I’ve been visiting Srinagar every year since I was born. My family is Punjabi, but has lived there for generations. My grandmother has a house there. It was here that I learnt to ride a bike, eat my first plate of rajma-chawal and grow up. It is where I belong and where I have learnt that its beauty is not just in its mountains, gardens and lakes but also in the people and their art and craft. Snippets from a day’s outing looking at Kashmir’s glorious craft heritage.
Cloth of splendour
Zahoor Ahmed welcomed my friend and local guide, 17-year-old Humayun Abdullah, and me into his wooden home. Pointing to an empty room, he said it used to be full of weavers. Now he is the only weaver there as the rest quit, one by one. “The customers prefer machine-made to hand-made shawls,” he explained as he continued to weave a brown pashmina shawl. Though he smiled, his eyes were sad.
Papier-mâché curios
Ali Mohammed was a middle-aged man who invited us into his brick-and-mortar house with great gusto. A beautifully-crafted carpet adorned his living room. He looked at my camera, then at me and said, “Ask whatever you want to know.” So I did. I asked if he liked his job. “To my fellow craftsmen and me, it isn’t a job. People hate jobs. We love what we do because we do what we love. We put our heart and soul into this. It does get tiring sometimes. Some days we work nights too, but I love it,” he said. The rest of the conversation happened over a cup of tea. Mohammed had none, as he was fasting. He said he supplied to the big stores in the city and to well-off individuals who gave him custom orders. One was a box called Hazari that had a thousand tiny red flowers outlined with gold.
A sample of Nature
The wood carver’s shop was in a secluded place near an now-defunct factory. Mohammed Rafi songs played on a cassette player as the carvers smoked, laughed and ate czochworu (a crunchy, baguette-like local bread), in a dark room. Farooq Ahmed spoke about how they rarely used machines and most of the wood was hand carved. The larger designs were machine-cut, but the intricate flowers, petals and lines were all made by hand. They worked on walnut wood, their pride, because it’s native to the region. Then came the heavy lifting! In an adjacent room they led me to a finished cabinet. The detail was spread across the whole piece.
Knotty affair
Hameed, the carpet maker, couldn’t speak in Hindi or English, so Abdullah translated. On his loom was an orange paper with a bunch of signs. The signs were a language only the carpet weaver and the person who orders the making of the carpets could decipher. His hands moved swiftly, weaving the woollen carpet with its light background and designs drawn from Nature. He wouldn’t be disturbed from his work, answering through the yarns, in Kashmiri, the language with no script.
