Aari

The cloth is stretched drum tight on a frame. The embroiderer holds the hook above it and feeds the thread from below with the other hand; the hook goes down through the cloth, catches the thread and brings it back up as a small loop, and the next dip goes through that loop. The line it leaves sits slightly raised, like a fine cord, and a flower is filled by running the line round and round in concentric rings.

The design comes first, and it is someone else's job. A naqash draws it. A tracer, the naqashband, pricks the drawing through paper, lays the paper on the cloth and rubs charcoal or chalk through the holes, then joins the dots with a pen. William Moorcroft watched the same pounce method in Srinagar in the 1820s, down to the gum arabic that fixed the powder. The hook itself is often made in the workshop, a steel rod turned and set in a handle, and a little mustard oil on the index finger keeps it moving. The thread was wool, silk or cotton; wool and cotton remain, and rayon has replaced most of the silk. Within the craft it is said to take sixteen years to master.

Nobody can date it. The hook is credited variously to craftsmen from Damascus under Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin in the fifteenth century and to Persian Sufis and their followers; the Victoria and Albert Museum notes that hook embroidery in India most likely began with the Mochi shoemakers, on leather before cloth. What the record shows is the market. The Kashmir shawl was woven work, slow and dear, and the early nineteenth century found a cheaper route: shawls embroidered by needle on plain cloth, which Walter Lawrence in 1895 called amlikar and said never fetched more than 200 rupees against the loom-woven kind. The story usually told is that an Armenian merchant, Khwaja Yusuf, began it in 1803 and that five thousand embroiderers were at work within twenty years.

Then the trade fell, with the war between France and Germany in 1870 and the famine of 1877 to 1879: a French merchant told Lawrence that Srinagar's thirty or forty thousand weavers were down to four thousand. The hands went into carpets and into chain stitch on felts and curtains, and by 1903 George Watt was recording a large new export trade in exactly that. It never left. Tyndale Biscoe found Anantnag in 1922 living on embroidery and on curtains made from old blankets, and the handicrafts register to March 2025 still puts ten of Kashmir's thirteen thousand chain-stitch artisans there.

Recognition came late. UNESCO named Srinagar a Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art in 2021, with ari among the seven city crafts in the dossier. In January 2023 the handicrafts department filed for Geographical Indication marks on Kashmir Chain Stitch and Kashmir Crewel, registered in 2025. There is no mark called aari; the hook is covered by those two, and an aari and staple embroidery application is next.

Three things get called Kashmiri embroidery, and they are easy to separate once seen side by side. Sozni is needle work: tiny flat stitches on the surface of fine cloth, often so even that a shawl reads the same on both faces, and slow enough that some pieces take years; it has carried a Geographical Indication filing as Kashmir Sozani Craft since 2006, and our guide to sozni covers it. Tilla is metal thread, gold or silver toned, laid at a neckline. Aari is the chain: raised, linear, quick, and at home on wool.

Machine chain stitch exists, and it is honest work at its price: the wool silk scarves at £55 to £65 and most of the cotton kurtis at £15 to £20 carry it, and say so. Hand work shows in the loops, shorter on a tight curve and longer on a straight run where a machine's are all one length, and in the price: a wool cushion cover worked edge to edge by hand is £40, a woollen jacket with a hand-worked front border £50 in acro wool and £135 to £165 in pure wool.

For most of its history the workshop embroiderer of Srinagar was a man: Biscoe in 1922 describes shop after shop of men at embroidery in silk, cotton or wool, and the craft still passes from father to son, boys apprenticed at eight or ten. The last thirty years changed the picture without changing the wage. In Kund, a village in Kulgam, Zamrooda Akhtar has trained around four thousand women in crewel work since the 1990s; a piece takes from a few days to ten weeks, and a trained hand earns four to five thousand rupees a month. In Srinagar's old city a woman who had done aari for twenty years told the Kashmir Times in 2025 that she earned twelve to fifteen hundred rupees a month, less than the few men in the same line. Those are the hands behind the cheaper end of the craft, worth remembering when the hand-worked piece costs more than the machine one.

Aari on wool wants the care of any wool, with one extra rule: turn the piece inside out first, so the chain does not rub. Woolmark's method is a hand wash in lukewarm water, about 30 degrees, with a mild detergent, ten minutes' soak, a rinse in lukewarm water and a second in cold. Do not hang it: lay it on a clean pale towel, knead it back into shape, and dry it away from sun and radiators. Press on the wool setting with steam while the cloth is still slightly damp, embroidery face down on a towel so the chain is not flattened. If a loop catches, ease it back rather than pull: a chain stitch is one continuous thread, and a pulled loop runs.

• £15 to £36Kurtis and kaftans in cotton, crepe, georgette and muslin, most of them machine chain stitch; the listing says which.
• £25 to £80Pherans with aari at the neckline, cuffs and hem: acro wool to £70, pure wool at £80.
• £40Wool cushion covers, hand worked edge to edge.
• £50 to £165Woollen jackets with hand-worked borders: acro wool at £50 to £60, pure wool at £135 to £165.