Papier-Mache: From Samarkand to Srinagar's Bazaars

How It Got Here: Samarkand, a Sufi Saint, and a Sultan's Vision

The origin of Kashmir's papier-mâché tradition has two historical anchor points, and both are worth knowing because they shaped the craft differently.

The first is Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani, the 14th-century Persian Sufi mystic known throughout Kashmir by the honorific Shah-e-Hamdan, King of Hamadan. He arrived in the Kashmir Valley from Persia in the 1370s, bringing with him a group of craftspeople; estimates range from several hundred to over seven hundred artisans skilled in paper-making, metal engraving, carpet weaving, and the decorative tradition of transforming paper pulp into lacquered, painted objects. These artisans made Kashmir their permanent home. They brought with them a Persian craft vocabulary, the arabesque, the geometric repeat, and the intricate floral motif borrowed from manuscript illumination and court decoration, and they fused it with what they found in the valley: the chenar tree, the lotus, the iris, and the particular quality of Kashmiri light. The mosque built in Shah-e-Hamdan's memory became, and remains, the finest living example of what those early craftspeople could do with a painted surface.

The second chapter came in the 15th century under Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, Kashmir's most celebrated ruler, known popularly as Budshah, the great king. He had spent time in Samarkand, the great Central Asian city that sat at the crossroads of the Silk Road, and when he returned to Kashmir, he brought with him artisans trained in Samarkand's highly developed crafts culture. Under his reign, Kashmir's craft traditions, including papier-mâché, were systematically developed and patronized. The craft's original Kashmiri name, kar-i-qalamdani, or "pen-case work," tells you what it first produced: the long narrow pen cases used by court scribes and scholars. From there, the forms multiplied: boxes, trays, vases, lampstands, and eventually the architectural surface work that transformed the interiors of mosques, shrines, and noble houses into painted environments.

The craft reached its widest production and most diversified form under Mughal rule, from the late 16th century through the 18th. Mughal patrons demanded papier-mâché for palanquins, bedsteads, doors, window frames, and ceiling panels. The stories painted on them expanded too: hunting scenes from Mughal courts, scenes from Persian poetry, portraits of Nur Jahan, and episodes from the Ramayana set in the valley's own landscape. By the time European travellers and traders began arriving in significant numbers, Kashmiri papier-mâché was already a fully developed, deeply layered artistic tradition with its own hierarchy of masters, its own design vocabulary, and its own community of hereditary specialists.

The French connection is worth noting here. French traders who came to buy Kashmir's famous shawls began using the lacquered papier-mâché boxes as packaging, and these were so admired in Paris that they entered European markets in their own right. The French called the technique by their own term, 'papier-mâché,' meaning 'chewed paper,' and the name stuck internationally, permanently replacing the original Kashmiri name in global usage. Europe's appetite for the craft stimulated production but also, gradually, began shifting its character. Objects were made faster, patterns simplified for a market that valued the look but not necessarily the depth. The tension between craft integrity and commercial demand that defines the crisis today has roots that go back at least three centuries.

Two Specialists, One Object: The Sakht-Saz and the Naqash

What most people who buy Kashmiri papier-mâché do not know is that the object in their hands was made by at least two different specialists, working in different workshops, who may never have met.

The first is the sakht-saz, whose title comes from the Persian sakht, meaning structure or base, and saz, meaning maker. The sakht-saz is the form maker, the person who transforms waste paper into the object itself.

The process begins days or weeks before any paint is applied. Used newspapers, discarded printing press offcuts, old school notebooks, and tissue paper are soaked in water for anything from five days to three weeks, depending on the season and the weather. In winter, the cold slows the softening, and the material may need to soak for up to fifteen days. In summer, the process moves faster. The soaked paper is then ground in a stone mortar called a kanz with a wooden pestle called a muhul until it becomes a uniform pulp. Rice flour and natural adhesives are worked into the pulp to give it binding strength. Copper sulfate is sometimes added to prevent mold.

