Why Review A 2011 Book in 2025?
A friend spotted The Kashmir Shawl in one of those offline book-box sales in Hyderabad earlier this year. While the words were familiar, considering Kashmir and shawl are nearly spoken in the same breath, this was a book that had not been discussed, at least not to my knowledge, among the literary aficionados and bookworms in the valley. A Kashmiri picking it up in a pile of used books, thousands of miles away from the valley, was also quite a coincidence.
Written by Janey King, a British journalist and novelist who goes by the pseudonym Rosie Thomas, The Kashmir Shawl turned out to be an extraordinary piece of fiction. Published by HarperCollins UK in 2011, it was awarded the ‘Best Epic Romance of the Year’ in 2012 by the Romantic Novelists' Association, UK.
My friend gifted it to me during his recent visit to the valley, and thus began the unstoppable ride through the 400-page The Kashmir Shawl, spanning several decades and beautifully capturing the Welsh landscape, an equally stunning Kashmir, and Ladakh.
As soon as I finished reading it, I decided to write about it. So here we are. This is not just a review of the novel. It is an attempt to introduce it to those who may have missed this literary gem in Kashmir and elsewhere.
An Epic Tale
Janey King rummages through the past through tangible memory in the form of an antique shawl in The Kashmir Shawl. But why pursue the past? Did she want to look at history through a shawl? What significance does it hold for anyone?
Uncommitted, untethered, especially after her father’s death, when Mair Ellis, the present-day protagonist, clears out her father's house, she finds her grandmother’s exquisite antique Kashmiri shawl, with a lock of a child’s hair within its folds.
Curious, Mair decides to trace her grandparents’ roots back to Kashmir as she embarks on an extraordinary journey which would fill the void she finds within herself. The author uses a dual timeline to narrate the story and knit generations together like coloured tapestries in a shawl.
Set in North Wales, Ladakh, and Kashmir, the weather, life, lifestyle, and culture of people have been dealt with vivid imagery and are evocative and accurate without distortion in each timeline of the story.
The idea of the novel likely evolved from the author's travel to Ladakh. Making her way through a flock of goats and yarn traders, she immerses in the beauty of the warm and luxurious pashmina. Not to forget her keen interest in British rule in India, all of which she stitched together to weave The Kashmiri Shawl.
Mair’s grandmother, Nerys Watkins, died before she was born. After their father’s death, as Mair’s siblings were clearing up the old house to hand it over to a real estate agent, she discovered the antique Shawl and the single lock of hair.
As she tries to unravel the story behind the two items, she is taken into a trance to a new landscape, geography, weather vagaries, people and the world, which shape her narrative and transform her life.
Transformation spans through decades, and life-changing events - from war engulfing Europe and the world in the 1940s to the characters inhabiting remote, isolated, peaceful Himalayas battling unhappy marriages and negotiating scandals of secret affairs, while simultaneously forging friendships.
It also describes the missionary work undertaken by the colonial British to ‘civilise’ the colonial world. They were close to the Jhelum River and Nery’s stood gazing at the Shikaras loaded with local goods on their way downriver to be traded or sold in Baramulla and as far as Rawalpindi. She thought of the floating vegetable gardens out on the lakes, the apple orchards, and rice paddies, the shops along the Bund and the shawl makers up in Kanihama.
Fast forward to the present, the world has changed, so has Srinagar, marred with violence. Few tourists, few buyers of Pashmina. The author poignantly reflects on everyday life dictated by violence, poverty, unemployment and conflict, particularly the exploitation of shawl makers.
Then she had seen the faces in the street last night, and the way people had gone up afterwards and gone on with their lives despite the violence that boiled up around them, and she began to interpret this place differently. Srinagar was battered, impoverished, and decaying into its arterial ways, but it was proud.
Seven decades later, the granddaughter is left intrigued as the politics, people and borders in both time frames have changed. The book also simultaneously reveals the emotional roller coaster rides in the lives of three women, far away from their husbands, many decades ago. They live on houseboats, flirt and fall in love. Each plays an indispensable part in weaving the shawl story and making the plot gripping and absorbing.
The story mostly revolves around the characters of newlywed Nerys and her friend, Myrtle McMinn, the vulnerable Caroline Bowen, and the Swiss mountaineer Rainer Stamm. Gradually, Mair depicts the psychological transformation of characters subtly and also gets transformed in the process of exploring the history.
Besides the rugged landscape of Ladakh, the book reflects the life of Srinagar and artistically captures the shawl-making processes. The book also delves into the socio-economic and political conditions of the natives afflicted with poverty, disease, ignorance and societal dogmatism. Like the woman ostracised for marrying a person of her own choice, her orphaned, abandoned kids infuse a different colour to the plot of the story.
With the stories progressing, new narratives emerge. As Mair meets the old friend of her grandmother, Caroline, too old now to see and hear, she lays her hands on a few letters that help stitch the narrative further.
And all the questions - how the shawl came into the possession of Mair’s grandmother, how the memories, hidden histories, realities, and denials play a role in their significance to each individual - find their answers.
The plot unfolds seamlessly, but apart from evocative love-making scenes and description of larger-than-life landscapes, it limits itself to the lives of its non-native characters. The other local characters merely help to keep the wheels of the narrative roll.
For a lay reader, the book does not provide sufficient understanding of the socio-political and economic conditions of people, as the narrative limits itself to the lives of characters. It seems more a discovery of the personal history of the shawl for the family, while veering into the lives of local people off and on.
The book, written over a decade ago, romanticises the beauty of Kashmir, its people, landscape and ‘the shawl’ with vivid imagery. It explains the socio-political milieu in varied dimensions and is reminiscent of the then Kashmir. It reflects reality as was. But for those who read the book on the cemented, crowded boulevard, or in a houseboat, or maybe on the Jhelum Bund, or even the tarmac road to Ladakh, it is sheer nostalgia!
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