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  KASHMIR HANDICRAFTS 05/18/2025 6:43am (UTC)
   
 

KASHMIR HANDICRAFTS




From the amusing trinket to a collector's item, you'll find it all in Srinagar. Row upon row of shops filled with handicrafts line the streets. The array is awesome. There are objects to suit every pocket, for the variety within each craft is wide.

While top-of-the-line products cater to the discerning, some handicrafts cater to the buyers with a modest budget. To the uninitiated, the difference between two shawls may be negligible and hardly worth the enormous disparity in price. However, the dealer knows exactly what he has in his showroom, knows how much skill, labour and material has gone into its fabrication, and so accordingly structures the price.

Kashmiri handicrafts are prized everywhere for their exquisite craftsmanship. Kashmir carpets, in both wool and silk with their Persian design, are a lifetime investment and the shoppers’ selection range from the simple to the most extraordinarily intricate patterns handed down the generations.

Then there are papier-mâché items ranging from jewellery boxes to mirror frames, a range of intricately carved walnut wood furniture and accessories, stone jewellery boxes, beautiful woollen shawls, crewel embroidery on furnishing material sold by the meter and more. Following is a brief description of the main handicraft legacy of Kashmir:

Papier mache is a delicate decorative art which shows the artistic zeal of a craftsman. This art was introduced in Kashmir in the 15th Century by a Kashmiri Prince who spent years in prison at Samarkand in Central Asia. The art born in the land of Persia was highly favored by Mughal Emperors of 15th and 16th Century.




At first glance, all papièr mâchè objects look roughly the same, but there is a price differential which depends on the quality of the product. However, besides at least three different grades of papièr mâchè, some are actually cardboard or wood! The idea, however, is not to hoodwink the unwary, but to provide a cheaper product with the look of papièr mâchè. To make papièr mâchè, first paper is soaked in water till it disintegrates. It is then pounded, mixed with an adhesive solution, shaped over moulds, and allowed to dry and set before being printed and varnished. Paper that has been pounded to pulp has the smoothest finish in the final product. When the pounding has not been so thorough, the finish is less smooth.


Papier Mache, today, has become highly stylized and appealing by using real gold and silver paint and by adding intricate decorations. The designs and decorations of the Kashmiri Papier Mache, usually in the form of flowers and birds, have a strong Persian flavor. Among other rich designs are 'Arabesque', done in gold against a brown or red ground to show sprays of rose blossoms in fine lines and 'Yarkand', an elaborate design built up in spirals with gold rosettes radiating from various centers and white flowers laid over gold scroll work. Some items like bowls and vases are lined with brass, while on special orders boxes and other items are ornamented with gold and silver leaves and depict beautiful landscapes and objects like a house boat, that form an inseparable part of Kashmiri lifestyle.




The designs painted on objects of papièr mâchè are brightly coloured. They vary in artistry and the choice of colours, and it is not difficult to tell a mediocre piece from an excellent one. Gold is used on most objects, either as the only colour, or as a highlight for certain motifs. Besides the finish of the product, it is the quality of gold used which determines the price. Pure gold leaf, which has an unmistakable lustre, is far more expensive than bronze dust or gold poster paint. Varnish, which is applied to the finished product, imparts a high gloss and smoothness, and increases with every coat applied.
 
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Last Updated on November 2008
  Ravees Mir Says
The inspiration for the creation of the arts and crafts of Kashmir is the paradisiacal land of Kashmir in its physical and metaphysical meaning and expression. The artistic genius of the Kashmiri people as expressed in the fields of literature, poetry, literary images, shawl-making, embroidery, embroidered floor-coverings, wood-work and wood-carving, papier-mache and metal-work has been studied by the author, in the beauty of their composition, history, making and design movement.

The arts and crafts of Kashmir testify to the Kashmiri artist being a true lover of nature. Nature is reflected in the polished mirror of the designs and decorative patterns of ornamentation of the Kashmiri arts. Poetry in form to reach the realm of thought, idea, dream and vision that shows joy in this world as the world is joyful in Him.