This pulp is pressed over wooden or clay molds, built up in layers, each layer allowed to dry before the next is added. The object must dry slowly and evenly, in open air when possible, to avoid warping. Once the basic form has dried sufficiently, it is removed from the mold, the seams smoothed with a wooden file, and the surface prepared through a series of coatings: a layer of saresh, a lacquer made from natural resin, then a coat of saresh mixed with chalk powder and water to create a smooth base, sanded between each application. The surface that emerges from this preparation is dense, hard, and fine enough to take detailed paintwork. The entire sakht-sazi process, from first soaking to finished base, typically takes two to three weeks for a single object.

Only once the base is complete does the object leave the sakht-saz's workshop and enter the hands of the naqash.

The naqash is the painter, and within the world of Kashmiri papier-mâché, the naqash is the artist. The name comes from the Persian word for decoration or painting, and the naqash's position in the craft hierarchy reflects both the visible beauty of the finished work and the years of training required to achieve it. A master naqash works with brushes sometimes made from a single squirrel hair for the finest details and paints freehand, without stencils or printed guides, in a process that demands total control of line, color, and proportion.

Traditionally, the colors used were extraordinary in their origins. White came from lead that arrived from Russia. The local stone known as "shall-a-noon" provided body white. Clay from near Manasbal Lake in Srinagar gave grey tones. Verdigris, the particular copper green, came from a mineral sourced from Surat in Gujarat. Red came from cochineal or the kermis insect. Ultramarine came all the way from Yarkand in Central Asia. Yellow, orange, and brown came from local produce: turmeric, saffron, walnut shell, and pomegranate rind. Gold was used on fine pieces. The palette of a master naqash was itself a map of the trade routes that had made Kashmir possible.

Most contemporary naqash work uses modern pigments and poster paints, which are stable, consistent, and much cheaper. What distinguishes the finest contemporary naqash work from ordinary production is not the origin of the paint but the quality of the design and the density of the painting. The two primary styles are hazaara, literally "a thousand," in which the entire surface is covered with an all-over pattern of minute flowers and scrollwork, no ground visible, the whole field a continuous cascade of form and color; and shirkha, a single-tone work that uses monochrome gradations to achieve a sculptural, shaded effect. Hazaara is the more celebrated technique and the more demanding because it requires the naqash to hold the coherence of a complex repeating pattern across every inch of the surface without a single break in rhythm.

The munjuk, the varnisher, applies the final protective coating that gives finished pieces their characteristic glossy surface and protects the paintwork from moisture. In smaller workshops, the naqash performs this step himself.

These specialists work in karkhanas, the hereditary workshops concentrated in specific neighborhoods of Srinagar: Zadibal, Alamgiri Bazaar, Khanyar, Bhagwan-Pura, and Hasna-Abad. These lanes have been associated with the craft for generations, and the knowledge passed within them is the living institution that keeps papier-mâché alive.

What Tourist Demand Did to the Craft

There is a version of Kashmiri papier-mâché that tourists have been buying for decades, and it has very little to do with the craft described above.

When Kashmir became a major tourist destination in the latter half of the 20th century, the demand for inexpensive souvenirs created an entirely new market tier. Boxes painted with simplified chinar leaf motifs, miniature shikaras with Kashmir written on the side, Santa Claus figurines for the Christmas export market, wind chimes, photo frames, and small decorative items could be produced quickly, sold cheaply, and bought by visitors who wanted something to take home without spending much.

The market responded to that demand in the most economically logical way. Production volumes increased. Preparation time decreased. The long soaking, the careful layer-by-layer drying, and the multiple chalk-coat sanding stages of proper sakht-sazi were compressed or skipped. Natural pigments gave way entirely to industrial paints. Hazaara naqashi, which requires weeks on a single surface, was replaced by simpler, faster motifs. Some objects claimed as Kashmiri papier-mâché were not made in Kashmir at all; they were factory-produced items from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, papered over and painted in a Kashmiri style, and then sold in Srinagar's tourist markets with Kashmir written on the base.

