Kashmir shawl, unknown maker from India or Pakistan

Exhibition Label:
“Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees: Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art,” Nov-2005, Mary Dusenbury
Visually this shawl presents a well-defined and unified composition. Technically, however, it is a jigsaw of more than two hundred small, odd-shaped bits, pieced together into a coherent whole by a skilled needleworker (rafugar).
This strange and inefficient construction method can be traced primarily to European demand for quick responses to continental fashion trends. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shawls were typically woven in pairs by two weavers working together. With this method, a complex shawl required eighteen months to complete, much too long for a rapidly changing fashion market. Dozens of weavers, however, each producing long, narrow bands of isolated motifs on a plain ground, could produce enough patterned material for a large shawl fairly quickly. A rafugar, working from designs supplied, ultimately, by French or Kashmiri designers, cut the motifs from the strips and pieced them together, using his needle to create a complex, coherent design from a heap of discrete motifs.