Srinagar, Jul 29: It’s a garden in a carpet, fruits in wood, flowers in waste paper, Chinars in copper, and a landscape on a shawl. Kashmiri artisans cannot divorce their art from the scenic, poetic, and spiritual nature of the region’s people. They use mountains, lakes, flowers, and the spiritual aura of Kashmir to craft their art through shawls, carpets, papier-mâché, wood carvings, and pottery. Sufism is a very powerful force in Kashmiri arts. Even one of the colours used in Kashmiri shawls is called ‘Sufiana rang’, and the very name refers to the connection of craftwork, music, and mysticism in the region.
The name Kashmir has existed for over 23 centuries. It has been a favourite destination for poets, travellers, and historians. Their writings provide an understanding of the culture from which the craft of Kashmir originated. The 14th-century Persian poet Hafez of Shiraz described the challenge of portraying Kashmir’s beauty as being akin to Farhad drawing a stream of milk from Mount Bisutun for his beloved Shirin. The 16th-century poet Urfi Shirazi went further, inviting those who believed Kashmir to be paradise to come and see that paradise itself had come to Kashmir.
The Mughal Emperor Akbar named it Bagh-e-Khass, which translates to ‘Chosen Garden,’ while the revered saint Syed Ali Hamadani (RA), who was instrumental in the diffusion of Islam and Persian culture in Kashmir, had previously named it Bagh-e-Sulieman or “the Garden of Solomon.” In his Tuzuk, Mughal Emperor Jahangir showed appreciation for the roses, narcissus, tulips, and various other kinds of flowers present in the Valley during the spring season. The French traveller Francis Bernier, who visited Kashmir in the 17th century, recorded Jahangir’s desire to exchange all his provinces for Kashmir.
Such accounts were not just praises for scenic beauty. They reflected the environment in which Kashmiri artistic traditions developed. The Valley’s visual language found its way into the hands of artisans. Flowers became motifs. The cypress, or boyet, became a distinctive design element, particularly in the corners of shawls.
Patterns were passed from one generation of craftspeople to another, preserved through memory, practice, and painstaking observation.The artisan’s work was therefore both inheritance and innovation. In the weaving culture of Kashmir, motifs are passed down from one generation to another, but the craftspeople inject a personal twist into them. The shawl, carpet, or embroidered cloth made could include a vocabulary of designs created hundreds of years ago but nevertheless made by human hands. There is a spirituality to creation that is just as essential.
The mystical poet of Kashmir, Lalla Arifa, who is a very much living part of the culture of the region through her poems, spoke of shedding conventions in search of truth. Her famous lines, “Dance then, Lalla, clothed but by the air. Sing then, Lalla, clad but in the sky” conjure the notion of spiritual liberation that fits within the larger framework of Kashmir’s artistic heritage. Persian mystic poet Rumi wrote about how music is a veil from which ultimate truths are unveiled.
In Kashmir, where the spiritual art form of Sufiana music was born, the concept of how melody can transcend the tangible world has a home. The same tension between the visible and invisible runs through the region’s crafts. An artisan begins with raw material – Pashmina fibre, wool, wood, clay, paper, or metal – but the finished object carries something that cannot easily be measured: memory, imagination, and inherited knowledge. Pottery, perhaps the most elemental of crafts, embodies that paradox.
Omar Khayyam, in his Rubaiyat, imagined the potter’s clay speaking to the hand that violently pounds it: “I was once like thee – so treat me well.” This vessel is the study of the relationship between the creator and his creation, questioning whether the potter is the creator, the merchant, or even the purchaser of the pot. The potters of Kashmir are well aware of this relationship. Pottery is moulded by hand, fired by the flames, and reborn out of creativity. Using one of the most humble materials in existence, its creation requires patience, accuracy, and toughness. The same spirit runs through Kashmir’s wider artistic tradition.
