A genuine Kashmir Pashmina shawl can take months of handwork before it reaches a buyer. A power loom can produce something similar in an afternoon.

Both can appear on shelves from Delhi to Dubai under the same three words: Kashmir Pashmina.

That is where the trouble begins.

The name promises craftsmanship, origin and quality. The market, increasingly, has learned to sell that promise without delivering the craft behind it.

It exposes the limits of a legal system that gave Kashmir Pashmina a powerful name, backed by centuries of craftsmanship, but has struggled to keep it from counterfeiters.

Kashmiri Pashmina received Geographical Indication registration in 2008, GI No. 46, and Kashmir Hand-Knotted Carpets followed in 2016 as GI No. 527, both filed through the registry in Chennai, the carpet application brought by Meeras carpet weavers on behalf of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries. 

Both registrations lie under India’s Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, which took effect in September 2003. 

The statute exists partly because of an international commitment: under the TRIPS Agreement, a country that fails to protect a product’s origin at home has no claim to protection abroad either. 

The goal is straightforward: only genuine producers in the valley may call their pashmina “Kashmir Pashmina” or their carpets “Kashmir Hand-Knotted Carpets.” Registration should let artisans capture higher prices for authenticity that machine production cannot replicate. 

But while registration turned out to be the easy part, enforcement, the piece that actually protects an artisan’s income, remains badly underdeveloped.

Pashmina itself begins far from any loom, in the high-altitude terrain of Ladakh, where Changthangi goats grow the fine undercoat that gives the fabric its name, sometimes called Kashmir’s soft gold. 

Spinners and weavers in the valley convert that raw fleece into fabric using techniques passed down through generations, an intricate process that resists shortcuts. 

Genuine........

© Kashmir Observer