By Mahoor Haya Shah

The Pheran is not just a garment. It is winter woven into wool, a whisper of the mountains, a thing that holds centuries inside its heavy folds. It belongs to the people of Kashmir like the veins belong to the body. It carries stories, prayers, whispers of lost winters. You walk into an old Kashmiri home, and there it is, draped around a mother warming her hands over the kangri, wrapped around a poet who stares out at the endless white of the valley, held close by a child who grows into it like roots stretch into earth. The Pheran is the past, the present, the unyielding memory of a land that has spent too long being taken, stripped, rewritten.

And yet, in the marketplace of the world—where everything sacred is a commodity waiting to be sold—it is being pilfered, reshaped, mispronounced, and paraded like a novelty from some exotic hinterland.

Walk through the tourist-filled lanes of Himachal Pradesh, and you’ll see it. Hanging like an artifact in boutique shops run by women who dont know its significance. “Authentic Himachali winter wear,” they call it. Some have gone to the extent of calling it Himachali Pheran!

And there it is, hanging under the neon glow of commercial greed, its price tag mocking those who carry it in their blood. Non-local manufacturers, sitting in workshops........

© Kashmir Observer