours of our framing. The weavers come and go to and from our factory as they please...”

MOST KARKHANDARS TEND to be weavers who are either able to acquire capital to expand their operations or have inherited looms. In Batpora village, I met Fayaz Mir, a 45-year old karkhandar who owns ten looms and employs about ten weavers, a number that can increase or decrease depending on the amount of work. Mir’s father and two uncles were all engaged in the craft; he continues to weave shawls on one of his looms as well. “I picked the craft at an early age,” he told Object, “Over the years, I also developed relations with suppliers in Srinagar; when my father passed away, I infused some of the savings we had and started selling shawls.”

Mir sold the shawls from his looms to suppliers and store-owners in Srinagar. Often, he also had to give them on credit if the demand was low. He said that he usually makes between Rs 25,000-30,000 every month. He knew he could rake in much more, but he had neither the connections nor the wherewithal to sell to customers directly. “I live in a village and spend most of the time at the workshop either weaving or overseeing work,” Mir said.

Vannessa Chishti, who teaches history at OP Jindal University and has authored a research paper on shawl weavers in Kashmir, said that access to markets was also a matter of monopolies. “In Kashmir, selling shawls is a family business, where contacts of clients are passed down generations. These families have stores in big Indian cities and control the exports,” she told Object.

During the 2022 Qatar World Cup for instance, 70,000 Kashmiri pashmina shawls were distributed to special guests and visitors. According to media reports, all of them were supplied by one exporter.

Chishti said that such controls were earlier challenged to a certain extent by “Phirwael”—Kashmiri men who went to different parts of India, selling shawls and carpets door-to-door. But in recent years, majoritarian hostilities against Muslims grew and Kashmiri salespersons in particular faced attacks in multiple instances. In February 2019 for instance—soon after an ambush on an Indian military convoy in the Pulwama district of Kashmir claimed the lives of nearly forty paramilitary personnel—two Kashmiri shawl-sellers were assaulted by mobs in two separate incidents in West Bengal. As a result, many sellers ceased their travels. They were no longer willing to take the risk.

IN 2020, KANIHAMA was declared a “craft handloom village.” According to the website of the development commissioner, handlooms, there are eleven such designated villages across the country so far, which have been identified based on clusters of weavers practising a common craft. The villages are developed by the ministry of textiles in collaboration with the relevant district administration. The website states that the ministry is meant to provide “assistance towards improving infrastructure,” in these regions so that the products they are known for can be exhibited and sold to domestic as well as international tourists.

While this endeavour may have been successful in improving shawl weaving exports and revenues, it seemed to have had little effect on the lot of exploited weavers. Most weavers I met echoed Ganai’s pronouncements, swearing by god that they would do everything it took to ensure that their future generations did not carry the burden of the ancient craft.

Contrary to what the label of the “craft handloom village,” might suggest, the practice of weaving shawls isn’t exclusive to Kanihama. In fact, weavers in adjoining villages felt that they didn’t get the kind of government support that Kanihama did. Residents from villages close by, such as Batapor, Mazhama and Roshanabad, recalled that almost every family once had a loom in their homes.

But these numbers are dwindling, and fast. According to the forty-seventh edition of the Digest of Statistics published by the directorate of economics and statistics of the Jammu and Kashmir government, about 49,000 people were employed in the woollen shawl weaving industry in Kashmir in 2020. Within two years, only 5,000 people remained.

Although the recent decline is particularly steep, the industry’s struggles are hardly new. Over the years, various governments have extended efforts to steady the ship . In 2008, for instance, the Kashmiri Pashmina shawl was granted a Geographical Indication (GI) tag. For a while, the tag helped ward off competition from cheap knock-offs made on power looms in Punjab, which were flooding the market.

While the industry pulled in crores of rupees in revenue, the shawl weaving industry in Kashmir remained largely unorganised. Shawl weavers and experts I spoke to believed that it has been kept this way deliberately so that large retailers and suppliers, who pocketed a bulk of the profits, avoided accountability. 

The government official Mehmood Shah acknowledged that artisans were exploited while middle-men often walked away with a major chunk of the proceeds from the sales of shawls. But, he added, “One has to also realise that capital for making shawls and connections to sell them at premium are brought in by the middle-men. Shawl weavers don’t have money to buy raw material. So you can’t just take the middle-men out of the equation.” 

On the face of it, multiple micro-credit schemes administered by the state and central government are meant to help the artisans access capital. For instance, the official website for Budgam district—under which villages such as Kanihama fall—advertises the Pradhan Mantri Weavers MUDRA Yojna that provides loans to weavers and spinners for Rs 1-2 lakh. The Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP), which came into effect in 2008, aimed to support entrepreneurs in setting up new units in the non-farm sectors through loans as well. But, the weavers said, such schemes are not easy to avail as they required a guarantor to secure loans.

Fayaz Mir, the karkhandaar from Batpora village, took a loan of rupees Rs 4,80,000 under the PMEGP in 2023. He paid Rs 3,000 every month as interest. “Three thousand might not seem much but that amounts to Rs 36,000 a year. I’m not a big businessman,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the Artisan’s Credit Card Scheme (ACCS), which was introduced by the Jammu and Kashmir handicraft and handloom department in 2020 and provides weavers with loans for up to Rs 2 lakh, does not need a guarantor.

But among the weavers Object spoke to, those who had used the scheme to obtain loans said the interest rates of seven percent were too high for them to afford. Some also said that the terms of agreement under the scheme had not been explained to them clearly.

Asif, a 35-year-old weaver from Batpora, received Rs 1.8 lakh under ACCS in November 2023. The money was meant to help him start a functional business with the loom at his house. With the onset of winter, his mother fell ill and he had to use some of the money he had borrowed for her treatment. It was only a couple of months later, when he started working on his loom and paying back the monthly instalments, did he realise that he also needed to pay the interest. 

