Ask this old house videos
“.and making these products needs patience. Mudasir says the new generation has no patience. Though they love to be around the artefacts created by Yousuf, they are not involved in carving. They are students, in different colleges. In the room, a charcoal Bukhari is lit in the middle with many of his cousins sitting around. This is our family’s 200-year-old legacy and I have to learn it,” he adds. He says he himself has started making wood carving products. I realised what is the market, where the market is and what kind of products we should come up with,” says Mudasir. My family, my relatives would tell me I will not able to do it but I never gave up and ultimately I succeeded. I went to Ahmedabad, I went to Mumbai, I went to Goa and I failed everywhere. Soon, Mudasir discontinued his education and started direct trade of the artwork made in his house. He bypassed the traders and started selling products made by artisans from home. Even getting that little money out would be a problem. If the artwork would be priced at Rs one lakh, the trader would procure it at Rs 20,000. "The trader would come to them and take the artwork on the meagre amounts. He says artists have several handicaps including lack of formal education and lack of exposure to the world and how much the world appreciates their products. And an artist would get a pittance only,” he adds. He says he has seen once the artisan completes his woodwork art a trader would visit him giving a small amount of money against the finished luxury item and then sell it in the market at a high rate. And before the partition we had even a showroom in Karachi,” he narrates. My father and grandfather were doing this art for decades. Mudasir says he has seen how artists over the years have been exploited. Not too often, but at times, they also take time out to create from imagination. Kashmir has been the centre of art and craft over centuries and artists have been innovating to cater to changing tastes. "Once polished, it will be priced at Rs 6 lakh," he says. "This is made of a single piece of wood and is of much in demand in Europe because of the intricate artistry." Apparently, it took three years to be finished. Mudasir points at the Saint George figure. The products range from Rs 5 to 10 lakh mostly and are bought by foreigners and wealthy Indians. “Each product made by my uncle has been created with painstaking perfection," he adds.Īs you look around, you realise, he is not exaggerating. "You will not find it anywhere in Kashmir," Mudasir brags. Mudasir shows an art piece of a Kashmiri man with a hookah in his left hand and a kangri (or a firepot that keeps people warm through winters) in his right hand.Ĭarved and polished to perfection, the piece is ready to sell. His hands are busy at a panel on which he has been working for the past year. Immersed in his work, Yousuf seems oblivious to his surroundings. He is a master craftsman,” says Mudasir while sitting next to his uncle. “He has great accuracy and perfection and he was doing it since his childhood. Yousuf's nephew, Mudasir Ahmad Murran, who runs Paradise Wood House, says his uncle might be the only living artisan, who has attained perfection in wood carving in Kashmir. His woodcarvings are stories chiselled and etched narratives he otherwise can't voice. His woodwork is an act of dedication to a craft his family has mastered over 200 years and passed on. There's a roundtable with fine and intricate motifs, a dry fruit bowl with a lid, wall decor, a falcon ready to fly and panels made of a single piece of wood.Īrtisan Mohammad Yousuf Murran can neither speak nor hear. Also, at a corner stands a woodwork female bust.Ī carefully carved, walnut wood nesting table is set with four-season work all over. In another corner, a portrait of a Kashmiri man smoking hookah.
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On the second storey of this old Kashmiri house, you find a specially-abled artisan at work, carving out from walnut wood, luxury products to be sold in the market at home and abroad.Īt the one corner of the room sits an artwork of Saint George taming and slaying a dragon that demanded human sacrifices. Amid the old-style houses, a narrow lane leads to a paradise wood house in the Narwara area of Eidgah.