Issue 228 · Summer 2026·Kazakh embroidered suede robes, Two 16th-century weavings linked by powerful art dealers, An inscribed Caucasian dowry rug and its matrimonial symbolism
Editor's Choice: a rare shawl fragment from the al-Sabah Collection on view in A 'From Persia to Paisley: Global Luxury and the Kashmir Shawl' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
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Ben Evans
Editor, HALI
·4 min read·25 Sept 2026·
Waist sash (patka) fragment, Kashmir, Mughal India, early 17th century. Goat hair (pashm); double-interlocking twill tapestry weave (kani). The al-Sabah Collection, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait, LNS 59 T. On view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
My first response on seeing this fragment is wonder: how can a textile made through the painstaking interlocking tapestry technique possess the same vivacity that I would associate with an artwork made using a painter’s brush or a calligrapher’s pen?
Waist sash (patka) fragment, Kashmir, Mughal India, early 17th century. Goat hair (pashm); double-interlocking twill tapestry weave (kani). The al-Sabah Collection, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait, LNS 59 T. On view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Now on display in ‘From Persia to Paisley: Global Luxury and the Kashmir Shawl’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston until 29 November 2026, this enigmatic shawl fragment is on loan from the al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait. Few objects reward close looking as richly as this Mughal patka, or waist-shawl fragment.
Its appeal is immediate: six stylised red shrubs rise from a saffron-yellow ground, flanked by narrow, crimped leaves and framed by diamond-lattice side borders and meandering bands of leaf and blossom. Woven in the kani technique, an interlocking tapestry weave using the finest pashm, the cloth retains the near-weightless softness that made Kashmir patkas prized across the courts of India.
Installation view, 'From Persia to Paisley: Global Luxury and the Kashmir Shawl', MFAH. From top: dorukha shawl, Kashmir, c. 1870–80, MFAH 33.105; patka fragment, Mughal India, early 17th century, al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait, LNS 59 T; doshalla shawl, Kashmir, 1805–15, MFAH 33.104. All pashm, kani weave.
Look longer, and the fragment becomes still more intriguing. When HALI first published it in Vol. 6, no. 2, it was singled out as beautiful, unique and puzzling, and its peculiarities have lost none of their force. The stems end neither in the split roots borrowed from European herbals, nor in the rocky mounds of miniature painting, nor in a vase; instead, they curl into spirals. The side borders, or hashiya, are some six times wider than the cross borders, or zanjir, whereas the earliest examples keep the two roughly equal. The leaves lack the fluid curves of Mughal ornament, and the iris-like flowers are stiff and formal rather than naturalistic.
These departures point south. The dense foliage, stylised blossoms and lattice borders sit closer to the Deccani idiom, and to the patkas worn in Deccani painting, than to the output of the imperial workshops. At that time HALI's conclusion was that the sash was woven in Kashmir to a Deccani design, most likely for a Deccani client.
