Takli Spinner · Srinagar, Kashmir
Five centuries of craft.
One valley.
The history of Kashmiri Pashmina is inseparable from the history of the Kashmir Valley itself. In the 15th century, Zain-ul-Abidin, the benevolent Sultan of Kashmir, invited master weavers from Central Asia to train local artisans. The craft they established — hand-spinning and hand-weaving the finest goat fleece — became the foundation of an industry that would sustain the valley for five hundred years.
The methods have changed remarkably little. The takli spindle remains the preferred tool for spinning, its weight and balance unchanged since the Mughal era. The khatwa loom, a simple frame loom operated by hand, produces fabric with a character that no industrial machine can match. These are not nostalgic choices; they are technical necessities for working with fibre as fine as 12 microns.
Our founder's family entered this trade in the 1960s, establishing direct relationships with Changthangi herders on the Changthang plateau. Three generations later, those relationships remain. We know the families who comb the goats, the villages where the spinning happens, and the workshops where the weaving takes place. This is what "Kashmiri Pashmina" means: not just a product, but a network of people and places that can be named and visited.
