Following the Map: A Postcolonial Unpacking of a Kashmir Shawl

Abstract

This article traces the stories in and around one of four Srinagar “map shawls” (c. 1870), bringing postcolonial discourse analysis to bear on reading its changing and contending meanings. Its technical brilliance sits amongst changes in shawl production as a result of East-West trade, particularly during the nineteenth century. The shawl's meanings draw upon courtly dress and gift exchange, the social functions of cartography, local traditions of painting, the pomp of the Raj, commodity capitalism, personal souvenirs, gallery patronage and residual post-colonial rivalries. Its complex significance is “mapped” across trans-regional exchanges of power and cultural traditions in Kashmir, its use as a sign of conquest in imperial exhibitions, and its contemporary status as a prized work of exotic fabric art. Rehistoricizing and repoliticizing the Godfrey Shawl reveals a denser narrative than often circulates around Asian textile “collectibles” — one that lends itself to comparison with literary uses of textiles as signs of history and culture. Salman Rushdie's novels Midnight's Children and Shame also draw our attention to the Kashmir region through the device of texiles as symbolic inspiration and modes of storytelling “subaltern” to dominant histories. Attention to such narratives reveals limitations in some Western gendering of fabric arts.