The consequence was not just a loss of quality at the cheap end. It was a collapse of discernment across the market. When a visitor cannot distinguish between a 200-rupee souvenir and a 20,000-rupee work of genuine naqashi, they tend not to pay 20,000 rupees. The master naqash, who spent years learning to paint hazaara freehand across a complex surface, finds himself competing in the same visual category as someone who applied a stenciled flower pattern in synthetic orange. The GI tag, which Kashmiri papier-mâché holds, was supposed to protect against this, but it applies to the product category broadly and cannot by itself guarantee the quality of individual pieces.

The numbers describe what this pressure has done to the community. In one locality alone, the area around Srinagar's Zadibal, the workforce in papier-mâché was once between 300 and 400 people. Today, barely 200 remain. Around only one to two percent of young Kashmiris now enter the craft. Those who do earn, at the workshop level, somewhere around 300 rupees per day for a skilled day's work. The artisan Syed Maqbool Rizvi, working from 9 in the morning to midnight on detailed floral patterns for a loyal client base he maintains through WhatsApp, earns the equivalent of approximately five US dollars for that entire day. The craft is economically invisible at the point where it is most artistically alive.

Beyond the domestic tourist pressure, the craft's export markets have also become volatile. Kashmir's papier-mâché makers depend heavily on Christmas ornament orders from the United States and Europe, Easter decorations, and decorative gifts, a global market share that developed from the 1970s onward. The Russia-Ukraine war disrupted European order flows. Geopolitical tensions affected Middle Eastern buyers. And a 50% US import tariff on Indian handicrafts imposed in 2025 made Kashmiri papier-mâché significantly more expensive for the American market at a moment when the craft could least absorb the shock.

The Quiet Revival: What the Naqash Is Doing About It

Against this pressure, something is also moving in the other direction.

A generation of naqash artists and traders has recognized that the souvenir market is a trap: high volume, low price, and guaranteed artistic death. Their response has been to move the craft decisively toward the fine art and high-design end of the market, finding new surfaces, new objects, and new audiences that value the naqash's skill on its own terms.

The most significant shift has been the migration of naqashi onto new materials. Artisans now apply their intricate designs to steel, glass, leather, and porcelain, using industrial paints adapted for durability on non-paper surfaces. A naqash who would once have painted a box now paints leather jackets, handbags, and bridal clutches with the same freehand hazaara and gul-andar-gul, the flower-within-flower motif, that he learned from his father. The result is objects that carry genuine craft content but fit into contemporary purchasing contexts; a jacket is not a souvenir; it is something a person will wear and show.

The jewelry direction has been particularly notable. Papier-mâché earrings, bangles, and necklaces, lightweight and hand-painted, have found a strong urban market among younger buyers who want wearable craft objects. The artisan does not need to change the technique at all. The object changes, and with it the market, the price, and the cultural perception.

Some artisan families have pursued the architectural and luxury interior market directly, producing bespoke commissioned pieces for hotels, shrines, and private homes. A 200-year-old Sufi shrine in Srinagar's downtown area that was damaged by fire in 2012 was reconstructed with new papier-mâché work on parts of its interior, designed and executed by contemporary naqash artists. The Shah-e-Hamdan mosque continues to be a point of pilgrimage for the finest naqash work, both as inspiration and as a standard against which contemporary pieces are measured.

National award-winning naqash artists like Fayaz Ahmad Jaan and Nazir Ahmad Mir have combined their craft practice with teaching, running training workshops that pass the hazaara technique to younger artists while also connecting the next generation to the philosophical depth of the tradition. For these masters, naqashi is not merely decoration. It is a visual theology, the Arabic word "naqash" itself deriving from a root meaning to engrave or to write deeply, and that seriousness is what separates their work from the souvenir tier in both intention and outcome.

