A history of paisley

Collected by the Changpa people in Ladakh and Tibet,the raw pashm travels to Kashmir,where from a greasy mass of wool it is woven into light and exquisite twill tapestry by Kashmiri craftspeople. Traditional design ranged from floral meanders to lahriya zigzags and pictorial ‘hunting shawls’. With sumptuous photographs of antique shawls and fragments,Rizvi traces how the pashmina look-book changed over the years,from the sere fields with slender,decorative buta panels at the edges to the rococo designs prized by 19th century Europe,when embroidery ran riot over the field. She also picks at fascinating threads,like how the cypress design came to Kashmir — was there possibly an Iranian connection?

The book is clearly meant for dedicated textile enthusiasts. It is not so much a cultural history of pashmina and what it reveals about its times as much as a straight telling of the shawl’s glory days,the conditions of its production and trade. Rizvi has exhaustively researched pashmina weaving and trade from Mughal times to British and later. She follows the yarn from oppressed,debt-ridden weavers in Kashmir to Central Asian merchants and finally,European salons where they were worn. “It’s a story that could stand as a template for the whole history of European economic imperialism” writes Rizvi,of the way Asian markets were systematically destroyed by the import of cheap imitations,and how finally,the feather-light fabric came to exclusively drape fashionable shoulders in Europe.

The section on ‘Shawls in the West’ is especially riveting. For instance,if you look closer at the famous Madame Recamier portrait,the drape sensuously arranged around her limbs is a good old Kashmir shawl,butidar pallavs and all. From Joshua Reynolds to Ingres,Western painters made extensive use of the Kashmir shawl in their portraits. But inevitably,the romance soured and Western appropriation of the Kashmiri buta finally made it a cliché,“completely disconnected from its origin,and universally recognised by the name of a small Scottish industrial town as the paisley”.

Cashmere has traveled down the luxury ladder to become widely available around the world. Meanwhile,pashmina,the Himalayan heaven’s embroidered cloth,has enjoyed a remarkable revival in India in recent decades. And despite chaotically arranged chapters and much repetition,as a tribute to the material pleasure that is the pashmina shawl,this book is probably as good as it gets.