Allama Iqbal refers to Kashmir as “Iran-e-Saghir” or “Little Iran” due to its strong connections to Persian and Central Asian culture. Iqbal mentions his spirit as being from Hijaz, his body from the garden of Kashmir, and his art from Persia. Kashmir has an artistic vocabulary which shows the influences of all these aspects. Persian, Central Asian, and indigenous cultures have merged in Kashmir, giving rise to art forms which are both indigenous and part of a larger culture.
However, for Iqbal, the beauty and creativity of Kashmir also carried a warning. In a poem written in Nishat Bagh, he lamented the condition of Kashmiri artisans, saying they created fine art while remaining unaware of their own “egos”, weaving silken garments for the wealthy while living in tatters themselves. That contradiction remains central to any understanding of Kashmir’s handicrafts. The extraordinary beauty produced by artisans has often existed alongside economic hardship and uncertainty for the people who create it.
However, the instinctive drive to create lives on. As per Ghani Kashmiri, one of Kashmir’s finest poets, the creative instinct is in the genes of Kashmiris.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that he incorporates the imagery of clay, beauty, and creation in his poetry. This indicates that creativity is impossible without association with the Valley’s natural environment and the sentiments that run through its people. Poetry is inborn in Kashmir. In a land of such visual splendour, inspiration comes even to ordinary people, let alone poets. This is how one can explain the variety of arts in Kashmir.
The Kashmiri artist manages to make art out of the snowy peaks, the hills in the Valley, the flowers growing in the meadows, roses and narcissus, green grass, and lakes and rivers. Water lilies from the Wular Lake and lotuses from the Dal Lake enter into their imagination. Various hues of the sky, clouds, rain, and snow manage to enter into the design of the fabric. The sound of the running rivers and spring waters becomes, through the skill of poets and musicians, a metaphor of harmony and creativity.
Even the mountains, as Ghani Kashmiri puts it, do not keep quiet anymore: “They continue conversing in sweet tones even when it gets dark at night.”
It is the never-ending conversation between nature and man that makes the Kashmiri handicrafts unique in their own right. The beauty of the Valley is not only copied but interpreted by the artisan. A carpet becomes a garden captured in silk, a shawl becomes a landscape carried on the shoulders, a carved walnut wooden panel brings the geometry of leaves and flowers into a home, papier-mâché turns fragile paper into objects of intricate colour and form, and pottery gives earth a human shape.
Behind each object is a chain of knowledge – the designs remembered by craftspeople, the techniques learned from parents and teachers, the patience required to repeat a movement thousands of times, and the instinct to know when the work is complete. This aspect has always been acknowledged within Kashmiri literary traditions. Saadi Shirazi, the great 13th century Persian poet, writes, “The Nightingale in the grove sang of nothing if not the bloom.”
This can just as easily apply to the Kashmiri craftspeople: “What would they craft their hands into without the mountains, flowers, lakes, colours, and tales?” The answer lies in the crafts themselves. The Kashmiri artisan is not merely making a product for the marketplace. The artisan is continuing a conversation that stretches across generations – between nature and imagination, faith and form, tradition and innovation. Now, the task is to make sure that this heritage is economically sustainable for those who inherit it. As stressed by Iqbal, “weaving for the rich people and living in poverty” is a sad fact which makes it clear that the craft tradition cannot be sustained only by aesthetics.
The future of Kashmir’s artistic traditions is tied to the dignity, livelihoods, and recognition of its craftspeople. For centuries, poets have struggled to describe Kashmir. Abul Fazl wrote in the Akbarnama that the praises of its beauty could not be contained within the narrow limits of language, Hafez compared the task of portraying it to an almost impossible feat, and Urfi imagined paradise itself travelling to Kashmir to witness its beauty. The artisans of Kashmir have found another answer. They do not try to describe the Valley using words. They weave it, chisel it, paint it, mould it, and decorate it with embroidery in fibre, wool, wood, paper, and clay to keep something alive of what centuries of poets have attempted to express through their words. And that perhaps could be the reason why the crafts of Kashmir have survived for ages, because in every pattern lies not only the talent of a craftsperson, but also an age-old belief that beauty needs to be pondered over and recreated.
