The men who woke the sleeping looms of Kashmir

Behind carved lattice windows, in sun-warmed courtyards, on creaking wooden floors where men sat cross-legged, the rhythm of weaving filled the days.

It was not simply an industry. It was the pulse of the city. The loom’s knock was as familiar as the call to prayer, its hush as rare as snowfall in summer.

For centuries, Srinagar’s carpets told the story of this land. They carried the curves of chinar leaves, the intricate gardens of Mughal kings, the winding veins of rivers that split the valley.

There was a patience to this art, a kind of prayer that moved through the hands. A carpet from Kashmir was not just a floor covering. It was a map, a memory, a woven testament to beauty and endurance.

But then the years darkened.

The strife that gripped the valley broke rhythms. The orders stopped coming. Foreign buyers looked elsewhere. Warehouses emptied. Looms, once the pride of the city, were abandoned. Wood splintered, threads rotted, and silence settled thick as dust.

Children who once sat beside their fathers learning the Senneh knot now grew up dreaming of escape. The workshops that had bound generations began to vanish, one by one.

Srinagar, a city once held together by silk and story, began to forget the feel of its own craft.

Still, nostalgia held its ground. Even as the sound of weaving slipped from the streets, a few travellers continued to wander through the alleys, pulled by the ghosts of old stories. They came to run their fingers over the fading carpets hanging in sleepy shops, to ask about the looms that once sang, to find something that might still pulse beneath the silence.

Most of them found nothing but dust and closed doors.

But tucked away in a small workshop, between leaning houses that seem to rest upon each other like the tired, Aaditya Kitroo and Aamir Wani were doing something audacious.

They were bringing the looms back to life.

Under the brand, Jos & Fine, they did not chase the past. But instead, dared to look forward. They replaced the familiar paisleys and Mughal gardens with faces, portraits and landscapes so intimate, so sharply alive, that the silk seemed to breathe.

No one had thought it could be done.

“Portraits had been tried before,” Aaditya said, his voice laced with both pride and prognosis. “But they always looked flat. What we’ve done is bring in shadow, light, and life. We’ve made silk speak.”

It wasn’t just a design breakthrough. It was a resurrection.

Each carpet demanded relentless care: hundreds of thousands of knots, months of devotion, each loop pulled tight with intention.

Their carpets, stitched from Srinagar’s forgotten streets, now lie in the homes of English collectors, in Russian parlours, in Mumbai’s towering Antilia, where a carpet inspired by the still waters of Dal Lake now rests.

But the true heart of their work is not stitched into the destinations. It is woven into the hands that make them.

Shabbir Ahmad’s hands, for example, carry decades of weaving – years spent tying the same flowers, the same curling vines, until the work became weightless, the designs faded into muscle memory.

“It became mechanical,” Shabbir admitted, sitting by his loom where the soft knock now sounded again. “The patterns stopped surprising me. I stopped feeling alive in my work.”

The duo’s portraits called him back to loom and liveliness.

“They forced me to see again,” he said. “It was like weaving for the first time.”

Shabbir’s mastery of the Senneh knot, a knot most weavers no longer attempt, became the silent engine of the revival.

Without this delicate and precise knot, the portraits would dissolve into softness, losing their clarity. It is Shabbir’s knotting that holds the faces together, that gives them their breath.

But Aaditya and Aamir’s resilience is not merely technical. It is human.

“A craft can’t survive if the craftsperson is crushed,” Aaditya said, as though stating the most obvious truth, though it has been ignored for decades. “When you pay fairly, when a man knows his daughter can learn arts, when his son can dream of cricket, that’s when real creativity happens.”

The duo’s workshop is built around this simple refusal: they will not let the craftsperson vanish behind the carpet.

Each weaver signs their work. Each piece carries not just art but authorship.

“There’s no room here for exploitation,” Aamir said. “We’re not here to mass-produce. We’re here to build something with names and faces and pride stitched into every thread.”

The revival, slow but steady, has started to ripple beyond Srinagar’s lanes.

At Hamburg’s sprawling carpet markets, Kashmiri weaves with the GI tag pressed into their edges, are returning. The GI tag has become their armour, protecting their work from the flood of cheap imitations. Export incentives, though modest, have begun to arrive.

But Aaditya and Aamir know this is not enough.

They dream of a Kashmir where design schools flourish, where young weavers are not treated as relics but as artists. They want policies that nourish imagination, that build a future where looms hum again as a living rhythm.

In the fading afternoons, the soft knock of the loom now echoes through their workshop, a sound almost forgotten by the city that once thrived upon it. It is a fragile sound, but it holds the pulse of something stubborn, something that refuses to fade.

Thread by thread, knot by knot, Aaditya and Aamir are stitching the lost stories of Srinagar back into the world’s fabric.

And this time, the weavers will not be forgotten. Their names, their hopes, their craft are tied into every loop, resting in the hands of those who dared to bring the city’s looms back to life.