This illustrated kids' book explains where pashmina fiber comes from and the experience of being Tibetan in exile

And, though the story itself is quite simple, it draws upon years of research on North Indian and Tibetan textiles. In 'Karma and the Snow Lion', a pashmina goat called Karma learns about his heritage as a Tibetan in India from the celestial animal and emblem of Tibet—the Snow Lion. English-language stories from and about India seem to be on a new trajectory in the 21st century. If books in translation have become contenders for international prizes with growing frequency over the last 25 years, books for children too have been exploring and expanding the realm of the possible and desirable. And 'Karma and...' seems to push a few boundaries just by going into Ladakh which is seldom pictured in mainstream Indian children's books—illustrated or otherwise.

Over a video call with Moneycontrol, Quill talked about the book, how he met Thangka painters Mitthu and Sonam Lama Tamang in McLeod Ganj around seven years ago and struck up a friendship that led to this collaboration, how he worked with them to use Thangka imagery and techniques to create a different visual language for the book, and how he established the location of the action and art in the book in the foothills of the Himalayas. Edited excerpts:

Tell us about the research you are doing, and how you came upon it?

The research that I'm doing at the moment is for my PhD in Indian textiles. It is actually on Mughal Indian textiles, including pashminas and pashmina fiber... my PhD topic is kind of tangential to my interest in Tibetan and Himalayan art.

I have been able...to use some of the research that I have done into pashmina fiber—where it comes from, and how it ends up in Kashmir—and turn it into a book that is accessible for children... because not many people really know how far they've (the industry have) come.

You mentioned you had some difficulty getting a supervisor for your PhD research. But there's a lot of interest globally in Mughal textiles; including exhibitions at museums like the Victoria and Albert Museum, where you have interned briefly.

Mughal textiles I could find a supervisor for, but for Tibetan textiles and Himalayan textiles I could not. There are a couple of academics in the UK that you can study Tibetan and Himalayan art with, but not in London and not with the kind of theoretical backgrounds that I wanted to pursue for my research.

I also have a background in Indian textiles. I worked in an Indian textile gallery in London for six years, and so that inspired me to pursue that area of interest.

I didn't take a straightforward path to get where I am. I've studied lots of different areas of art and lots of different histories. Pashmina fiber and the story of the connections between these different aspects of my research, this is the area that I've landed on which combines all of these research areas, from Persian and Islamic contexts to Himalayan Ladakhi context, to Tibetan and Buddhist context. This is a connecting point for all of those different areas of research that I have pursued over the last 10 years of university.

You have been learning the Tibetan language, some of which you've sprinkled through the book. And you're working in Dharamsala as we speak. What is the most fun thing that you have found out about Tibetan textiles and art in this time that you think most people don't know?

The most fun thing that I've learned about textiles is the way textiles can affect your emotional moods and your state of experience. The anchor that I've had for all of my research is this theoretical understanding of cloth as something that you don't just see, but you touch, feel, smell, everything. It's this multi-sensory experience of cloth...

And then, through reading and interacting with different scholars in the field of Indian textiles, I came into the idea of rasa and experience and emotional mood and essences. I was then able to incorporate that into my research as well, to understand how textiles can transform the experience of space, the experience of touch, and really to look at them in their materiality.

This interest in pashmina fiber comes out of that, through the softness of the fiber, through where it comes from and the reason why it keeps people so warm because it comes from these freezing high-altitude regions in Tibet and Ladakh. So, the most interesting thing that I found in terms of textiles from this region is this body of literature, particularly in India, that allows you to understand their effect on your person through the different senses.

In terms of Tibetan textiles, one of the most amazing things that I found while travelling in Ladakh was that in lots of monasteries, on the reverse of the Thangka, there's block-printed cotton textiles from further West in India - Gujarat and Rajasthan and areas like—that are also used in the Tibetan context for at least two to three centuries. And that's been confirmed through looking at centuries-old Thangka paintings that are in the British Museum as well in the study room—a lot of the Thangka aligned with Indian textiles.

This book was illustrated by Thangka painters, which are the religious scroll paintings surrounded in silk brocade. On the front, the silk brocade often comes from different sources; it comes from China, but a lot of it—particularly in Ladakh and in Tibetan communities now—comes from Varanasi.

So, this idea of Tibet being an isolated place and the Himalayas being this impenetrable landscape that nothing touched, is really not the full picture of the story. Of course, it is part of it, but it also incorporates this long millennia of contact through the Himalayas that connected the Indians are continent with the Tibetan Plateau.

