Kashmir cannot be contained in two words: paradise or conflict. In her debut essay for The British Asian Collective, Karishma Shivani Dar traces the layered world of Kashmiri pashmina — from the fleece of high-altitude Changthangi goats in Ladakh to the patient hands of artisans who weave months, sometimes years, into a single shawl. Drawing on personal memory, colonial history, and living craft tradition, Dar reveals how pashmina is not merely fabric but a fragment of a region's soul — inherited, imitated, commodified, and yet enduring.

In Focus

The word "propaganda" gets thrown around a lot these days, but rarely with the weight of history behind it. The recent release of Dhurandhar has reignited a familiar debate, one that almost always circles back to The Kashmir Files. What began as intellectual posturing for some has now become a kind of reflex: have a mic, will call it propaganda. Yet many Kashmiris, people with living memory of January 19, 1990, have been earnestly sharing their testimonies, only to be dismissed. Documented events include the mass exodus, the killings of B.K. Ganjoo, Girja Ticku, Sarwanand Premi and his son, and the Nadimarg massacre of 24 civilians. These are police-recorded facts, not cinematic liberties. You may critique the filmmaking, but documented history is not subject to taste. And as one survivor puts it plainly: we did not leave Kashmir because of the weather.

5min reading
Editor's Desk

In October 1983, Kapil Dev's newly crowned World Champions came to Kashmir, and a young child heard it all through the crackle of a battered transistor perched on the almirah like a deity. Cricket arrived not through screens but through static, through a small box that made distant stadiums feel close and strangers feel like family. This is a memoir about growing up where the transistor took center stage, where commentary from Eden Gardens and Chepauk drifted through walls, and where cricket's faithful were swept so completely off their feet that the whole world outside simply ceased to exist.

9min reading

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