“These government schemes are all a sham,” Ganai told Object. Hilal, Ahmed and he could not secure loans from various schemes. Ganai said that in some cases, even though government officials had told them that they did not need a guarantor, banks turned them away if they did not have one. He recounted an incident from 2023, when a bank official came to their workshop to invite them for a weavers’ exhibition in Srinagar. “They gave us clear instructions that if anyone asks you if banks provide loans without guarantors, ‘Say yes!’”

Shah conceded that the state department had been able to facilitate loans for only a fraction of the craft workers in the region. “We have over 3,50,000 artisans registered with the department. Every year, we provide loans to roughly about 5,000 artisans under the Artisan Credit Card Scheme.” He claimed he wanted every artisan in Kashmir to have access to credit schemes and had taken the matter up with  other officials

As far as Shah was concerned, the plight of the weavers was a consequence of the lack of clear-sighted policy that preceded his tenure. “I took over the department in 2020, before that there was no policy in place for artisans. But at least now we have a policy in place that talks about credit for weavers, marketing, designing,” he said. “We have also started initiatives like craft safari, where we take tourists directly to artisans so they can see the hard work behind making these handicrafts and artisans are paid a full price. Today if only ten-twenty are going for craft safari, it will grow with time.”

His solutions were technocratic: an envisioned e-commerce website for Kashmiri handicrafts so that artisans could sell directly to the end customer. This, Shah pointed out, posed a separate set of challenges.

“There is the need for inventory management. Our artisans are also not very tech savvy, so we would need to build an end-to-end platform that not only markets the products but is also friendly enough for artisans to enlist by themselves.”

“Such initiatives take time,” Shah concluded.

JUST AS I was leaving the karkhana at which Khursheed and his colleagues worked in Kanihama, he received a call from the owner of the workshop who lived next door. He used to be a kani shawl weaver himself, Khursheed told Object. But his eyesight had weakened far too much for him to practise the craft. “He can’t even get out his room without assistance from family members. He only calls us on mobile to check on the progress of shawls,” Khursheed said. “Yath karas manz tche lighte gasan pathe”—in this line of work, you eventually end up losing your vision. 

Farooq Ahmad, a 68-year-old kani shawl weaver who had been engaged in the craft for four decades and won a national award for his work, instructs young weavers at the government weaver training centre in Kanihama now. For Ahmad, weaving wasn’t simply a profession, or even an artistic venture. It was a spiritual journey.  “Do you know why shawl weavers have still survived even though we never made any real money from the toil,” he asked. There was a pause, but he wasn’t waiting for a response, “This work has Allah’s blessing. Shawl weaving is among the most honest kinds of work that one can do. So, even if we make 10 rupees, it feels like 100 rupees” he said.

But Ahmad’s unwavering faith could not erase the physical toll of the work. His vision was blurry. Sometimes, his feet swelled up because of the long hours he spent on the wooden bench with the loom. He continued to work to assist his son, who is also a weaver. “In our time we would live off very little, now there are many expenses, and I want to do as much as I can for my family,” he told me.

Despite his love for the craft, even Ahmad found it hard to envision a sustainable future for weavers. Government policies, he said, often failed to meet the distance between inception and execution. According to Ahmad, many shawl weavers in the village suffered from eyesight issues. “But the government has not even conducted an eye-testing camp, which would not even have cost 500 rupees,” he said, “That tells you how much they really care.”

An ophthalmologist at a nearby government hospital, who did not wish to be identified, told Object that a lot of people from the villages in which shawl weaving is dominant reached out to him. “Even though Hyperopia or farsightedness is common among individuals under forty, among weavers, the rate seems very high,” he said

WHILE GOVERNMENT INTERVENTIONS have offered scant respite for weavers in Kashmir so far, private efforts appeared to be bridging part of the gap.

Since 2022, every morning has been a frenzy of activity for Moomina—a resident of the old city of Srinagar, Sher-e-Khaas, popularly known as downtown. She gets her children ready for school and rushes to catch a bus for work, joined by other women from adjoining neighbourhoods. Together, they set off for Omerhair, a small neighbourhood near Anchar lake in Srinagar. There, she spins pashmina yarn on yender—the Kashmiri spinning wheel—to make the delicate threads that are used for weaving.

Moomina and a dozen other women are employed at Zaevyul, a Kashmiri start-up that produces pashmina shawls, which was founded by the writer-and-entrepreneur Wajahat Qazi in 2022. The organisation did everything in-house: from the cleaning of raw yarn, to spinning and weaving. “I started this initiative because weavers were leaving due to low pay and often those who employ them would make the most money,” Qazi said, “We wanted to change that.”

Nasir Ahmad, who worked as the head weaver of the factory, told me he made Rs 16,000 per month, while his father, who was also employed there, made Rs 14,000. Between the two of them, they had about sixty years of experience. Earlier, they both worked on contracts like most weavers in Kashmir, but the low pay and delays in payments made their survival nearly impossible. “If there were more factories like this, weavers would at least make a decent living,” Zahoor said.

Qazi pointed out that such initiatives were not without challenges. “Others, who have been in this business for many years haven’t made any effort to bring all components of shawl weaving under one roof because it’s not easy and it costs more,” he said, “You have to be really dedicated to the craft and not be in it just for profits.” 

The women at Zaevyul took a break for noon chai—the salty, pale pink tea that is a staple in every Kashmiri household. They told me that they had been spinning yarn for years, but from home. “I would make 2000-3000 rupees a month. It was lonely work and I would often be distracted by household chores,” Moomina said, “But here, I’m paid 8,000 and transport is free. Working with other women helps.”