06/23/2015
Master Embroiderer in Srinagar, India
Renuka Savasere, a scholar of Indian textiles and my companion on the day’s tour through the city’s ateliers, borrowed one of the men’s shawls, which was a garden of flowers: scarlets and emeralds and daffodils on a pale-gray background. One man works on only one shawl, she explained. He designs it. He stitches it. And then it will be sold. A typical Beigh shawl, Renuka said, takes at least two years to make and costs $3,000. This type of work is called kani sozni, and to see it so close is both beautiful and heartbreaking: beautiful because it is, and heartbreaking because of the way each man cradles the length of pashmina in his arms, letting it fall around his legs; heartbreaking because there is something gestational about spending so long creating one object.