The challenge is whether these individual acts of artistic integrity can sustain a craft tradition that needs not dozens but thousands of skilled practitioners to remain genuinely alive. Hakim Sameer Hamdani, an architectural historian and design director for the Kashmir section of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, has been direct about the stakes: without policies that ensure fair wages, incentivize arts education, and promote the craft at the level it deserves, papier-mâché will vanish within 10 to 20 years. Individual naqash excellence, however brilliant, cannot substitute for an ecosystem.

What Genuine Kashmiri Papier-Mâché Looks Like

If you are standing in a shop or a workshop and want to understand what you are actually looking at, here are the things worth examining.

Weight and surface. A properly prepared sakht-saz base has a particular density and smoothness, is firm but not brittle, and has a surface that has been sanded and coated through multiple stages to give the paint an even ground. Cheap objects feel light and hollow in a way that suggests the pulp was thin and the preparation minimal. Genuine pieces have a substantiality to them that reflects the weeks of layered construction.

The painting. Hazaara naqashi fills the entire surface without gaps. The motifs—flowers within flowers, chenar leaves in their five-pointed form, Persian roses, and arabesque scrolls—are painted with a consistency of line that only comes from years of practice. Look at the interior corners of boxes, the curves of vase necks, and the narrow borders that frame the main design. In genuine naqashi, these are executed with as much care as the central field. In souvenir production, corners and borders are where shortcuts appear first.

The colors. Traditional and high-quality naqashi uses deep, saturated colors with subtle gradations; the petals of a painted rose move through four or five tones of pink and red. Synthetic souvenir paint tends toward flatness and uniformity. The gold, on pieces that use it, should appear warm and slightly variable, applied with a brush rather than laid down uniformly.

The fringes. High-quality papier-mâché is often signed or documented. Ask the seller who made it and where. A seller working directly with named Naqash artists will answer this question easily and proudly. A seller who cannot answer it probably cannot tell you because the object came through a chain that began far from any individual's hands.

The GI tag. Kashmir papier-mâché holds a GI certification. Not all tagged pieces are masterworks; the tag certifies origin and the use of traditional techniques broadly, not quality grade. But its presence is a starting point. Its absence, particularly on expensive pieces claiming to be Kashmiri, is a signal worth heeding.

Seeing It in Srinagar: Where to Go

The workshops of Zadibal and Alamgiri Bazaar are where the craft is still practiced in its traditional setting. These neighborhoods in Srinagar's old city have been associated with papier-mâché for generations, and visiting them, walking into working karkhanas, and watching a sakht-saz grind pulp or a naqash lay down a hazaara pattern on a fresh base is the most direct education available.

The Shah-e-Hamdan mosque on the Jhelum is both the historical and the spiritual origin point of the craft in Kashmir. Its papier-mâché ceilings and walls, continuously restored and added to over six centuries, are what the tradition looks like when it is given the time, the patronage, and the devotion it deserves.

The government emporium and Craft Development Institute in Srinagar maintain collections of certified and documented artisan work that offer a reliable benchmark for quality. Before buying in any market, spending an hour at either is worth the time.

Experience the Craft with Folk Experience

The real story of Kashmiri papier-mâché is not in the bazaar. It is in Karkhana Lane at dusk, where a naqash is still painting at the end of a twelve-hour day, working by the light coming through a narrow window onto a surface that may take him three more weeks to complete. It is in the conversation with a sakht-saz who explains why the paper needs to soak for fifteen days in winter and only five in summer and why that difference matters to everything that comes after.

Folk Experience curates encounters with the craftspeople behind these traditions, in their own workspaces, on their own terms. A visit to Srinagar's papier-mâché lanes, guided by someone who knows which workshops are doing serious work and which names carry the tradition forward, is a different journey entirely from shopping on the tourist strip. You leave not with a souvenir but with a relationship to an object and the knowledge of what it cost in time and skill to produce.

That knowledge is what makes a genuine piece worth keeping. And it is what keeps the naqash's lamp lit.