Queen Victoria, the Sultan and the Adventurer: Weaving Strands of the History of the Kashmir Shawl

Authors

Joan Hart, Independent ScholarFollow

Date of this Version

2024

Document Type

Presentation

Citation

Textile Society of America 2024 Symposium

Shifts & Strands: Rethinking the Possibilities and Potentials of Textiles, November 12-17, 2024, a virtual event

Comments

Published by the Textiles Society of America

Copyright 2024, the author. Used by permission

Abstract

Tipu Sultan, William Moorcroft, and Queen Victoria owned Kashmir shawls from Kashmir, India dating from 1780 to 1880. Rare provenance for these shawls reveals the troubled strands of Kashmir production and the shifting political fate of the Kashmiri people.

Tipu Sultan is a hero in India, having conducted successful military campaigns against the British East India Company (1782-1799). Tipu gave a valuable Kashmir shawl to a captive British surgeon in 1784, probably the earliest shawl to enter Britain. Revealing a rare moment when the fate of India was not yet sealed for the British, Tipu still had empathy by honoring this soldier. Another strand in the British conquest of India and its shawls comes from William Moorcroft who explored Asia from 1810 on, where no westerner had been. The first veterinarian, hired to find horses for the British, he also found Kashmir shawls and decided to start a business. The research he gathered on the shawls is critical for understanding the harsh Sikh regime's management of their production. Due to the Treaty of Amritsar, Queen Victoria received shawls as tribute after the British conquest of India in 1846. This final era of shawl production demonstrates the culmination of the suppression of Kashmiri weavers who, nonetheless, produced exuberant shawls.

The violent and bloody encroachment of Britain into India, the gradual degradation of the Kashmiri weavers, the vibrancy of the Indian shawl production can be traced through these three disparate figures and the history of their shawls.