A Social History of the Northern Indian Kashmiri Shawl

FAIN: FB-51851-05

Chitralekha Zutshi
College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA 23186-0002)

This multidisciplinary project records the social history of the production and consumption of Kashmiri shawls in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century global context through four critical snapshots. It follows Kashmiri shawls in their interaction with the production and consumer cultures of Kashmir, France, England and British India, as they became bearers of Kashmiri identities; sites for the discourse on authenticity and imitation; carriers of imperial ideologies and middle-class Englishness; and the embodiments of sovereignty. I argue that, far from simply being textiles, Kashmiri shawls were commodities that produced value and created knowledge, not only within and about Kashmir but also within societies to which they were exported.