Deer and Snake Paper In modern times it is not unusual to see a tissue set between highly colored book pages of art work in order to prevent offsetting of color. Indian artisans long ago made a special "paper" for this very purpose. In the same city of art and history where Kipling's father tended to his museum of wonders, I met Haji Muhammad Bashir. Fighting off the crushing force of bikes and scooters through the narrow alleys of old Lahore, Pakistan, I was led to a room called the "Ambala Bookbinding House", where hundreds upon hundreds of old Korans and Moslem manuscripts were stacked so high the walls disappeared. The bindery's letterhead proudly proclaims that it is "famous for high- class, beautiful, and durable bookbindings." Bashir, the gray-bearded proprietor, is radiant. For the last thirty- five years he has, without charge, repaired old books collected in the mosques, which are then recirculated. He says, "The Islamic world will be benefitted by my work." Among his "new" works is a huge Koran he illustrated with magic markers and bound over a period of thirty months. This Koran has a weighty cover seventy by forty inches and requires four men to carry it. It was in Bashir's studio that I first saw the mystery cellophane interleaving paper bound in between the pages of many old Korans, which had been illustrated with precious stone pigments. Called hiran kechelli, the thin, clear, flexible "paper" had been made from the membrane between the meat and skin of the deer since long before the advent of plastic wraps, at a time when, according to Bashir, "deers used to be in abundance in the subcontinent and hiran kechelli was very much in fashion." How did one get such a clear sheet? Bashir said that the formulas for preparing the membrane were generally lost, but that there was supposed to be a family in the Billimaran section of old Delhi, India, versed in the secret technique. With a translator and little else to go on, I began the search back in India. Despite incalculable masses of people, to my surprise and wonder we hit pay-dirt. Sixty- two year old allopathic doctor Maulana Farooq Wasfi, who runs a travelers' inn in Billimaran, which offers free lodging to those visiting spiritual sites, knew the whole process. In his youth the method for the transparent paper had still been a secret guarded by those who made it. Maulana told the tale of a neighbor, Munchi Nazir, who used to make hiran kechelli behind a curtain. Nazir had learned the craft from Lucknow painter Munchi Inayat Ulla. A young man then, Maulana was obsessively curious. He pulled back the curtain, discovered the master at work, and begged to be taught. The man refused. Maulana used to deliver betel nut to the family's home and had gained favor with the artisan's wife. One day he stole a piece of the "deer-jelly" paper to study it. He was especially interested because he knew deer hunters who could easily bring him skins. Many times he looked behind the curtain at the materials used, trying to unravel the paper's mystery. Eventually the artisan, prodded both by his wife and the young betel nut deliverer, relented and taught Maulana the process, which he had supposedly kept secret even from his own son. Maulana first made his deer paper in 1943, when he was nineteen years old. The entire skin of the deer was removed immediately, while the blood was still warm, so that the membrane beneath the skin of the deer could be freed without breaking. The effort was guided by a very sharp knife and the membrane was stretched around a clay jug or on a wooden frame, like a carpet frame. It was allowed to dry for at least fourteen hours, then rubbed with sandpaper and coated with a secret liquid applied with a squirrel's tail brush. The secret fluid was described by Maulana as one part chunia gound (a red tree sap) and one part kikar gound (gum arabic, resin from the babul, aracia arabica) mixed in water. Fifty drops each of spirits of chloroform and aromatic ammonia were added, and the mixture was kept for three days, at which point it became thick. Salt was then added. The membrane was allowed to dry in the shade and an additional sandpaper thinning enhanced the paper's transparency. Since the coating had filled in all the pores, it was also excellent for calligraphy. Even rarer was a "paper" called kechelli nag, made the same way from the skin of the black snake. Occasionally hunting scenes were painted on this snake paper. In Jaipur, artist Ram Gopal Vijay, showed me a collection of antique transparent skin-paper, more yellow and covered with countless wave-like wrinkles. A similar "paper" is called charba by Agrawal, who claims it was used as a tracing paper for paintings.(1) Artisans used "to collect together a large number of the various animals, plants, and edifices drawn by the master, and to fix them with paste to the thin skin of the gazelle which is found in large quantities in the shops of the beaters of gold and silver, the sketches being so adjusted that the image was visible through the membrane."