Three Generations in Pashmina: What Our Family Witnessed When Shahtoosh Was Traded
No article in this series can say what this one can: we were there. Our grandfather worked these markets before the enforcement began. Our father watched it close. We are building the legitimate trade that came after. This is the account no external observer could write.
In This Account
- Who We Are and Where We Come From
- What Our Grandfather Knew — The World Before Enforcement
- The Ring Test — What We Watched Sellers Do
- What We Knew That Buyers Did Not
- Why Our Family Did Not Participate in the Shahtoosh Trade
- The Enforcement Years — What We Watched Happen
- What the Valley Felt Like During the Transition
- What Continued Through Everything
- What Three Generations of Observation Tells Us
- Frequently Asked Questions
Throughout this series we have documented the Shahtoosh trade from the outside — with science, with law, with conservation data, with investigative history. This final article of Month 2 documents it from the inside: from within the Kashmir Valley, from within the Pashmina trade, from the particular vantage point that three generations of one family occupying the same trade across sixty-plus years makes possible.
We are not neutral observers. We have a position, a commercial interest in genuine Pashmina, and strong views about what happened to the chiru and why the enforcement was necessary. We state these things openly because the alternative — pretending to a detachment we do not have — would be less honest than simply declaring where we stand and letting readers weigh the account accordingly.
Who We Are and Where We Come From
1960s–1980s — Establishing the Trade
Our grandfather established the family's position in the Kashmir Pashmina trade in the 1960s, working within the craft economy of the Valley that had operated in essentially the same form since the Mughal court patronage we trace in our article on Akbar and the Pashmina shawl. He built relationships with the Changthangi goat herding communities — the Changpa — and with the weaving families in and around Srinagar. This was the foundation of everything that followed. He worked in a Valley where Shahtoosh was present but where he made a clear choice about which trade he was in.
1980s–2010s — Living Through the Peak and the Closure
Our father's generation built the trade through the period when Shahtoosh was at its commercial peak in the Valley's tourist market — and watched the enforcement years dismantle what had been an openly operating parallel economy. He continued in Pashmina throughout, maintained the family's herder and weaver relationships, and led the transition as the legitimate trade rebuilt its premium market through GI certification and international direct export. He is the one who said, when we were children: "Our hands are clean."
2010s–Present — Building the Digital Pashmina Trade
Our generation inherited a trade that had already made its choices, had already survived the transition, and was positioned to grow in the post-Shahtoosh era through the channels that previous generations could not access. We built Pashwrap as the digital face of that trade — reaching buyers in London, New York, Dubai, and Tokyo directly, without the tourist market intermediary that had characterized the previous generation's commercial model. The Shahtoosh market we write about in this series is, for our generation, history. But it is family history.
What Our Grandfather Knew — The World Before Enforcement
Our grandfather worked the Kashmir Valley trade in a period when Shahtoosh was openly available in the market and when the legal framework that would eventually close it either did not exist or was not enforced in any meaningful way. He knew what Shahtoosh was. He had handled it. He understood its properties — its extraordinary fineness, its near-impossible lightness, the specific sensory quality that made it so different from even the finest Pashmina.
He also understood, with the directness that trade knowledge provides, that it came from killing an animal. This was not a mystery in the Valley. Everyone who worked in fine fiber in Kashmir knew, in general terms, where Shahtoosh came from. The chiru was not a secret. What was absent in the pre-enforcement era was not knowledge of the species or the killing — it was the legal framework and the institutional will to act on that knowledge.
📖 Memory — First Generation
"He told us, more than once, that he had held a Shahtoosh shawl in both hands as a young man and thought: this is the most extraordinary thing I have ever touched. And then: I will never sell this. Not because of what I knew about the law — there was barely a law yet — but because of what I knew about the animal. You do not build a trade on something that requires killing everything it needs. You have nothing left."
He was not a conservationist in the modern sense. He was a pragmatist who understood that a trade with no sustainable source has no future. That insight proved correct, although it took decades and an international enforcement programme to prove it.
The Ring Test — What We Watched Sellers Do
The ring test — pulling a shawl through a ring as a demonstration of extreme fineness — was ubiquitous in the Valley's tourist market at its peak. We watched it performed hundreds of times across our childhood and early trade years. It was performed on Shahtoosh. It was also performed on fine Pashmina. It was performed on very fine commercial cashmere. It was performed on blended pieces that were neither.
The ring test proved nothing about species. As we document thoroughly in our dedicated article on the Shahtoosh ring test, any fiber below about 16 microns at reasonable weave density will pass. We watched sellers demonstrate the ring test on Pashmina pieces they presented as Shahtoosh — knowingly, to buyers who had no reference point to contest it. We watched it on genuine Shahtoosh. We watched it on things that were genuinely neither. The test was a sales technique, not an identification method, and the sellers who used it knew that.
