Shalin Shawls

Woollen Shawls with the Fine Pashmina yarn are handwoven also in the villages of Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh with exciting experimentation in natural dyes which give a whole new range of hitherto unavailable colors. Villagers delve back into tradition, and often long-forgotten knowledge, to extract colors from walnut bark, indigo, turmeric and madder, which take on a different hue depending on the quality of the water in which it is dyed or the quality of the woollen yarn with which it is woven. In an age of monotonous and mechanised replication, the world of handmade, natural-dyed textiles offers a welcome non-standardised exclusivity. Local yarn, fine Pashmina yarn and fusion with silk or cotton yarn also adds a new range of textures and weights to such fabric. In Ladakh, the high-altitude starkness is brushed over with subtle colors. The changing sunlight brings out the nuances of various shades from slate grey to deep russet, light camel brown, gentle pinks of the sunset and the purple rust of the fading day. Green crops, mustard fields and indigo blue skies reinforce the unsurpassable grandeur of Nature’s handiwork. Here exists a little known tradition of dyeing handwoven woollen cloth with natural dyes. It is said that the robes worn by monks in Buddhist Ladakh were dyed in deep maroon red with madder (locally known as tsot) and also used to color the ceremonial dress of a bride. Cows’ urine was used to develop the colour of indigo (locally called rbums) and shades were teased out of the chimney soot, the bark of an apple tree, walnut peel, the extract of leaves of wilk roses and the colours that emerged from boiling a local fodder grass, called snyalo. The cream coloured Pashmina, woven in a texture coarser than that of Kashmir, accepts these purely natural ingredients in a variety of ways.