Semi-Pashmina Fully Embroidered Twill Shawl

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This semi-Pashmina twill shawl, effulgent, rich and gorgeous, with best possible quality of embroidery : neat and precisely laid design-motifs, fine details and fascinating forms or the illusion of forms for the eye does not find any, or at least many, when it explores it dot to dot and dash to dash and what appeared to be a form, a motif : a flower, flower-plant, or a pair of sportive birds, begins dissolving, and the whole surface begins glowing with a lustre which to define the man’s diction does not have a term, is a class of shawls now almost extinct. With its parallels : in design and quality of embroidery, seen in a few rags from the nineteenth century reported from some private collections, this shawl takes back to the tradition of great Kashmiri shawls of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when a Kashmiri shawl was a passion even of queens and empresses. Unique in its mystique : manifesting what it does not manifest, bathing in luster which it breeds in the eye and in the mind beyond its lines and colours, and its sublime simplicity, the shawl’s look is divine, and its touch, a rare experience.

Though not so rare in its material as in the quality of its embroidery, this shawl has been made of semi-Pashmina wool, the fleece of the same Capra hircus goat that produces pure ‘pashm’ – the wool of which a Pashmina shawl is woven, except that Pashmina-wool is the goat’s inner-most layer from under its neck and belly with 14 to 16 microns diameter, semi-Pashmina is its outer layer : the fleece of the same goat from those very parts though with about 19 microns thickness. Worth of material apart, it is the kind of embroidery, and of course its extent and volume, that gives the shawl its beauty as also its class as twill shawl. Dragging the eye diagonally by diagonal parallels across the entire piece whereas the grid consisted of horizontal linear courses – woven or embroidered, a twill shawl enjoys the same status in the hierarchy of Kashmiri shawls as a ‘kani’ shawl, jamavar, Pashmina-taafta, khatraaz, or a moon-shawl. Obviously a twill shawl, this piece astonishes with its diagonal thrust which it creates by its horizontal grid conceived to frame all its design motifs within its frame.

Thus, the piece is exceptional, both in its superb handling of embroidery and in its subtle use of colours. The embroidery extends over the entire piece covering it in total except of course the usual end-parts, about twenty centimeters on either end, the shawl’s universal distinction. The shawl consists of a thin border on both sides of the length with edges defined by series of simple interlock stitches, its main expanses, with courses of thick uniform dots across the entire length, and a fine line separating the border from the rest : field. The pallas have in addition to this border an elaborate ridge-line from the apexes of which radiates a plant-motif, each comprising three branches with their independent foliage, and from the ridge-line’s descent, a paisley carried over a stem.

The field has been distributed using two-linear horizontal courses which create over the entire field honeycomb frames, each containing a bunch of design motifs comprising series of flowers, pistils, sporting birds, radiating squares, dots and dashes, embroidered mostly using straight stitches applied in angular fashion. Stitches are not so fine as in Sozni embroidery but their visual effect is tremendous to which the lustre of the silk thread used in embroidering them and their colour-scheme greatly contribute. Besides red, pink and saffron-like golden yellow the embroiderer has most ingeniously manipulated the black of the background, which far more than the background colour becomes operative when a form requires a fourth, to reveal it, and in a palette of tints of the same household : red, pink and golden or saffron, a colour like black is the most welcome intruder for all forms become manifest only in their conflict with it. The theory of contrasts is not seen to have such wondrous effect as it has in the art-work of this shawl.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr. Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of literature and is the author of numerous books on Indian art and culture. Dr. Daljeet is the curator of the Miniature Painting Gallery, National Museum, New Delhi. They have both collaborated together on a number of books.