MAHOOR HAYA SHAH
The Pheran is not just a garment. It is winter woven into wool, a whisper of the mountains, a thing that holds centuries inside its heavy folds. It belongs to the people of Kashmir like the veins belong to the body. It carries stories, prayers, whispers of lost winters. You walk into an old Kashmiri home, and there it is, draped around a mother warming her hands over the kangri, wrapped around a poet who stares out at the endless white of the valley, held close by a child who grows into it like roots stretch into earth. The Pheran is the past, the present, the unyielding memory of a land that has spent too long being taken, stripped, rewritten.
And yet, in the marketplace of the world—where everything sacred is a commodity waiting to be sold—it is being pilfered, reshaped, mispronounced, and paraded like a novelty from some exotic hinterland.
Walk through the tourist-filled lanes of Himachal Pradesh, and you’ll see it. Hanging like an artifact in boutique shops run by women who dont know its significance. “Authentic Himachali winter wear,” they call it. Some have gone to the extent of calling it Himachali Pheran!
And there it is, hanging under the neon glow of commercial greed, its price tag mocking those who carry it in their blood. Non-local manufacturers, sitting in workshops far removed from the crisp air of Kashmir, have begun to mass-produce it, tweaking its designs, slapping on new labels, selling it to those who don’t know, those who don’t care.
It doesn’t stop there. No, theft is never satisfied with just the body—it wants the soul too. They speak of it as if it belongs to them, whisper fictions about its origins, post filtered photographs with captions like Traditional Himachali Wear! The audacity tastes like iron in the mouth.
It is one thing for a traveler to take a piece of Kashmir home, to carry it like a relic of a place that touched them. That is different. That is personal. But when a piece of identity is uprooted, sold off in bulk, and rebranded like a cheap imitation of itself, it is no longer admiration—it is erasure. It is cultural vandalism dressed as commerce.
The people who sell it now, who claim it as their own, will never know the way the Pheran holds warmth like a mother’s arms in the dead of winter. They will never understand what it means to press frozen fingers into the soft heat of a kangri beneath its folds, or how it carries the scent of hearth smoke, of resilience, of loss.
They will never know that for every Kashmiri who wears a Pheran, it is not just clothing—it is inheritance, it is defiance, it is survival.
To make it worse, some of the same people who drape themselves in the stolen warmth of the Pheran would not think twice before turning their noses up at a Kashmiri in any other state. The very garment they commercialize would be treated as ‘too ethnic’ when worn by the people it actually belongs to. The same outsiders who romanticize it in their curated Instagram posts would not sit next to a Kashmiri man wearing one on a train, would not look a Kashmiri woman in the eye without suspicion.
Theft is not just about taking something. It is about stripping it of context, about making it palatable for the people who wouldn’t dare understand its true weight.
But let it be said—loudly, clearly—that it is Kashmiri. It is not an aesthetic to be borrowed, a trend to be worn for a season and discarded. It is history, it is identity, and it will always belong to those who have felt the weight of snow pressing against their roofs, who have walked through the fog of their own breath in the morning light.
The Pheran was never meant to be pretty. It was meant to shield you when the world turned its back. It was meant to carry the scent of burning coal and the echoes of conversations held in whispers. It was never made for Instagram aesthetics.
Cultural misappropriation is not just about theft. It is about erasure.
It is about taking something and scrubbing it clean of its pain, its politics, its pulse. It is about reducing an identity to an accessory. It is about turning a battle-worn flag into a decorative rag.
Let’s honor heritage with authenticity. If you wear the Pheran, know its story. If you admire it, respect its roots. And if you speak of it, acknowledge where it truly belongs. Culture is not a trend—it is identity. Let’s protect it, not appropriate it.
