Geetanjali Krishna: The Shahtoosh conundrum

When the Budget was unveiled last week, I was impressed to see a special allocation of Rs 50 crore for a Pashmina Protection Programme in Kashmir. Such measures for specific craft clusters will, to an extent, incentivise craftspeople to continue with these craft instead of opting for other more lucrative careers. In Srinagar a fortnight ago, I was told that the number of pashmina weavers and embroiderers was diminishing every day. In fact, many of the shawl manufacturers I met there said that embroidered pashmina shawls of the finest quality were hardly being made any more. Then, one of them added a new spin. "Let me show you something even better than pashmina..." he said.

With great ceremony, he unlocked the only wooden cupboard in a shop full of glass-fronted shelves. From it he withdrew a small stack of shawls. "Feel these, and you'll never want to wear pashmina again!" He declared. Warning bells began to ring in my brain. Could these be Shahtoosh, the king of wools extracted with such cruelty that it's been banned since 2002? Not only is it torn out from the soft underbellies of the endangered Chiru or Tibetan Antelope (it takes the wool of five Chirus to make one shawl), the animals are then left to die a ghastly death. According to World Wildlife Fund's estimates, the population of Chirus is down to less than 75,000 in the wild, which is mostly due to the fact that the underground supply as well as demand for this barbaric wool continues.

It turned out I was right. Shahtoosh it was. "Is it new?" I asked, wondering how the transaction of a banned product that could theoretically put both the buyer and seller in jail, was being carried out so openly. "Of course, it is!" he said. "See how fine the wool is. Yet it's warm enough to keep you toasted in the thick of winter." The shopkeeper told me that even though it was even more expensive than pashmina (a plain natural colour Shahtoosh shawl costs upwards of Rs 80,000), this was the most coveted item in wedding trousseaus, and that in fine society, ladies prefer the silken warmth of Shahtoosh over any other wool.

Was he aware, I asked, of the cruelty with which this wool was extracted? "We just buy it from Nepal traders who say that only the Chinese slaughter Chirus. The Nepalis merely collect the wool the Chiru sheds!" he said. It was a fairy tale, I said. Our conversation speedily went south. "It's because of unthinking activists like you that the Shahtoosh shawl, such a vital part of Kashmiri handicraft, is practically extinct," he said, hurriedly closing his cupboard.

Was Shahtoosh so easily available in Srinagar? I walked into another shawl shop to find out. It was. "We bring the wool illegally from Nepal because of the government's short-sighted policies that favour animals over people!" the shopkeeper said. The market for Shahtoosh, he said, was thriving in spite of the ban. "The publicity campaign against Shahtoosh actually made people more aware of it," he said. "Before the ban, not many people knew how expensive and valuable Shahtoosh was. Today, the ban is precisely the reason it is so sought after..."

I walked out, frustrated with his unassailable logic. Given that these poor animals are found mostly in China's remote Changthang highlands and not in India, there isn't much the Indian government can do except ban Shahtoosh - thus making it a seductive forbidden fruit. The Wildlife Trust of India has worked with the fashion fraternity to make Shahtoosh alternatives fashionable. Maybe the government should apply such creative solutions on a wider scale before the Chiru becomes extinct and there's no more Shahtoosh to ban.