Enjoy this exclusive feature as part of our ongoing look at traditional dress around the world. If you have a PieceWork All Access membership, you can read the full story by logging in to your account below. Not an All Access Subscriber yet? Join the community here! Interested in reading more about traditional dress? Check out PieceWork's Winter 2025 issue today.
A Himalayan Village
On a steep hillside in the Annapurna range of the Himalayas, the village of Ghandruk has thrived for more than three hundred years. Earth and stone homes with slate roofs intermingle with modern hotels. Flourishing kitchen gardens and meandering stone pathways give way to terraced rice and millet paddies stretching down the hillsides to the Modi River below. Snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas tower above.
Most of Ghandruk’s four thousand residents are Gurung, a hardy people who migrated gradually from Mongolia into Tibet and eventually over the high peaks to settle in the valleys of the Annapurna mountains more than two thousand years ago. Each valley in this mid-hill region evolved somewhat independently, and the people of each community developed their own dialects of the Gurung language and slight variations of traditional dress.
Everyday Dress
Today, in many Gurung villages across the Annapurnas, clothing is increasingly influenced by the West as well as urban Asia. However, the everyday dress of women still reflects much of past traditions. This includes a lungi, a tubular skirt tied at the waist with a very long, narrow cotton belt, often blue, called a patuki. Tops vary from T-shirts to sweaters to the traditional chaubandi cholo, a short, high-necked blouse fastened with four ties across the chest. The women almost always cover their shoulders with a large shawl, or pachauri, and a head-cloth, also called a pachauri, which they gather in a knot at the back.
Women from the Gurung village of Lwang share a laugh on rice-planting day. All wear pachauris on their heads and lungis. The three women in the middle wear cholos and patukis.
Cholo
The chaubandi cholo, the four-tie blouse, may have been woven from cotton and sewn by hand in times past, but over generations, women began purchasing and sewing ready-made cloth. Several years ago, with the construction of a road linking Ghandruk to Pokhara, a large city a few hours away by bus, they started to buy ready-to-wear cholos in a market specializing in Gurung clothing and jewelry. Everyday cholos may be polyester, cotton, or dhaka, the iconic Nepali handwoven cotton brocade.
Lungi
Below the cholo is the lungi, a wide rectangle of fabric sewn into a tube, resembling the sarong worn throughout Southeast Asia. Typically made of Dutch wax-print cotton, the lungi is vibrant and practical. Women gather the cloth at the side of the waist in two or three folds, tuck it into a petticoat—a slip worn underneath—and secure it with a patuki. This long cotton sash wrapped several times around the waist offers lumbar support for hardworking women and functions as a handy pouch for carrying small items. As Lanka, the owner of the Old Gurung Museum in Ghandruk, explains, the patuki is a symbol of “always being prepared for hard work.”
Roshni Gurung from Lwang wears a patuki over her lungi to carry personal items while she works in her rice paddy.
Today, a more modern version of the lungi leaves the fabric open—no longer a tube—and adds waist ties, making it more like a wraparound skirt. Though lungis may once have been made of handwoven cotton, no one in Ghandruk recalls a time before they purchased the fabric for them. The origin of Dutch wax prints in local use also remains uncertain. These prints trace back to the Indonesian batik tradition, which was industrialized by the Dutch East India Company and widely traded across Asia and Africa. Today, imitation wax prints manufactured in India and China are ubiquitous in markets throughout Nepal.
Pachauri
A shawl, or pachauri, is the most consistent aspect of traditional Gurung dress. Whether a woman chooses to wear jeans and a T-shirt or lungi and a chaubandi cholo, she almost always wears a shawl draped around her shoulders with the ends crossed over one shoulder so that her whole upper body is covered. Women and girls wear shawls year-round as protection against cool mountain air, intense sun, or relentless rain. With equal frequency, women wear smaller pachauris wrapped around their heads. In the winter months for extra warmth, they may wear a third shawl wrapped around their waists.
Click any image in the galleries below to explore them in full-screen and read more about each.
Pachauris used to be handwoven of wool and later cotton in the villages, but now women buy them ready-made in nearby Pokhara. They come in varying fabric and designs, from polyester, simple cotton, or a double layer of muslin and flannel to handwoven wool or even cashmere blends. Some pachauris imitate Kashmiri Aari embroidery, which is found throughout Nepal in a mix of hand- and machine-made forms. These shawls come in vivid colors—magentas, reds, and greens are common—and are heavily embroidered in chain stitch in bright wool threads. Another common style is based on Jamawar shawls, also from Kashmir, with mainly paisley motifs woven into the fabric, which ranges from silk to wool. One of the more common designs for a pachauri is the tartan pattern made of a fuzzy polyester fabric or less often a blend of cashmere, wool, and silk.
Why the Tartan?