Rafoogari / rafoogiri (رفوگری); practitioner: rafoogar (رفو گر)
The repair of holes, tears and worn areas in fine cloth so that the damage disappears: the darner matches the weave, rebuilds the warp with a needle and then weaves the weft back in, so the mend reads as plain cloth. Two main methods are used: patchwork, in which a piece of the same cloth is cut and fixed over the damage with fine stitches, and tana-bana, in which threads pulled from elsewhere in the cloth are cross-worked into the gap. For Kani shawls the yarn is traditionally drawn from old pashmina kept for the purpose, and old fabric is dyed to match. Najibabad, in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district, became the repair hub for Kashmir's shawls, perhaps because rafoogars settled there on the old trade route from Kashmir to Bengal; by 2019 only about a dozen experts there held the craft. Its success is its own obscurity: the better the work, the less anyone knows a rafoogar was there.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not inscribed
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