In his two-room wooden house high in the beautiful Grace Valley in Pakistani Kashmir, Hidayat Ullah weaves at a manual paddle loom. Asked how he learned the craft, he gestured to an old man coughing on a bed.
“I got this skill from my father, but now my son is not taking up this profession. He prefers to work in the fields and sometimes also works as a laborer — it’s better money than the loom,” Ullah said.
Weavers have produced exquisite shawls in Kashmir for centuries, but their craft risks dying out in the face of cheap foreign imports and a young generation uninterested in mastering the skill.
Photo: AFP
Kashmir gave its name to the soft cashmere wool that commands sky-high prices in the West, but in Ullah’s village there are now only 10 paddle looms — known as khadis — where there were once 100.
Cashmere scarves and sweaters sell for hundreds of dollars in the developed world, but Hidayat Ullah takes only 3,000 Pakistani rupees (US$30) for the 15 days’ labor needed to make a shawl.
For centuries, the people of Grace Valley in the Pakistan-administered part of the Himalayan territory lived off their livestock, taking their animals up to high pastures in summer and bringing them down in September to shear them and spin the wool.
Photo: AFP
As snow blanketed the valley for the long months of winter, villagers confined indoors wove shawls, embroidering colorful patterns by hand before selling them in the spring.
However, demand among locals is collapsing.
“A hand-woven shawl costs 10,000 rupees, while you can get the same kind of shawl in the markets for 2,000 to 3,000 rupees,” weaver Zeenat Bibi, 32, said.
Photo: AFP
Bibi makes shawls with her father-in-law, but said no one else in her family wants to learn.
“I have a 10-year-old daughter who asks me why I waste my time doing this strange old job,” she said.
In the past, the isolation of the area helped local craftsmen as it was difficult to bring in goods from outside. Now, as communications open up, things are changing.
“These days second-hand clothes with new designs, good material and at cheaper prices are available, so they want to buy these and this old tradition is diminishing day by day,” said Fatima Yaqoob, a lecturer at the Arts and Cultural University of Azad Kashmir.
Government help is needed to modernize the industry — in particular to switch from manual to power looms — and encourage more people to go into it, she said.
In India, the government has stepped in to minimize the impact of similar problems affecting the traditional artisans who make beautiful shawls from special wool from the Pashmina goat.
It has secured a WTO Geographical Indication (GI) mark for the fabric and the process of shawl-making and set up a testing laboratory in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.
Pashmina goats are reared by nomads in the Changthang area of Indian Kashmir’s Ladakh at an altitude of more than 4,267m, where winter temperatures can plummet to minus-50oC.
The finest Pashmina wool is hand-spun into shawls, usually by women. Artisans then embroider them with intricate designs for a finished product that can cost thousands in the West.
Thousands of Indian Kashmiris are in the Pashmina trade, but scarce raw materials and an explosion in fakes worries artisans and traders, and many have quit the profession.
“The term Kashmir Pashmina is being misused by very many people around the world,” said M. S. Farooqi, who heads the Craft Development Institute in Srinagar.
“The craft of Pashmina making has such a historical context, exquisiteness and uniqueness that it is a coveted product worldwide ... and GI will help bring it back to the people and the region it belongs to,” Farooqi said.
However, the younger generation in Ladakh are abandoning the Pashmina trade for jobs with the government or construction.
Last winter, about 25,000 Pashmina goats perished in Changthang in unusually cold weather when their fodder froze under a thick, icy layer of snow and land routes to the area were cut off for weeks.
Scientists at the Sher-i-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology in Kashmir last year succeeded in making a clone of the Pashmina goat called Noori. The aim is to increase productivity of the Pashmina yielding goats and to send male clones into the environment to breed naturally.
Experiments have shown that the Pashmina goat can survive at lower altitudes, but does not produce the same quality of wool.
However, it is unclear if science can stop the market trends.
“Most buyers find it difficult to distinguish between a fake and a genuine Pashmina shawl,” said Mohammad Sadiq Wani, a trader and exporter of Kashmiri crafts.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”