(2) These were students of the arts who needed to practice their skills for several years in order to develop an eye and rendering ability. They placed the transparent sheet and image on top of another paper and pricked the outlines with a needle. A bag full of powdered charcoal (from the burnt branch of tamarind) was passed over the image, filling the pin pricks and creating a duplicate outline. These were the tracing papers of India. Bark Paper A proto-paper called lekhana or bhurja, made from the bark of the birch (bhojpattr or bhurja- patra), was used by both the Buddhists and Hindus in Northern and Central India for manuscripts and letter writing. A Greek chronicler of the 4th century BC observed that the ink used on the bark was prepared so that it could not be washed off. Although only fragments of bark writings remain from the great university at Taxila, numerous ink-wells attest to the literate environment of this extraordinary center where Alexander once held philosophical debate with naked spiritual scholars. Today in the remote, isolated Pakistani hills of Gilgit and Hunza, locals still remember when, about a hundred years ago, bark was still used for writing. It is maintained that the birch bark was not merely stripped from the tree in rolls, but was prepared with methods which are no longer known. Alberuni, one thousand years ago, indicates the bark was rubbed with oil and then polished. Occasionally I found small roadside shops which sell everything from tea and apples to odd bits of hardware and rock crystals, and, surprisingly, rolls of birch bark scrolls. Called juj or joje, they are used to line the ceilings of mountain homes for insulation or to wrap butter, which is then placed into a hole in the ground so that, as I was told, "for a hundred years underground nothing happens to it." In Gilgit, near the site of Buddhist stupas where important early manuscripts and some of the earliest paper in the subcontinent was found, Professor Karl Jettmar was told that it was common practice "to dig in one of the stupas for strips of birch-bark (manuscript leaves) in order to use them in covering the roofs of the houses. The villagers noticed quite well that there was some faint writing on the leaves, but nobody was able to read the lines."(3) Not so destructive to the historical record is the locals' use of the birch bark for amulets both in northern Pakistan and in some of the Indian hill states, where people believe that "the vertical lines which are visible on the surface are understood as Aleph, i.e., as an abbreviation of the name of God, and this makes birch bark a holy material."(4) Shop owners told me that animal herders who tend to livestock in the mountains gather the bark in the summer, bringing it to Gilgit and Hunza villages from as far away as Nagar and Ghizar. The Mysterious "Big-Paper" of the Indian North Cloth moulds used for making mountain paper can sometimes be quite large. The Almora sheets from Dr. Joshi were 62 inches by 29. By area standards, however, this sheet, which is as wide as the hands can stretch, is a baby. There are many reliable observations of unexplained mammoth sheets from the Kumaon and Garwal, especially from Almora. Toward the end of the 19th century, Charles Horne measured sheets ten feet by four, made by the Doti in east Kumaon, which would sound like a fish-story if so many others had not made similar observations. Horne reported that the near-by Kachar Bhotias, from the Cis-Himalayan Bhot, make "fine smooth sheets" of paper seven yards square.(5) The stories continue. Fani Parks, in her Himalayan wanderings, writes, "I purchased a single sheet of paper that measured forty feet in length by nineteen feet and one half in breadth. It is made, they tell me, from the fibers of the leaf or bark of a tree, and is brought from Almora, and other parts of the hills. Some of the sheets are very large and rather coarse, others are smaller and very fine; insects do not attack shawls that are wrapped in this sort of paper."(6) Forty feet by nineteen and a half! What on earth kind of mould could have been used to create such a paper? Many years afterwards in the Asiatic Society in London, Parks saw paper ticked with this note, "A single sheet of paper measuring sixty feet by twenty-five, made in Kumaon from the inner fibers of the set bawra or daphne cannabind tree, presented to the Asiatic Society by G. W. Traill, Esq., 1839."(7) Simply to add weight to these astonishing claims from extremely reliable observers, H. W. Emerson, in his turn- of-the-century monograph (one of the most important, comprehensive, and informative documents of the time on Indian papermaking), declares, "Samples of daphne paper have been sent to Europe, where a thin strong paper suitable for foreign post has been produced from it. The size of the paper varies up to great sheets, thirty feet long by twelve feet broad, which have been used as a material for the ceilings of rooms."(8) Dard Hunter mentions similar legendary sheets thirty feet by twelve, shown in a London exposition in 1851, and says "I have been unable to secure definite information relative to these huge sheets of paper."(9) It is remarkable that Hunter, who spent his life traveling the world, collecting every important detail and trivial fact about paper, failed to come up with an explanation for these mega-sheets, perhaps the largest handmade paper in the world. The even dispersal of fibers in these mammoth mountain sheets confirms that they had to have been made in a water solution, yet every known way of making such paper would become unworkable at these large sizes. Certainly this is one of the most provoking mysteries of mountain paper. Notes 1. O. P. Agrawal, Conservation of Manuscripts and Paintings of Southeast Asia (London: Butterworth and Co., 1984). 2. R. F. Martain, The Miniature Painting and Painters of Persia, India, and Turkey from the 8th to the 18th Century (London: Holland House Press, 1912). 3. Karl Jettmar, The Gilgit Manuscripts: Discovery by Installments. 4. Ibid. 5. Charles Horne, "Papermaking in the Himalayas." 1877 The Indian Antiquary 6 (New Delhi: Gain Publishing, 1812). 6. Fani Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1850). 7. Ibid. 8. H. W. Emerson, Monograph on Paper Making and Papier Mache in the Punjab, (1907-1908). 9. Dard Hunter, Papermaking by Hand in India, (New York: Pynson Printers, 1939).
