Hundreds of Kashmiri craftswomen take to pashmina weaving as treadle replaces ‘charkha’

Samaan Lateef

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Srinagar, March 11

Hundreds of women in Kashmir are taking up the craft of spinning pashmina fibre after a modification in the traditional ‘charkha’, spinning wheel, has doubled their income.

Authorities have replaced the hand-driven pashmina spinning wheel with the treadle and a chair to shift its main control to the legs of the operator. The pedal is making the charkha easy to maneuver and increasing its spinning capacity.

“My mother-in-law would spin pashmina on traditional charkha. It is tiring to operate. We had to work really hard from dawn to dusk and still it won’t pay us enough,” said Mehmooda, 55, a craftswoman of the Hawal locality in Srinagar.

“The new charkha has made things very easy,” she said. It takes months and even a year to weave shawls with intricate designs.

Over the years, the number of women spinning pashmina had decreased sharply in Kashmir, mainly due to low wages and less output on the traditional charkha.

In the past year, more than 200 women have been trained and given modified charkhas.

The initiative is part of an effort to protect and preserve the genuine age-old craft of pashmina shawls, which is facing a massive invasion of fake and machine-made shawls, said Mujtaba Qadiri, president of Me&K which trains women in hand spinning and provides them free modern charkhas.

Earlier, craftswomen had to buy the fibre to spin it and later sell it to traders at meagre prices. On the traditional charkha, they would earn Rs 1 for each knot, which is a bundle of 10 threads of 10-inch length.

“Now, we are paid Rs 1.5 per knot. On the traditional charkha, we would earn Rs 80 for making threads from 10 gm of pashmina and on modern charkha, we earn Rs 250 from spinning 10 gm of pashmina,” Mehmooda said.

Qadiri distributes fibre free of cost among the craftswomen and pays them two times more than what they used to get from traders in the past. “One of the reasons for Kashmir pashmina or cashmere being the finest in the world is because of hand spinning. We realised during the training programme that it empowered women,” he said.