Moinuddin’s ambition led him to the foothills of the mighty Himalayas. His journey was animated by entrepreneurial desire. He wanted to bypass the middlemen who traded in his family’s wares and forge connections with the buyers himself. Carrying a suitcase packed with precious textile, he undertook an odyssey steeped in history. “The fabric that we spin is interwoven with the legacy of the Silk Route,” Nasim Ahmed, Moinuddin’s 36-year-old grandson, said.

According to the family lore, “many many” years ago, likely in 1936, Marwari traders lauded for their business acumen travelled to Banaras with a proposition. They urged the city’s weavers to emulate gyasar, a silk brocade adorned with auspicious Buddhist and Chinese symbols. Woven with gold and silver, it is used in traditional ceremonies and rituals. It was a tall order but the Ansaris were intrigued. Their confidence was underscored by their artistry. After all, their kinkhwab—a gold brocade, the name of which literally translates to “a little dream”—had earned them first-class medals from the British at an exhibition in Lucknow in 1885 and from Prince Edward at the Colonial and Indian exhibition in London the following year.

The prize was in the product. When the Ansaris spun the fine fabric, the shine, the bewitching colours of India and the cost of their textile transformed the market. China was no longer the only source for gyasar. “Monks and the nobility wanted hundreds of metres and we met that demand,” Haji Haseen Mohammad—Moinuddin’s son and Nasim’s father—told me. And so, the family from Banaras embarked on a journey into the unknown, following in the footsteps of those who had traversed the ancient networks of the Silk Route before them. The fruits of their labour travelled to far-off Ladakh, Tibet and beyond.

Each year, for sixteen years after his first visit, Moinuddin travelled from Uttar Pradesh to West Bengal to present the textile to prospective clients. In the days leading up to his departure, his sons would slide into the loom with him, eager to help. Their hands worked in synchronicity to orchestral effect. The percussive rhythm of the handlooms rose over the melodious qawwali playing from a small radio.

As we spoke in the summer of 2022, Haseen sat cross-legged on a white gadda at his house in Banaras which doubled up as a karkhana—a workshop. Surrounded by cascading heaps of gyasar, he relayed myth-like stories from personal history. He ran his hands over the sturdy silk fabric. The raised woven design resembled fine embroidery. He unfolded metre after metre of the resplendent cloth—used in Buddhist monasteries from Leh to Lhasa—revealing vibrant hues of blue, yellow and red. While the fabric was taut and stiff, the fall was delicate and the details ornate.

Each motif bore a special significance: the dragon symbolised strength and enlightenment; the clouds were a tribute to celestial mobility; and the lotus embodied purity of mind and body. The gold-and-silver mina zari was more than just surface ornamentation. It was akin to a sartorial hymn, merging the spirituality of Buddhist monks with the devotion of Muslim weavers to their craft.

“My father called it the fabric of peace,” recalled Haseen.

But peace is fragile. It morphs into hostility with ease. For over two centuries, gyasar bridged the disparate worlds of the weavers in Banaras, their suppliers in China and their customers in Tibet. Now this connection faces its most existential threat yet.

Where its past was nourished by the spirit of enterprise and grit, its future is overwhelmed by the constriction of imaginations and borders. As relations between India and China unspool, the conflict continues to imperil countless lives and livelihoods. But exhortations to boycott Chinese products are no counter to this bleak reality. Instead, they betray their ignorance of an elemental truth. When the roots of intertwined cultures and commerce run this deep, it is an exercise in futility to simply wish them away.   

AN ABIDING SENSE of romanticism creeps into the Silk Route. It is ushered in by images of caravans laden with bounties, trundling their way from the ancient Chinese city of Chang’an (now Xi’an) rolling toward their destination in the erstwhile capital of the Roman Empire, Constantinople. The silk road was never a single highway, but a web of choices—navigated for millennia by adventurers and marauders, merchants and refugees. Its nomenclature belies the vast landscape, both physical and metaphorical, that it inhabited.

The Silk Route spanned over 1,500 years, from the second century BCE to the fourteenth century CE. It extended across regions in Africa, Asia and Europe to transport not just luxurious objects and nascent technologies but also new beliefs and experiences that challenged the familiar. 

