A brief history of a fabric

The trade in toosh was only one segment of the much more extensive trade in pashm — the similar but less recherche fibre produced by domesticated goats, which was and is the main raw material for the Kashmir shawl industry. This in its turn was integrated into the trade in subsistence commodities between village Ladakh and the high-altitude pastures. The herdspeople were self-sufficient in meat, wool and dairy products, also salt collected from the brackish lakes of their region; but the altitude and the climate of severe cold in which they lived did not allow them to grow foodgrains. Thus peasant farmers from Ladakh trekked up to the pastures with caravans of donkeys loaded with foodgrains and other necessities, which they bartered with the herdspeople for wool, pashm and small amounts of toosh. The total import of toosh into Srinagar was estimated at 1000 lbs (445 kg) in 1820; and possibly 200 kg around 1950. So prized was it that it was bought and sold not, like pashm, by the maund (about 80 kg) but bythe bhatti (2 kg).

A reading of travel books relating to western Tibet and northern Ladakh in the 19th century and the earlier part of the 20th century gives sufficient evidence that great herds of chiru, numbering tens of thousands, were ranging the plateaux and mountains of these areas until at least the 1930s. In view of this, the estimate quoted by Khosa of one million animals half a century ago sounds entirely plausible. If, today, the number is reduced to a mere 65,000 (estimated) this means an enormous increase in the number of animals slaughtered every year. It is frequently said that it is only in Srinagar that toosh is spun and woven into shahtoosh shawls; the facts would seem to imply that the number of weaving establishments engaged in this work must equally have increased in the last 40 or 50 years. I’m not aware of any investigation which proves this to be the case, and it would certainly be in order for such investigation to be carried out.

Khosa quotes Ashok Kumar, president of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, as saying that it’s not possible that the fibre should be shed naturally, because it grows in order to protect the animal from sub-zero temperatures and without it the animal can’t survive. I suspect that this is inaccurate. In the case of the pashmina goat, the pashm develops on its body at the onset of winter, and is shed naturally as temperatures rise in summer. It is not shorn but combed out by the herdspeople. The same must be the case with the chiru. Although all the information at my disposal leads me to the understanding that the main method of collecting toosh was indeed to kill the animal on whose back it grew, there does seem to exist the theoretical possibility of harvesting the fibre from living animals.

Something similar has been attempted in the case of the musk deer and, an even closer analogy, in the mountains of Peru the vicuna, the source of a fibre said to be comparable in fineness and warmth to toosh, is now being raised in a semi-enclosed environment and its wool shorn and traded on a sustainable and ecologically sound basis.

Considering that the habitat of the chiru straddles the India-Tibet border, the obstacles to seeking such a solution for shahtoosh would seem to be more political than technical.

Rizvi has authored two books on Ladakh.