👁 What We Observed in the Tourist Market — Peak Era
- →The ring test demonstration was standard sales practice regardless of what was actually being sold — we watched it used on Pashmina presented as Shahtoosh repeatedly
- →Prices for pieces described as Shahtoosh varied enormously from seller to seller, with no obvious relationship to the fiber's actual identity
- →The "naturally shed" claim — that the fiber was collected from rocks and bushes rather than from killed animals — was used with apparent confidence by sellers who clearly understood its falsity
- →Western buyers, in particular, had essentially no framework for evaluating what they were being told — they arrived with curiosity and left with whatever story the seller constructed
- →Some sellers were also selling genuine fine Pashmina alongside Shahtoosh, sometimes from the same shelf, with the same descriptions and the same ring test
What We Knew That Buyers Did Not
The information asymmetry between Valley insiders and international buyers during the peak Shahtoosh era was vast. International buyers arrived with strong desire to own something extraordinary, no independent means of verifying what they were buying, and often a willingness to suspend doubt in the face of a compelling sales narrative.
What we knew — as trade insiders — that those buyers almost never knew:
- The ring test does not identify species. Fine Pashmina passes it.
- A significant proportion of pieces sold as Shahtoosh in the tourist market were genuine fine Pashmina — priced as Shahtoosh but not Shahtoosh in fiber.
- Some pieces were genuine Shahtoosh. The only way to know which was which was laboratory fiber testing that no tourist was going to commission in the Srinagar market.
- The "naturally shed" story was false. We knew this. Every trade insider knew this. It was said to buyers because buyers wanted to hear something that made the purchase feel ethical.
- The legal exposure buyers were creating for themselves by purchasing pieces and taking them home was real, even if enforcement was not yet focused on retail buyers rather than commercial traders.
Why Our Family Did Not Participate in the Shahtoosh Trade
Our family's decision not to handle Shahtoosh was not primarily a legal calculation — in the early period, the legal risk was diffuse enough that many legitimate traders were not particularly concerned about it. It was a commercial and ethical judgment that our grandfather articulated first and that passed through the generations without needing to be revisited.
The commercial argument was simple: a fiber sourced by killing a wild, undomesticated, unfarmed species has no sustainable supply chain. There is no herd management, no breeding programme, no long-term supply security. Every shawl requires new killing. The moment enforcement tightened, or the population collapsed, or international pressure became irresistible, the entire commercial structure would evaporate instantly. He had seen enough trades rise and fall in the Valley to recognize the pattern.
The ethical argument was equally simple: the people who handled Shahtoosh knew where it came from. Choosing to trade in it was choosing to be part of that supply chain. Whatever individual craftspeople up the chain knew or did not know, the traders and sellers at the market-facing end knew. Our grandfather chose not to be a knowing participant in a trade that required killing to continue.
"There was a shop two lanes from our grandfather's that did very well with Shahtoosh for twenty years. Then it closed, very suddenly, one day in the early 2000s. The owner had had enough warning to move what he could. What he could not move — the pieces he could not sell before the enforcement reached him — he could also not keep, not insure, not discard easily. Twenty years of premium income, ended in a week. Our grandfather had said: this is how it will go."
The Enforcement Years — What We Watched Happen
👁 What We Watched, Year by Year
Word reached the Valley that raids had happened in London and New York. The names of specific shops were discussed. The tone in the market was not panic — most sellers assumed this was a Western enforcement problem that would not reach the Valley. There was some voluntary quietening of the most explicit Shahtoosh sales pitches in shops that served Western tourists. The ring test became slightly more discreet but did not stop.
The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau began active operations in the Valley. Raids on identified workshops started. The first prosecutions under the Wildlife Protection Act — cases our family watched with close attention — sent a clear signal that enforcement was no longer a Western problem reaching India only through export seizures, but a domestic enforcement reality. The open tourist-market sale of Shahtoosh began contracting noticeably.
The contraction accelerated. Shops that had openly offered Shahtoosh were no longer doing so with any consistency. Some had moved inventory; some had quietly abandoned the line; some had been raided and were not in a position to continue. The tourist market was still operating but the explicit Shahtoosh trade had gone from open to cautious to, in most accessible tourist-facing shops, essentially absent.
By approximately 2012, what our father described as "the open market" was effectively closed. Shahtoosh had not disappeared from the Valley — it continued in informal, private networks that enforcement had pushed underground — but the visible, tourist-facing, ring-test-demonstrating, openly-priced Shahtoosh trade that our grandfather had worked alongside for decades was gone. The same market streets were there. The same shawl shops were there. But the specific trade was gone.
What the Valley Felt Like During the Transition
The economic impact of the Shahtoosh closure in the Valley is something we have documented analytically in our article on what the ban cost local artisans. What that article cannot fully capture is the human texture of what the transition felt like to live through — the specific quality of anxiety, adaptation, and eventual relief that the transition years produced in the communities around us.