Coming back to your book, you have chosen a pashmina goat as your hero, not a human child, who is discovering their Tibetan heritage and roots. Talk us through a bit of how some of the characters and the imagery came together for the book.

The book has a lot of different layers of meaning that I was trying to put forward in quite a simple story. So the idea of the pashmina goat living in the Indian Himalayas and having never been home, comes out of a lot of my experience with Tibetan exiles and refugees in Dharamshala who have been born in India and have never been able to travel home. That area of quite upsetting distance and inability to travel to where you are from, is something that I wanted to incorporate into this story of the pashmina fiber so that it taught more than one thing at once.

Another thing that I wanted to put forward in the book was this idea that he (Karma) didn't know how to write his name or other things in the Tibetan language, so he went and learn it from a magical snow lion in a dream. That's also addressing the idea that the Tibetan language is in danger of being wiped out by what's going on in Tibet today. And also recognizing the work that a lot of people are doing in exile and in Tibet, to preserve the Tibetan language and to keep it alive and teach it to young people that have never been to Tibet. There are lots of institutes and schools that work really hard to make sure that Tibetan children still learn Tibetan in exile, that they learn how to read and write in Tibetan. So that is something that I wanted to bring into the story as well.

And that's also why I thought it would be certainly more fun to have a goat as the main character. It was definitely one of the challenging things with having traditional Thangka painters do the illustrations who are used to doing things in a set format. The idea of a Thangka is not to be artistically special or innovative, it is to portray the God or the Goddess in exactly the proportions that are set out in Buddhist scripture. To ask them to draw a picture of a goat eating a plate of momos, then, was quite difficult and we had to ask for the help of different people to make the paintings come to life. There was another illustrator who did a lot of the outline. I sketched the rough drawing first so that he could visualise what it was, because it was quite hard to do just from the text, because I had it all in my head from having written the story. So he did the outlines and then the illustrators of the book did the painting.

Were textiles themselves a source of inspiration really for the art in the book? For example, the stars look like they are embroidered in the sky. Is that something that you were trying to do?

Actually, the stars are just how they're painted in Thangka paintings. But it was definitely important. I had been talking to my publisher about my academic work on textiles and publishing proper nonfiction works in the future, and she said: 'Would you be interested in doing a kids' book?' I had not thought of it before. But then part of what I want to do with my research, is to make it accessible for people who maybe have not gone to university because I was the first person in my family to go to university. And I don't want to keep what I've learnt myself. I want to share it with other people. Otherwise, I really don't see the point. So the idea of writing a book that would engage young kids with the story of Tibetans and textiles and trade between and connections between India and Tibet and also the Tibetan language and the art of Thangka painting was something that has been able to achieve a lot of goals in one small book.

So it's not that the illustrations were inspired by the idea of textiles. It was that I suggested—having been friends with these Thangka painters for about seven years—that maybe it would be a good idea to see if they would do the illustrations for the book in a traditional way to make more people aware of what a Thangka painting is as well. To try and get them interested in Tibetan and Himalayan art, not just textile.

How did you get to know these Thangka painters?

When I first came to India in 2018, I came with some friends from university and the one place that I was sure that I wanted to go was Dharamsala. Because when I was about eight years old, I watched this documentary on the Himalayas, and Michael Palin, the host, visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala. And from that age, I began to have this interest in Tibetan Himalayan culture, religion and art. And so I said I really want to go to Dharamshala and they, for some reason, had different plans. So I went on my own, but I went to the wrong place, further up the mountains. I had to walk down into Dharamshala and their Thangka painting shop was the first shop I saw. I just immediately walked inside and then ended up sitting with them for an hour, chatting, drinking tea, and then became friends. And we continued to talk and I visited their family in Kathmandu. I have come back... I don't know how many times, and spent lots of time with them, learning about what they do, how they learn to do the paintings, and really having this massive experience of friendship that I really treasure. That's how I met them completely by chance, but I don't think it was by chance really, and they continue to be some of my best friends in the world.

What is the work that you are doing at McLeod Ganj right now (early 2025)?

