Every year, when the bone chilling winter’s howl over the coldest places of the world, the Arctic waste of Siberia and Alaska, the bleak high altitude plateau of Inner Asia - that’s when the resident mammals don their chill-proof undercoat.
The “pashm” wool comes from the Capra Hircus goat indigenous to high altitudes of the Himalayan mountains. The domesticated goat of Inner Asia, internationally known as “cashmere”, is the most famous from which the classic Kashmir shawl is woven, is usually called “pashm”, an Urdu word originating from Farsi, that can be applied to the raw fibre. Pashmina is the yarn spun and the material woven from pashm. Pre-eminent among the down-bearing goats was the trans-Himalayan breed of Tibet and Ladakh, India’s northernmost region, often referred to as the shawl goat or the pashmina goat, and identified in contemporary breed-lists as the Tibetan or Changthangi goat. The herdspeople who raise it know it as changra or “northern goat”. This was the animal whose pashm was, par excellence, the raw material of the Kashmir shawl, hence the 19th-century application of the term “cashmere” to all goat-pashm. A traditional producer of Pashmina wool in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas are a people known as the Changpa. Real Pashmina is a delicate wool which is known for it’s thinness which gives it, the softness and a buttery texture. It hence has to be woven manually so that the delicate fibre does not face the harsh processing of a machine.
In addition to this, a single Pashmina shawl requires wool from about three goats. Hence the exorbitant price becomes obvious.
To know
more about Real Pashmina Shawls, Cashmere Scarves that are Sustainable, Conscious, Organic and 100% Handmade from the finest Pashm, you can visit www.pashminagoatproject.com
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