Its paths evolved from the early explorations of nomadic herders who crisscrossed mountains, steppes, grasslands, deserts, river valleys and deltas in search of greener pastures. They migrated as the changing seasons urged them to. Their navigational decisions were governed by physical and climatic limitations, while their destinations were determined by the ability of local villages and towns to absorb the travellers. Empires and societies adapted to these nomadic routes and exploited their pathways for long-distance exchanges.

Through wars and truces, transfers of political power and changing markets, the Silk Route was in a constant state of flux. What endured was the demand, the need, to be filled with wonder. From precious commodities—highly-valued silk, cotton, wool, glass, jade, lapis lazuli, gold, silver, spices, tea, horses, musical instruments—to intellectual exchanges of architectural, philosophical and religious ideas, this cross-continental transmission galvanised a diversity of peoples through thousands of years.

FOR MOINUDDIN, HIS room in Kalimpong was a portal to another world.

Nestled on a ridge in the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, in close proximity to Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan, this town was a bustling entrepôt for the trade of commodities that ranged from Tibetan wool to Indian toothbrushes.

An assortment of languages greeted Moinuddin there: English, Hindi, Nepali, Bengali, Ladakhi, Lepcha, Limbu, Rai and Tamang. With the passage of time, he picked up some words and phrases from the Ladakhi traders he sold his wares to. Druk for the dragon; namkha for the clouds.

“Teru hati yod-kyaga? Is there a shop here?” he would ask, nimbly cutting through the streets of Kalimpong.

 But in 1956, Moinuddin returned from his final trip with a sense of impending doom. It was a season of discontent. From traders in Kalimpong, he had heard of scuffles between the pastoral nomads of Ladakh who reared the long-haired Changthangi goats—which produce the finest pashmina—and nomads from across the Chinese border. 

By the summer of 1959, as the fourteenth Dalai Lama escaped a possible abduction attempt and fled to India, an armed uprising erupted across Tibet. The People’s Liberation Army executed a brutal crackdown. Information trickled down to the weavers at Peeli Kothi in bits and pieces: the complete annexation of Tibet by the Chinese seemed all but imminent. Trade will come to an end, someone said. Moinuddin stayed back in Banaras, working intently on his Jacquard pit loom.

That year, the Ansaris wove a fabric in the deepest shade of blue. For the Buddhists, the colour was associated with healing and purity, and Moinuddin was praying for a miracle. So much of the family’s life revolved around Tibetan customs and rituals: an invasion would alter the contours of its existence in profound ways. Bags packed with woven gyasar lined the house expectantly. But there was no journey to Kalimpong that year; the road to Nathu-La Pass—the trading post in Eastern Sikkim—remained shut.

 In the weeks and months that followed, facts merged with fiction. Stories of subversion held out hope. The streets were rife with tales about how the coveted fabric could reach China through clandestine methods. Of the many fantastical legends, the most famous featured a young Bhutanese princess of legendary daring. She arrived at Moinuddin’s house, smuggled the golden brocade to Tibet and offered it to a priest.

It is difficult to say whether these stories were grounded in reality or the fruit of imaginations wrestling against uncertainties. But one truth was indisputable: gyasar supplies from Banaras no longer reached monasteries in Tibet. “This led to a huge crisis in brocade,” said Haseen.

THE SILK TRADE between India, China, Tibet and Central Asia is ancient. Kautilya’s Arthashastra—a treatise on statecraft, thought to have been written around the reign of Emperor Chandragupta—notes the availability of Chinese silk cocoons and fabrics (“kauseyam cinapattasca cinabhumija”) since either the fourth century BCE or third century CE.

The exchange of textiles goes back to a time when the Chinese did not grow cotton and Indians lacked expertise in sericulture. Records from the Tang Dynasty show that during the fifth century, even after India produced a silk known as kauseya and cotton-weaving centres came up in Khotan (present-day Xinjiang), the finest muslins from Bengal, as well as cotton from Gujarat and the southern states, continued to be in high demand in China and across the world.

Weavers and merchants sought routes for silk wherever the opportunity presented itself.

