The Loom That Cannot Feed Its Weaver

• Ada Bhat
• Comments 0
• 20 Apr 2026

A Kani shawl takes up to three years to make. The artisan who makes it earns roughly Rs 300 a day. The retailer who sells it earns ten times that from a single transaction. Somewhere between the loom and the luxury boutique, Kashmir's most celebrated craft became a poverty trap.

Srinagar, Apr 19: Mohammad Yusuf Bhat has been weaving Kani shawls since he was fourteen. He is fifty-one now. In thirty-seven years at the loom, he has produced perhaps forty complete shawls, each one a document of patience so extreme it approaches the irrational. A single Kani shawl, woven in the traditional technique using small wooden spools called kanis rather than a continuous thread, requires between six months and three years of unbroken work. The weaver must follow a coded pattern sheet, a talim that specifies every individual thread movement across a design that can contain hundreds of thousands of colour changes. There is no shortcut. There is no machine that replicates it.

Bhat works from his home in Kanihama, a village in Budgam district that has given the craft its name and its geographical identity. He begins at seven in the morning and stops when the light fails. On a productive day, he earns Rs. 300. On days when the pattern is complex and progress is slow, he earns less. He has never earned more.

"My son does not want to learn this work," he says, without particular bitterness. "He drives a vehicle in Srinagar. He earns more in a day than I earn in a week. What would I tell him? That this is a better life?"

A craft the world wants and cannot afford to make

The Kani shawl holds a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, one of India's most prestigious craft certifications, awarded in recognition of the product's irreplaceable link to a specific place and tradition. It is exhibited in international craft fairs, stocked in luxury stores in Delhi, Mumbai, and occasionally in Europe. A high-quality Kani shawl retails for anywhere between Rs. 25,000 and Rs. 3 lakh, depending on the complexity of the design and the reputation of the seller.

The weaver's share of that retail price is between three and eight per cent.

This is not a market inefficiency. It is a structural feature of a value chain that was never designed to compensate the person at its foundation. The artisan sells to a local contractor. The contractor sells to a Srinagar-based dealer. The dealer sells to a national or international retailer. At each stage, the markup multiplies. At the foundation, the price paid for labour has not meaningfully increased in two decades.

A 2022 survey conducted by the Handicrafts and Handloom Corporation of J&K found that the average daily earning of a Kani weaver in Budgam district was Rs. 280 below the J&K government's own daily wage notification for unskilled construction labour, which stands at Rs. 400. A craftsman who has spent decades mastering one of the world's most technically demanding textile arts earns less per day than someone laying bricks. The survey's findings were noted, filed, and not acted upon.

The machine in the room

The economic marginalisation of the Kani weaver has been compounded by a problem the GI tag was supposed to solve but has not: the proliferation of machine-made imitations sold under the Kani name.

Power-loom shawls produced in Ludhiana, Amritsar, and parts of Uttar Pradesh are routinely marketed as Kashmiri Kani in retail environments ranging from roadside markets to online platforms. They are priced at Rs 1,500 to Rs 4,000, within reach of a buyer who wants to own something called a Kani shawl without paying for what that name actually means. The buyer often cannot tell the difference. Neither can the platform algorithm.

The GI tag, in principle, provides legal protection against this. In practice, enforcement is almost absent. The Geographical Indications Registry does not have the field infrastructure to monitor retail markets at scale. J&K's Handicrafts Department has filed occasional complaints. No prosecution has resulted in a penalty that functions as a deterrent.

The consequence for Bhat and the estimated 30,000 remaining Kani weavers in J&K is direct and measurable: the market for genuine Kani shawls has shrunk as the imitation market has expanded. Buyers who feel they were deceived once do not return. Buyers who never learn the difference simply buy the cheaper version. The authentic product is priced out of a market that its imitation has captured.

What survives and what is lost

Kanihama has perhaps 200 active weavers today, down from more than 1,000 a generation ago. The talim, the coded pattern sheets that carry the design vocabulary of the craft, are increasingly rare. Old masters who held entire design vocabularies in memory are dying without apprentices. The craft organisations that might document and preserve these patterns operate on budgets that do not allow for systematic archiving.

Bhat's own talim collection, inherited from his father, who inherited it from his father, sits in a wooden box in the corner of his workroom. Some are water-damaged. Some are in scripts he can read only partially. He has never been asked to share them with any government or academic institution.

"If I go," he says, looking at the box, "these go with me."

He does not say this as a complaint. He says it as a statement of fact, with the calm of a man who has understood for a long time that the world does not arrange itself to preserve what he knows.

Outside, the loom stands ready for tomorrow. The work continues because stopping at fifty-one, with no other skill and no other income, is not an option Bhat has.

Not pride. Not vocation. Necessity. That is what Kashmir's most celebrated craft has been reduced to.