Kashmir women do not have a working dress. This one has been squatting on a filthy bank cleaning her greasy pots with mud whilst wearing all her gold and silver and precious stones. She has no trinket box at home nor any place to store anything, so besides wearing all her clothes and valuables she has both pockets full, and tucked into her sash a handkerchief, knife, comb and snuff-box, and in the fold of her sleeves snuff and sugar in screws of paper, a needle and cotton and various other things.

The writer must have caught hold of her and given her a good shake and out must have tumbled all her possessions. A needle, a knife, a snuff-box. From the description, I have heard stories about snuff boxes; practice of cleaning pots with mud continued well into the 90s. And then slowly mud was replaced by Nirma.

Photo by Pandit Vishwanath, a student of Biscoe and the first Kashmiri photographer.Found it in the book 'Kashmir in Sunlight & Shade: a Description of the Beauties of the Country, the Life, Habits and Humour of its Inhabitants, and an Account of the Gradual but Steady Rebuilding of a Once Down-trodden People' (1922) by Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe.

The thing that really interested me in the photograph is her footware. Must be the famous Pulhor woven from leaves of Iris ( Krishm in Kashmiri ).

(I suspected it) Turns out she is wearing Krav or wooden sandals.

Panditanis

With graceful steps, erect and slow Adown the stone-built, broken stair The panditanis daily go And on their head help high they bear

Bright vessels, which they stoop fill Beneath the bridge's wooden pier: In pools of clouded amber still Which gurgle deep and glowing here.

Their movements of unconscious grace Glint in the Jhelum's flowing stream Where rich hues shimmering interlace And in the glancing ripples gleam,

Then with their slender rounded arms They poise the shining lotas high, Ot bashful, with half feigned alarms Draw close their veils with gesture shy.

Bedecked by jewels quaint of form In pherans robed, whose soft folds show Tints dyed by rays of sunset warm Flame, crimson, orange, rose aglow!

With you gay tulips they compare Which on these grass-grown house-tops blow: What types for artist's brush more fair Does all Srinagar's city know?

~ Muriel A.E. Brown
Chenar Leaves: Poems of Kashmir (1921)
Muriel Agnes Eleanora Talbot Brown was the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Adelbert Cecil Talbot, Resident, Kashmir 1896- 1900. And first wife of Percy Brown, art historian famous for his work on History of Indian Architecture ( Buddhist and Hindu, 1942 ).