The evolution of these meandering routes illustrates a rich history of collaboration between the Parthian, Sogdia, Indian and Chinese empires. For merchants in South Asia, the Old Silk Road’s southern axis allowed an entry into the Indian subcontinent via the route from the Chinese province of Xinjiang to Kashmir. In the years to come, this labyrinthine network encompassed varied pathways including the Southern Silk Route which connected the north-eastern regions of India with Tibet and China; and the Tea Horse Road which ran from Tibet to Bhutan and Nepal into India.

This expansive web of routes also invigorated the spread of religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Chinese Buddhist monks including Fa-Hien (who travelled from 399 to 414 CE) and Hsüang-Tsang (who journeyed between 629 and 645 CE), moved through the Khyber Pass that connected Balkh in northern Afghanistan to Kabul, and crossed into Yunnan, which linked Southwest China to Bangladesh, Assam and Myanmar. Those who met the itinerant monks on these trails were bound together, not simply by their involvement in the churn of commerce but also by their encounters with the spiritual.

The murals painted on the three-storey-high Sumtsek at Alchi—one of the oldest monastery complexes in Ladakh dating back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—evoke a visceral sense of this civilisational medley. At first glance, the ceiling appears to be covered in a single piece of fabric. But a more careful consideration reveals an intricate tapestry composed of forty-eight panels, each of which reflects different textile techniques. Some of these are indigenous while others such as brocade were the results of trade.

This mosaic and the royal garments displayed in the portraits on Sumstek’s walls are powerful reminders of the ways in which textile nurtured diversities through history. The sum of our parts has always been greater than the whole.

THE ANNEXATION OF Tibet upended the lives of many families in Peeli Kothi. As the plight of Tibetans intensified, the future of the gyasar made in Banaras lay in doubt. Many weavers adjusted to their new reality by re-focussing their efforts on the sari even as incomes dwindled. But for Moinuddin, the long-held connections were too precious to let go of.

“Well-wishers advised him against it,” his son Haseen recalled. Yet, if anything, Moinuddin’s love for gyasar grew deeper. He continued to produce the exquisite fabric, indifferent to the demands of financial pragmatism. Alongside, he began an obsessive hunt, purchasing stocks of gyasar wherever he could find them. His family attempted to reason with him and splintered in the process. Nothing could shake Moinuddin’s resolute belief in the future of the craft and cloth. “It is linked to religion and tradition, it will never die,” he said. 

Just as fame and fabric wither with time, so do fortunes. Once renowned as master weavers, the Ansaris were now derided as inflexible relics of the past. The dizzying pace of technological progress brought new novelties. The advent of the power loom rattled weavers in Peeli Kothi. The increasing hardships of artisans everywhere did little to assuage their concerns. The Jawaharlal 

Nehru government attempted to revitalise the handloom sector and launch a viable industry. Its measures included the establishment of Weavers’ Service Centres across the country for technical, creative and financial support to craft workers.

But even as the third branch of this centre was set up in Varanasi in 1958, weavers continued to drift away from the profession. If some simply didn’t have the finances to acquire a loom, years of colonial repression had taken a toll on others.

Pupul Jayakar—a cultural activist and a confidante of Nehru—was tasked with energising the disaffected weavers. Hers was a daunting mandate: to resurrect the flagging textile and handloom industry before its decay became irreversible. She was on a mission to retrieve lost histories as much as the Ansaris were keen on reviving them.

It was under these circumstances that Jayakar first made acquaintance with the Ansaris in the early seventies. Through the years that followed, since they had lost their market in Tibet, she encouraged them to adapt their skills and distil years of expertise into experimental work.

Handlooms were set up at the Weavers’ Centre in Banaras for artisans who were unable to procure their own. Over time, Jayakar, the textile revivalist Martand Singh (popularly known as Mapu) and the textile designer Jadunath Supakar marshalled their efforts towards helping the weavers nurture their distinct talents. While the textile industry shifted to mechanised processes and synthetic cloth, Jayakar, Singh and Supakar went to great lengths to discourage the weavers from imitating the machine-made products flooding the market.

By the late seventies, the streets of Peeli Kothi were abuzz with the news of a tantalising arrival in their midst. One of the residents had procured a power loom with the help of a relative from Bhiwandi, a t-shirt-manufacturing district in Bombay.