As part of the PhD studentship, we can undertake six months of work placements. I just completed a three-month work placement in the Tibetan and Himalayan department under the Indian department in the Victoria and Album Museum in London. And I am now doing the other three months in The Tibet Museum in Dharamshala, working towards the project on how Tibetan dress has changed in exile. How the materials and cuts have all changed owing to the different climate - the heat in India - compared to the climate in Tibet. We are interviewing tailors and I'm doing lots of background reading into Tibetan dress and textiles and working with an amazing group of curators and specialists in Tibetan art and culture in a way that really works towards cultural preservation and the biggest exposure that they can possibly get to allow people to understand what's going on and why it is so important that Himalayan art, culture, religion, language, literature, everything is preserved and a resolution is reached.

Could you give an example of how this dress has changed? You mentioned the temperature, of course. I imagine that the fabric has changed, you mentioned cut.

Even in the museum already they have information on how cotton became more widely used and how the cuts of the monks' dress was modified slightly to allow them to wear less layers. Basically, because they were all very hot when they arrived in their thick woolly robes which were made for freezing environment. Even though it's pretty cold here at the minute, it's not cold all year out, and it certainly wasn't that cold when they arrived in Sikkim and different places in India in the early period before settling in Dharmshala.

And what was the work that you did with the V&A?

I worked on creating an archive of the Tibetan Himalayan collections left by the late curator of Tibetan, Himalayan and Buddhist South-east Asian art, Doctor John Clark. I was asked to catalogue his personal book library of Tibetan and Himalayan art books into the V&A catalogue. And then also create an archive of different material that was part of his office, field notes and things.

It was very much. It was quite dusty, but very cool.

Did you find anything super fun there in his archives?

I found a lot of early correspondence about visits to Tibet... old photos that he took of collections that I have never seen, particularly Tibetan and Himalayan jewelry. He wrote this amazing book on Himalayan jewellery, which is also very close to Tibetan and Himalayan dress. And lots of lots of images of things that were in past auctions 20-30 years ago that I had never seen.

The Tibetan art inspiration is unmissable here. But the illustrations are also very contextual. Like in the section where the protagonist Karma is getting ready for bed, the mountains look like pillows. And the second thing is just the contrast of the home with the outdoors - the lotus flowers, the smoke going up in tendrils, and the Tibetan font! That must have posed a technical challenge. So how did that work out?

The font is Microsoft Himalaya. That's the one that Tibetan writing automatically goes to in Word. I was very impressed (with how the Tibetan font was placed on page) actually. When I published some academic research in the UK, the Tibetan font created such a headache for the editors because every time they edited anything in the entire volume, the Tibetan letters disjoined, and they would all go separately, and it became a mess. So (for this book), I checked every time (the book went through a round of editing, proofing or design changes), but it was correct every time. That's probably the difference of doing it with an Indian publisher - they understand things like this and maybe they have a different formatting on the computer that allows them to use the Tibetan script. Whereas when I published in the UK, the software was perhaps Eurocentric, and they were really embarrassed about it. But they were amazing. In the UK, the patience level was incredible. But there was there was no issue with publishing the Tibetan writing in this.

The other thing is that the trees are pine trees or juniper trees, which is something that I really wanted them to be. These trees are not normally found in Tibetan Thangka paintings. But the trees in Himachal and northern India are pine forests. So I wanted it to have that feeling of being in Dharamshala. And the lotuses are straight out of Tibetan Thangka paintings. They were painted by Mithu, the lady who does the shading of the sky and the shading of the grounds, and the plants and the rocks and the water and the flowers. She did the lotuses exactly the same as they're done on Tibetan Thangka paintings.

The last double spread, the history of Pashmina, has a photo from the Kashmiri loom workshop... It was something that I did because in a story you can't explain all of the fine details.

In the book, a snow lion leads Karma in his dream about his roots and his cultural heritage. Where did the snow lion come from?

The snow lion is a creature that is guardian of the Tibetan Plateau. It's an animal that's very closely associated with Tibetan identity - it's on the Tibetan flag, and it's representative of this land of snow that is high and guarded by mountains. They're like these guardian figures that protect the mountains that surround Tibet.

One of the things... when we were doing the illustrations... I said to the Thangka painters, please can you make the region look like the Changthang region in Ladakh, not just generic snow mountains like everywhere else. And it certainly has that slight orange tinge and the goats playing around.

How long did it take you to put the whole book together?

I was thinking about it for about six months. Then I just wrote in about an afternoon, and edited it in another afternoon. But then the paintings took around a month. They were done last year, and then the editing and the placement of the text took another three or four months.