There was genuine hardship. Families who had built significant income around Shahtoosh — particularly the spinners and weavers who had worked at the premium end of that trade — faced a gap in income that the Pashmina market did not immediately fill. The gap between the old premium and the new available premium was real, and it lasted years, not months.
There was also, gradually and unmistakably, a kind of relief — most visible among the artisans who had always known what they were handling but had chosen not to examine it too closely. The closure of the Shahtoosh trade removed a moral discomfort that had been quietly present in the Valley trade for years. Not everyone felt it — but those who did described the transition period, in retrospect, with a mixture of economic difficulty and moral clarity that is difficult to hold simultaneously but is precisely what the transition actually was.
What Continued Through Everything
✦ What Three Generations Built and What Survived
Through every phase of this history — the open Shahtoosh market, the enforcement years, the transition — the Pashmina craft continued. The Changthangi goats were still herded across the Changthang Plateau by the same Changpa families our grandfather had sourced from. The hand-spinners were still spinning. The handloom weavers were still weaving. The kani workers were still producing pieces that took months to complete and that bore no resemblance in craft terms to anything that could be made in a machine.
This continuity is not incidental. It is the argument. The Shahtoosh trade was a parasitic overlay on top of a legitimate, centuries-old craft economy — it borrowed the prestige that genuine Pashmina had built, paid premium prices that drew artisans toward it, and then collapsed, leaving the underlying craft economy to continue without it. The Pashmina craft tradition that predated Shahtoosh's commercial peak also outlasted it. That is not an accident. It is what happens when a craft has genuine foundations rather than borrowed prestige.
What Three Generations of Observation Tells Us
Having watched the Shahtoosh market from its peak to its closure, and having built three generations of genuine Pashmina trade through that entire period, we are in a position to say something that no external observer of the trade can quite say: the Shahtoosh market's collapse was not only legally correct — it was commercially inevitable.
A market built on killing a species that cannot be farmed, cannot be managed, and is protected by international treaty was always going to end. The question was only when and how. The enforcement that TRAFFIC's documentation and national wildlife crime agencies delivered compressed that timeline dramatically — and protected a species that might otherwise not have survived to reach the population of approximately 100,000 animals it holds today. We are glad it happened, as trade people as much as as ethical people. A market that cannot sustain its source cannot sustain itself.
Genuine Pashmina, by contrast, has sustained itself for over five hundred years and continues to do so because its source — the Changpa herders and their Changthangi goats — is renewable, humane, and embedded in a way of life that has adapted and continued across every political, economic, and social transformation the region has experienced in those five centuries. That is the trade we are in. That is the trade our grandfather chose. We have never had reason to regret it.
Our grandfather held Shahtoosh in his hands and said no. Our father watched the market that built on it close. We are building the trade that remains when it is gone.
Three generations. One answer. Pashmina.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Our family's trade has been exclusively in genuine Kashmiri Pashmina across all three generations. Our grandfather made an explicit decision not to participate in the Shahtoosh trade — both on commercial grounds (no sustainable supply chain) and on ethical grounds (knowing the killing involved). That decision passed through the generations and is the foundation of the trade we have built. We operated alongside the Shahtoosh market as witnesses, not participants.
Every trade insider in the Valley who worked with fine fiber knew the ring test was unreliable for species identification, because we handled both Pashmina and pieces described as Shahtoosh and we could watch both pass the same test. The ring test reflects fiber fineness and weave density — both of which can be present in genuine Pashmina as well as in Shahtoosh. In our own experience, we watched the ring test performed on fine Pashmina pieces that were being sold as Shahtoosh, and on Shahtoosh, and on things that were neither. The test told you approximately how fine the fiber was. It told you nothing about what species it came from.
It means fiber combed from Changthangi goats on the Changthang Plateau by Changpa herder families we have direct relationships with — the same families our grandfather established relationships with in the 1960s. It means hand-spun yarn, processed by spinners in the Kashmir Valley using traditional techniques. It means handwoven fabric on traditional looms by weaver families who have practiced these skills for generations. And it means GI-certified, verifiably authentic Kashmiri Pashmina — not a blend, not a label, but a traceable fiber with a documented and continuous supply chain that has operated without interruption for as long as our family has been in this trade.
Because we were exclusively in Pashmina, the enforcement era did not directly affect our legal position or our supply chain. What it did affect was the market context: the closing of the Shahtoosh premium market initially left a price gap that Pashmina took years to fully occupy, and the tourist market generally contracted during the enforcement years as the Valley attracted fewer premium visitors. In the longer term, the enforcement era was beneficial to our business — it created the conditions in which genuine, certified Pashmina could build a premium reputation without competing against a product that commanded higher prices through a combination of illegal scarcity and buyer deception.
Three generations. One craft. One choice.
The trade our grandfather built.
Still here. Still genuine.
Genuine Changthangi goat fiber, sourced from the same Changpa herding families our family has worked with for sixty years. Hand-spun, handwoven, GI-certified. The craft that predated the Shahtoosh era and has outlasted it.
