Painting on Pashminas in Srinagar, Kashmir

Driving through Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, it’s impossible not to notice Maqam. On the banks of the Jhelum River, its bright blue door, brown wooden columns and naqshi decoration adorning its façade transport me back to what I imagine the Valley looked like in the nineteenth century, when it was a summer retreat for the British and the ruling maharajas – a world away from today’s crowded city of around 1.5 million people.

Maqam was also the site of the recent exhibition Lal Ded: Vakhs of Silence (2026), which featured hand-painted pashmina shawls by Masood Hussain. The local artist has exhibited across India, in the UAE and been featured in the New York Times, but said this was his first exhibition in Kashmir.

Sameer Hamdani, the architect behind Maqam, told me that the original building was “rather characterless”, but its founder, Kadri Mujtaba, had the idea of refurbishing the space with material from dismantled buildings he had spent years collecting. Given the loss of Kashmir’s built heritage, Hamdani hopes it can be somewhere that “speaks to who we are as people”.

A window at Maqam. Courtesy of Kadri Mujtaba.

On the ground floor, visitors can watch men and women making Kashmiri shawls. The first floor is a showroom selling textiles and crafts, while the top floor will remain a designated space for collaborative projects and contemporary art.

Opportunities to exhibit remain limited in Kashmir. The dispute between India and Pakistan over the region dates to Partition in 1947 and the war that followed. In the Muslim-majority Valley, an uprising against Indian rule emerged in the late 1980s, followed by a counterinsurgency marked by abuses against civilians. Most of the Valley’s Hindu minority, the Kashmiri Pandits, left amid the unrest. The conflict has dragged on for so long that many now associate Kashmir with violence rather than the traditions of high culture and artistic inventiveness with which it has historically been connected.

For the past three decades, Hussain has painted “what he has witnessed” of the conflict in watercolour. The exhibition was born when Mujtaba approached Hussain about painting on pashminas. Mujtaba said he wanted Maqam’s inaugural exhibition to feature Hussain because “his work has always been deeply rooted in Kashmir”. For Hussain, pashminas were new territory: a surface he “had never considered”. The entire process of bringing the idea to life took two years.

An elevator at Maqam. Courtesy of Kadri Mujtaba.

The show featured 20 shawls. Spun and woven by hand, each took over 50 days to make. Before the fabric could be painted on, it had to be coated with a layer of glue, making the process, Hussain explained, “similar to working on paper”. Once painted, the shawls were steamed for hours to set the dye.

Accompanying each piece were vakhs (verses) by the fourteenth-century Kashmiri poet Lal Ded. In his introduction to I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (2011), Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote notes how, within Kashmir, she has “been venerated both by Hindus and Muslims for nearly seven centuries”.

By choosing to visually translate poetry emblematic of Kashmir’s history of coexistence, Hussain’s pashminas made a strong statement. The works also brought traditional Kashmiri shawl-making together with contemporary painting, reworking a longstanding art for today.

Courtesy of the artist, Masood Hussain.

According to Hussain, artists in Kashmir can often feel “like a last priority”. He said he has spent years lobbying local authorities for a space where artists can show their work but has been met with the response that there is “much more important work to do”. His account helps explain why this exhibition took place in a private store, and how individuals can provide the space artists struggle to secure from public institutions.

It also led me to think: in one of the most militarised regions in the world, what can an art exhibition offer?

It was on the ground floor of Maqam, watching women spin pashmina, that I met Mujtaba. It was in the showroom, admiring the wood-panelled ceiling and stained-glass windows, that I met Hamdani. And it was on the top floor, reading the translated poetry next to his pashminas, that I met Hussain.

Courtesy of Zara Khan.

A crucial part of creating a space for creative engagement, Hamdani emphasised, is also making a place where people can interact and talk.

On a covered balcony outside the main exhibition room hung four pashminas. Every so often they fluttered in the wind coming off the river. The effect was a stark contrast to galleries where controlled lighting against white walls foregrounds the art but removes the rest of the world – what time is it? Is it raining outside? Where are you? You could be anywhere. At Maqam, staring out onto the Jhelum River, at the clouds grazing the tops of the mountains, at the cars rushing past below – you’re unmistakably in Kashmir. That, in many ways, feels like the point.

Lal Ded: Vakhs of Silence was at Maqam, Srinagar, 7–14 September 2026.