Kashmir women do not have a working dress. This one has been squatting on a filthy bank cleaning her greasy pots with mud whilst wearing all her gold and silver and precious stones. She has no trinket box at home nor any place to store anything, so besides wearing all her clothes and valuables she has both pockets full, and tucked into her sash a handkerchief, knife, comb and snuff-box, and in the fold of her sleeves snuff and sugar in screws of paper, a needle and cotton and various other things.
The writer must have caught hold of her and given her a good shake and out must have tumbled all her possessions. A needle, a knife, a snuff-box. From the description, I have heard stories about snuff boxes; practice of cleaning pots with mud continued well into the 90s. And then slowly mud was replaced by Nirma.
Photo by Pandit Vishwanath, a student of Biscoe and the first Kashmiri photographer.Found it in the book ‘Kashmir in Sunlight & Shade: a Description of the Beauties of the Country, the Life, Habits and Humour of its Inhabitants, and an Account of the Gradual but Steady Rebuilding of a Once Down-trodden People’ (1922) by Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe.
The thing that really interested me in the photograph is her footware. Must be the famous Pulhor [ recent photo] woven from leaves of Iris ( Krishm in Kashmiri ).
(I suspected it) Turns out she is wearing Krav or wooden sandals.
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Panditanis
With graceful steps, erect and slow
Adown the stone-built, broken stair
The panditanis daily go
And on their head help high they bear
Bright vessels, which they stoop fill
Beneath the bridge’s wooden pier:
In pools of clouded amber still
Which gurgle deep and glowing here.
Their movements of unconscious grace
Glint in the Jhelum’s flowing stream
Where rich hues shimmering interlace
And in the glancing ripples gleam,
Then with their slender rounded arms
They poise the shining lotas high,
Ot bashful, with half feigned alarms
Draw close their veils with gesture shy.
Bedecked by jewels quaint of form
In pherans robed, whose soft folds show
Tints dyed by rays of sunset warm
Flame, crimson, orange, rose aglow!
With you gay tulips they compare
Which on these grass-grown house-tops blow:
What types for artist’s brush more fair
Does all Srinagar’s city know?
~ Muriel A.E. Brown
Chenar Leaves: Poems of Kashmir (1921)
Muriel Agnes Eleanora Talbot Brown was the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Adelbert Cecil Talbot, Resident, Kashmir 1896- 1900. And first wife of Percy Brown, art historian famous for his work on History of Indian Architecture ( Buddhist and Hindu, 1942 ).
Another one of her poems.
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