A World War II love story woven around a shawl

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By Rosie Thomas [2]

£7.99

Kashmir, given its exotic past and the current violent existence, has not been a popular setting for the English novels written by Britons. The two-decade long violence kept the foreign tourists away and pushed Kashmir from travel pages to the international pages of the Western newspapers.

Now, British writer Rosie Thomas, who has climbed the Alps and the Himalayas, trekked across Antarctica, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, has lived in Egypt and survived a few days in the Namibian desert, has set her latest book, The Kashmir Shawl, in the region.
The story about different generations of a Welsh family and their link to Kashmir through a Pashmina shawl tries to evoke a Kashmir during the World War II.
“I wanted to write about family history, I wanted to try and write something about a trip I made to Jammu and Kashmir and I started getting interested in the shawl-weaving techniques when I was in Kashmir and these are the strands that made me think of writing The Kashmir Shawl,” says 60-something London resident Rosie Thomas, who is originally from Wales.
Thomas, who has been writing over 30 years now, uses pseudonym for her 20-odd books, out of which she has won the Romantic Novel of the Year award for Iris and Ruby and Sunrise.
Thomas, who describes her personal style as monochrome, says she is in awe of the worksmanship in the creation of Pashmina shawls, but the colourful pieces are not her style. “I don’t collect shawls and I don’t know anything about their history, but as soon as I got out to Ladakh – I went from Leh to see where the goat herders tend to the goats on the plateau – I just thought that it was the most fantastic trajectory for a novel.”
“I followed the thread from actually seeing the herder shearing the animals, then I went to the Pashmina processing plant and then I took a journey on to Srinagar and there I started looking into the actual shawl manufacturing process. I was there introduced to a series of craftsmen, who showed me their work and talked to me about their processes. I was privileged to have a complete overview of the tradition. I went to a reasonably good museum in Srinagar to see some historic shawls. I actually got the whole history of the pashmina shawls and how these were made,” she explains, revealing the amount of research she did for her novel. Thomas, who has recreated an exotic version of the Kashmiri past in The Kashmir Shawl, describes Kashmir as “the most amazing place I have ever visited.”
Thomas, who spent a month on her own in Srinagar on a houseboat in the Nagin lake after a trek down the Zanskar river in Ladakh, wants more Westerners to visit Jammu and Kashmir.
“I wish more and more people go to Kashmir, there’s no reason really not to go. Actually it’s probably no more dangerous than New York or Cape Town or Johannesburg. There are plenty Indian tourists but there are no other Westerners and that’s a great loss I think,” she says.
“Life is difficult for the people who were there, but for me it wasn’t difficult at all. I was able to go more or less wherever I wanted, within reason. I was treated always with immense hospitality by everybody I met,” she add.
Explaining why she set most of her book in Kashmir during the World War II, Thomas says it would have been “both presumptuous and intrusive” if she had tried to write about the current situation in Kashmir.
“It was conscious decision to set the book in Kashmir around the World War II and not in Kashmir in present time. I am not Kashmiri or Indian obviously, I believe I have the point of view to write about the British in India but I didn’t feel that as a complete outsider it was my position or my right to something that is not meaningful about the current situation in Kashmir,” she adds.
Thomas, who loves researching for her books, says she read a lot of memoirs about Kashmir. “The book that I enjoyed the most is Tiger Ladies, it’s about a Srinagar childhood, the way families behaved. That often is much more valuable to a novelist than just a formal book on history.”
Exotic settings are a favourite for Thomas, and she is now writing a book set in Victorian England.
“I have got a real thing going with exotic settings — I have set a book in Everest, another in Antarctica, in Egypt. I think to do that gives you a lot of scope for a good story, something you are not going to get just by writing about Hampstead High Street,” she says.