Srinagar to Pampore: A Day in the Life of Kashmir's Craft and Harvest

If you only had one day to actually understand where Kashmir's most well-known exports come from — not just read about them — a route from Srinagar out to Pampore and back would cover an unusual amount of ground. Here's roughly what that day looks like.

Morning: Kehwa Before Anything Else

A day like this starts the way most Kashmiri mornings do — with kehwa. Saffron, cardamom, and slivered almonds steeped in green tea, sipped slowly rather than rushed, the way it's meant to be. Our Shahi Kehwa blend is built around exactly this ritual.

Mid-Morning: Srinagar's Old City

Srinagar's old quarters are where a lot of Kashmir's textile work still happens — small workshops where Ari-work embroidery is done by hand, the same hook-needle technique behind our designer pherans. Watching even a few minutes of this work explains why hand-embroidered pieces take days, not hours, to finish.

Midday: The Road to Pampore

The drive from Srinagar to Pampore is short — roughly 15 kilometres — but the change in scenery is immediate. Depending on the season, you're either looking at ordinary farmland or, for a few weeks in autumn, fields of lilac-purple saffron crocus stretching to the horizon.

Afternoon: Watching the Saffron Harvest

If you're there during harvest season, this is where the actual work happens — families hand-picking flowers at dawn (you'd have missed the earliest picking by afternoon, but processing continues through the day), then separating the red stigma from each flower by hand in the evening. It's slow, precise, and almost entirely manual — nothing about it scales the way most modern agriculture does.

Late Afternoon: Orchards and Dried Fruit

Depending on the time of year, nearby orchards might be mid-harvest for apricots or walnuts, or you might see the drying process itself — fruit laid out under the sun, the traditional method behind our khubani.

Evening: Back to Srinagar

The drive back into Srinagar as evening sets in is a natural point to reflect on how much of what ends up as a simple product listing online — a jar of saffron, a shawl, a pack of dried apricots — actually represents a full day (or season) of human effort behind it.

A Day That Reframes a Product Listing

You don't need to make this trip to appreciate what goes into these products, but it's hard to look at a bag of saffron the same way once you've seen even a fraction of what it actually takes to fill it.