NORTH INDIA, 19TH CENTURY

The development of Kashmir shawl design was driven heavily by European tastes, as weavers in North India creatively selected and combined well-established Indo-Persian motifs to suit the tastes of European fashion. Five of the shawls in this group are Chandars - moon shawls - which can be recognised by their central medallion with four part-medallions as the spandrels in the corners of the field. Jack Cassin speculated that the origin of the design may have been with Ottoman Cairene carpets, which were also sometimes square in shape and woven with a similar arrangement of motifs ("Chand-Dar - the Moon-Shawls of Kashmir", HALI 3, no.4, 1981, p.290). This still allowed for a considerable amount of variety. While three of this group are woven with an overall boteh design, two have a more abstract repeated motif on a plain red field. The final shawl in the group is a Rumal, with added 'harlequin' fringes which were added to shawls of this type from the mid-19th century (Monique Lévi-Strauss, The Cashmere Shawl, London, 1986, p.189). A large selection of Kashmir shawls, including numerous examples comparable to those in this group, was sold in these Rooms, 11-18 June 2019.