The dark, dingy room from which weaver Taufeeq Ahmed operates is tell-tale. It is crammed to the last inch. There’s barely any leg space for him, leave alone his occasional visitors. The room is poorly lit, and will never provide you with a whiff of fresh air.
Taufeeq’s weather-beaten face belies his age. The thick glasses wear heavy as he leans into his loom, and he does not have to make up a face to brood. He looks every bit a man resigned to his fate. Taufeeq does not look impoverished, but he’s not making hay either. He’s subsisting.
There’s another loom in the room, one that stays squeezed in the space bang opposite Taufeeq. But this one’s deserted. No one’s used this loom for months, maybe years.
Downstairs, Taufeeq’s sibling Tariq runs a grocery shop from a room that opens out into the narrow lane outside in Srinagar’s Downtown area. Their family is one of weavers – ones who wove shahtoosh shawls. Today, Taufeeq weaves pashminas. Tariq has given up.
It’s been close to 10 years since the life of this family, like many others, was thrown out of gear. In May 2002, the Jammu and Kashmir government outlawed shahtoosh production, bringing its laws at par with Indian and international laws that prohibited trade in shahtoosh products.
The Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), which had lobbied hard for the ban on shahtoosh, notes on its website, “The ban however came at a price. Overnight, about 15000 shahtoosh workers who depended on shahtoosh production for their livelihood, were turned into criminals. About 70 per cent of this workforce comprised women, many of them conflict widows in a state affected by civil and political unrest. They either faced unemployment or had to illegally continue their respective roles in the tiered production process of making shahtoosh fabric.”
WTI launched a rehabilitation project aimed at providing the alternative livelihood of weaving pashminas to the skilled workers in order to prevent illegal shahtoosh production and trade. There are some workers who have benefited. And there are those like our siblings who haven’t.
Tariq gave up weaving pashmina shawls after a while because the investments were high and the returns paltry and far too spread out. Almost all houses in the locality are directly or indirectly into pashmina weaving. And they all have the same litany of woes.
Not far away, Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh and two of his family members work on sifting pashmina wool. “We can’t even make Rs 150 a day,” he cribs.
Ghulam has a point there. On an average he needs 3.5 kg of pashmina wool that comes from Ladakh. He has to ferret out Rs 15,000 for a kilo. This has to be paid up in cash, upfront. There are no loans from any quarter, and workers need to buy the wool if they want to make a living.
Depending on the intricacy of the weaving, a shawl can take anything between a few weeks and a number of months to complete. And only then do the returns trickle in.
Tariq thought this was not worth the trouble. He looks only slightly less morose than his elder brother, and yet his eyes light up when you speak to him. “Yes, there’s probably not that much money to be made from my shop. But, at least, something keeps flowing into the household.”
The soft-spoken Taufeeq, however, carries on. But he has a reason for doing this. “There’s nothing else that I am good at,” he simply mutters, taking that rare break from his weaving.
He has already paid a heavy price. Shawl-weaving is not just an art, it is also exacting labour. The craft needs utmost concentration, and the work cannot be left midway through. A phase of the shawl has to be complete before you can even heave a sigh. This held true for shahtoosh, this is equally true of pashmina. It’s little wonder that Taufeeq has a failing eyesight.
For all pashmina weavers who still practice the craft, it is a story of being caught between the devil and the deep sea. On one hand you can barely eke out a living with no helping hand being offered by the government, and on the other your health takes a beating.
The lanky, spirited Showkat who takes this writer through the maze of lanes in Downtown, is a producer of shawls, and has many weavers working with him. “It can’t possibly go on like this, for ever,” he shakes his head. “Workers have been left in the lurch, left to fend for themselves.”
If the state of workers is not bad enough, worse news comes in the form of the fake pashmina shawls that are manufactured in the Punjab towns of Ludhiana and Jalandhar. Genuine pashmina shawls are expensive, and the cheap ones rake in the moolah elsewhere in India.
Kashmir’s handmade pashmina was awarded the Geographical Indication (GI) of Origin label in 2008. But this means nothing unless the government pursues it. In other words, not only is pashmina-weaving an expensive and exacting process, selling them is a pain as well.
As of now, for those who weaved shahtoosh yesterday and do pashmina today, there seems no way out.
