Kashmir Child's Tunic

India (Kashmir), 19th century,
the fabric dating to circa 1750

Length: 54.7 cm
Width: 72.2 cm

A charming tunic for a child made from a moon shawl (chandar), with a finely woven design of three-tiered buti in green, delicately outlined, accented in red, and spaced against a buttery golden yellow ground. The superbly drawn central medallion or cosmic moon of the shawl and the corner medallions, filled with a linked trellis of radiating red flowers on green stems with variegated leaves, have been used with care and imagination to decorate the back of the tunic, the two pockets to the front and the frontal opening below the buttons. The hashias or borders which outline the tunic have a spacious design of large individual flower heads, which enable us to date the shawl from which this tunic is constructed, to the mid-eighteenth century. The moon and corner medallions also display the complex serrated outlines characteristic of early moon shawls. The tunic was most probably made in the nineteenth century. It exhibits a sophisticated understanding of tailoring as can be seen in the cut of the sleeves, the darting above the pockets and to the back in order to shape the waist, and the imaginative use of the elements of the moon shawl. The delightful buttons are covered with hashia fragments.