Rumour and reality meshed into one another once again. Someone said it could churn out more saris in a day than the best weaver could in their lifetime. Haseen watched curiously as disparate parts of the loom steadily streamed in, nine houses away from his. The components had been amassed, newer arrivals still, and people from Bhiwandi had come to assemble the device. The residents of the weaving enclave thronged to observe the event, in thrall.

When it was ready, the Bombaywallah pressed a button. “It will destroy your hands,” Moinuddin warned his children warily. He instructed them to return to their kadhua work, a meticulous technique that no machine could emulate.

Artisans can often be resistant to change. But as chance would have it, a transition within the Ansari household coincided with another moment of transformative force. On a cool winter morning in 1986, when Jayakar was to meet the family in Banaras, the time was also ripe for a handover from one generation to the next. As Moinuddin rushed to meet Jayakar, he lost his balance on the uneven and crowded streets of Peeli Kothi. His three sons were alerted. Haseen, his youngest, was deputed to ferry a bundle of fabric to Jayakar at Rajghat Besant School, run by the Krishnamurti Foundation.

At the sight of the twenty-year-old boy, Jayakar was concerned. “Will you understand what I explain?” she asked.

He did. In those days, apprentices didn’t simply watch and weave. They immersed themselves in the craft they practised: dyeing, cutting, making the jaal (net) and the graph (weaving draft). Together, Jayakar and Haseen began a study, not just of brocade but also of techniques involved in the satin tanchoi and katan kadhua jaal. They discussed the ways in which these styles could be modernised. Jayakar was happy to part with any information she thought would help the Ansaris as they geared their efforts towards domestic customers.

Meanwhile, through the eighties and early nineties, Mapu curated a series of exhibitions titled ‘Vishwakarma—Master Weavers’, held across Indian cities and in different parts of the world. In a bid to lead the revival of the country’s dynamic textile traditions, these exhibitions showcased the extraordinary work of sixty-seven master weavers. Crucially, Vishwakarma established a direct link between the weavers and the museums in which their work was displayed.

Singh and fellow revivalist Rakesh Thakore—the co-curator of the exhibitions—began travelling to Banaras from 1979. They went from home to home, amazed to find at least one handloom in every house. When they eventually met the Ansaris, they enquired about the gyasar.

“Mapu left no stone unturned,” Haseen said. He would spend hours with the pieces, labouring over them, studying the methods of their bleach, polish and finish. Thakore and he were painstakingly rigorous. They spent days exploring the area as Haseen showed them around. They made many pictures: of the process; of the looms; of where the designs were made.  

In the end, Singh and Thakore asked the family to weave six saris featuring the Mughal buta—an ornamental motif from the Mughal period replete with the imagery of delicate flowers, leaves, buds and shrubs.

According to Haseen, the Vishwakarma exhibitions cast weaving in a new light. “It was then that people recognised it as art.” Accompanying the exhibitions was a book that contained images and short biographies of the artisans Singh and Thakore had identified. As Moinuddin and Haseen perused the tome, looking at the story of their family’s legacy on page, they also studied the practices of other craft workers. When the Vishwakarma textiles were shown as part of a travelling exhibit at the Weavers’ Service Centre in Banaras, the father and son were dazzled by the diversity of the fabrics on display. Haseen believed that Mapu honoured not just Jayakar’s legacy with the exhibitions but also “the weavers, us, who the people seldom see”. 

Through the ensuing decades, the Ansaris’ pursuit of artisanal integrity has endured. In their karkhana, sixty looms are brought to life by eighty weavers. The yarn and zari come together in gentle union as the shuttle clatters across the warp and weft of the Jacquard loom—a remnant of a fading past, not unlike the Ansaris’ dedication to their craft.

FOUR CORRIDORS LINKED India to the ancient Silk Road. Of these, the nearly 500-kilometre-long trail from Leh to Yarkand in Turkestan (Xinjiang Province of present-day China) became an important channel for trans-Karakoram trade. This route connected India to Central Asia, going as far as Turkey and Italy. Indian silk, including brocade from Banaras, was exported to Central Asia while yarn that came from Yarkand was woven in Punjab.

