Master Ghulam Mohammad
Master Weaver
“Each shawl is a conversation between my hands and the fiber. Some days the wool speaks clearly, some days I must listen harder.”
Hand-weaving & natural dyeing · Basohli, Kathua District
The Story
Master Ghulam Mohammad remembers a time when every third household in Basohli had a loom. The click-clack of the shuttle was the town's heartbeat. By the time he was forty, most looms had fallen silent — the young had left for cities, and machine-made shawls from the plains had undercut the handloom weavers.
He never stopped. Through decades when the craft seemed to be dying, he kept weaving. Not out of stubbornness, he says, but because his hands didn't know how to do anything else. His loom is over a hundred years old — a pit loom made of deodar wood, its surfaces polished smooth by generations of use.
Master Ghulam is also one of the last practitioners of natural dyeing in Basohli. He sources walnut husks from the trees around his home, pomegranate rinds from the local market, and indigo from a supplier he's known for thirty years. His colors have a depth that synthetic dyes cannot replicate — they are alive, shifting subtly with light and age.
Today, he is teaching two young apprentices. He says the craft will survive, but only if people learn to value the hand behind it.