The Kashmiri artist or craftsman can afford only two luxuries – the birds and the flowers – which grow wild, and the land holds one in charm by its free beauty. This natural beauty and the beauty of its arts and crafts have made Kashmir famous through the ages.

Also, Sufism, Islamic form of mysticism, has as in the case of the whole of the Islamic world permeated the Kashmiri society, though and literature and the philosophy f the creation of the arts and crafts of Kashmir, which also fulfill though in a meager way the economic needs of the maker. So it is metaphorically the desire for meeting the harmonious lip to express the pain of love, which results in the profound meaning of expression of the Kashmiri arts.

As in the weaving of the poetry of the harmonious beauty of shawls painstakingly, in one of the most difficult weaves of the world, each strand of thread moves in a static medium with such sinuous grace and force of expression as not only to enchant one in its fineness of grace and sensuous beauty but also to speak of the attractive, sensitive and appealing to the senses beauty – which intrigues, charms, captivates and absorbs the one touched and affected by it – of the land from which the materials of making and forming and composing and drawing the shawl spring forth. In a measure of transcendence the radiant and magnificent patterns and designs, in the case of Kashmiri metal-work, take back to the earth – from the material to the de-materialisation of the object afforded by the luminosity and movement of the line of the decorative pattern, though on the surface, to almost make one experience, if you like, something sacred – the bowels of which yield the raw materials and the rocks from which they are extracted. The Kashmiri embroidered rugs display the ‘soofyana rang’, while the wood-work and wood-carving praises the nature by taking it back to the woods. The papier-mache decorative designs in their miniature style of painting portray the verdant green and colorful landscape and the flowers in bloom and singing birds of the beautiful valley of Kashmir.

Nature speaks in the Kashmiri arts and crafts in the language derived mainly from Persian aesthetics a development of Islamic aesthetics – in the expression of the design of the arts; which has certainly taken Islam to be the influence and hence is born of the spirit of Islam itself.

The evolution of the significant and important ornamental design lay-out in Kashmiri arts and crafts is defined by the term arabesque with its centre being everywhere and nowhere to be seen as it is a continuous pattern so intricate as to make the eye tired of detail and carry it in a level of manifestation to the feeling, dream and vision of the transcendental meaning of life. It expresses the unity of existence in the continuous cycle of creation and re-creation with its underlying factor being that the things come and go but what remains constant is this very cycle and this passion and urge and love of creating and creation, celebrated by man by creating himself, as a defiance of nature (by creating a composition of a universe of art) but ultimately realizing his complete dependence upon it in thought, idea, dream, vision and material of existence and creating.

Thus there are levels of manifestation in the metaphorical and aesthetic expression (on the surface appearing to be endless cursive shapes, circles, polygonal figures and arabesque) to be explored and understood according to one’s knowledge and gift of ability to conceive the picture or the painting with its order, beauty, balance and harmony, which is truly man’s existence and which brings forth the expression of art. This beauty, poetry, music and dance of life is a way of bringing about recollection and of awakening within man an awareness of that supreme Beauty for posterity, of which all terrestrial beauty is but a pale reflection, for as Rumi says, as translated by Nicholson, that Kings lick the earth of which the fair are made. For God has mingled in the dusty earth a draught of Beauty from His choicest cup. It is that, fond lover – not these lips of clay – you are kissing with a hundred ecstasies. Think, then, what must it be when underfiled!

And the artist is a lyre whose strings are plucked by the Creator in a musical harmony with the embellishing ornament stylisd to the point of losing all resemblance with nature and obeying only the laws of rhythm – being a real graphic of rhythms with each line undulating in complementary phases, and each surface having its inverse counterpart for a balanced, harmonious composition – of the design of movement or the movement of design. Thus the ornament tries to stop the mind of the onlooker affected by it or the one who appreciates it and is absorbed in it from attaching itself on any particular form. This hindrance is to dissuade and stop one from arranging a definitive saying of “I” as an image says “I”.




Ravees Mir (Gemologist)

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