Reading 21 2

to the “Chinese provinces.” Both Asian and European merchants moved
Subcontinental shawls from their sites of production to their sites of
consumption along distribution networks that evolved gradually from Asianfocused
seventeenth-century routes to the bustling colonial trade routes of the
nineteenth century (Veinstein 1999; Chaudhury and Morineau 2000).
Map 1.
The Emperors of the Safavid, Zand, and Qajar empires in Iran (c. 1500–1924)
and the Mughal court of North India and its regional satellites (1526–1848)
used Kashmiri shawls and shawl cloth within their “established and
evolving social relations of consumption” (Howes 1996, 2). For example,
they bestowed shawls as khil’at (“robes of honor”) within their political and
religious practices. In the Iranian-influenced culture of the Mughal Indian
court, fine garments given in political settings were intended to establish a
hierarchical relationship between the giver and the recipient, whose
acceptance acknowledged submission. Indeed, the word “khil’at” originally
meant “something [End Page 32] passed on,” especially a “garment cast
off” (Buckler 1922, 197 and 1928, 240). The robes of honor typically were
exorbitantly expensive fabrics. The Mughal khil’at consisted of a sumptuous
set of clothes, which could include a turban, long coat, gown, fitted jacket,
sash, shawl, trousers, shirt, and scarf. One or all of these could be made of
pashmina (shawl cloth) and embellished further with gold-thread
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The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004