Several trade routes coming from Yarkand, Punjab and Kashmir converged at Ladakh, situated on the upper Indus. Consequently, Leh emerged as a commercial town of great significance. The authors A. Reeve Heber and Kathleen Heber described its thriving market in the early nineteen-hundreds in vivid detail:

“The Yarkandis from the far north offer brilliantly coloured carpets… silk from Khotan and thick felt numdah mat… Then there are the Tibetans, trying to persuade the Baltis to accept cooking butter and dried apricots in return for salt, borax and Lhasa tea. The nomads from Changthang offer the featherweight wool of their long-haired pashm sheep that the Kashmiris use for making their famous shawls. A man from the Kullu valley has brought petroleum to Leh market, while a trader from India offers brocade, underwear, tea, cigarette, spices and all 101 commodities a housewife needs to run her house properly. They are laid out all over the road and even pedestrians can hardly pick their way through.”

With time, as rising nation-states redrew territorial borders, existing routes became subservient to the whims of the victor. China’s annexation of Xinjiang in 1949, for instance, brought an abrupt halt to the Yarkhand-Leh trail.  

But old histories still linger in the creation of modern networks. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is reminiscent of the ancient route used from Xinjiang to Kashmir; while references to millennia-old trade through path-ways that connected Afghanistan to Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia are evident in the Lapiz Lazuli Corridor. In 2013, China announced its Belt and Road Initiative, an expansive project to link the economies of Asia, Europe and Africa. Unsurprisingly, it was quickly dubbed the “New Silk Road”.

THE GULLEYS OF Banaras echo with the roar of the power loom. The handloom has all but disappeared. While the automation allows for scale, the quality it produces is no match for the skill of the city’s artisans.

As the demand for gyasar persists, new trade routes from Nepal ferry the cargo. But it has become difficult to tell the original from an imitation. Fabulous fakes from Surat in Gujarat flood the market. Silk is replaced with polyester and golden plastic. A shopkeeper in the market asks the customer whether they want an asli—real—Banarasi sari or the Surati Banarasi sari, sold at a fraction of the cost of the former. 

“Earlier, the work done by weavers was complex. Today, they run away at the sight of it,” Nasim Ahmed—Moinuddin’s grandson—lamented, referring to the intricate kadhua. Many weavers left the profession after successive blows: demonetisation, the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax and finally, the global pandemic. 

“There wasn’t one death in Peeli Kothi,” Haseen recalled, when we spoke of the effect of COVID-19. People didn’t die of the virus, but they did lose their lives to starvation and unemployment. As nationwide lockdowns were imposed, markets were shut. An eerie silence replaced the city’s usual bustle.

But moving online was not an option. “The minute it’s on the internet, it will be copied,” Nasim was convinced. If that happened, the weavers of Banaras would lose by default—unable to compete with the fast fashion factories of Surat.

Despite the loss of income, the Ansaris tried to keep their artisans busy with work through the pandemic, even if their produce was being stockpiled. 

Weavers who used to weave three saris a month were asked to work on at least one. Their earnings dropped by nearly half—poverty, hunger and despair abound. In the search for more viable sources of income, some became auto-rickshaw drivers, some salesmen at kirana stores, others vegetable vendors. 

Then came the growing aggressions between India and China, the violent confrontation at Ladakh’s Galwan valley in June 2020 and calls for restrictions on imports of Chinese silk, similar to the bans on TikTok, WeChat and Shein.

“This is plain foolishness because while the silk may be made in Banaras, the silk yarn comes from China,” said Haseen. I met more than fifty weavers in Banaras, most of whom echoed this sentiment. China exports resham—raw silk—that is then processed in Banaras. Although the Chinese thread poses a threat to the sericulture industry in Karnataka, it is widely used across India. This, the weavers told me, was the result of a calculus that prioritised strength: the Chinese silk did not break on the power loom, Indian yarn did. 

Haseen summed up the reality in a pithy observation: “It says, ‘Made in India’, but it’s Chinese thread.” 

The warp is Chinese, the weft is Indian, and the ties that bring the two countries together are held firmly over the loom in a trade with ancient origins.