An in-depth historical narrative for the academically challenged readers...
Aramco, May/June 2016
The cloth is like the light vapours of dawn.
—YUAN CHWANG,
Chinese traveler to India,
629-45 ce
I first heard of Muslin
on a hot summer night in Karachi, Pakistan. It was sometime in the late
1960s. I was at the verandah table arm-wrestling with my school
homework. My father was at the other end drinking tea. I can’t recall
now how the subject came up, but I probably asked him something about
the British colonial times. It was a topic on which he held forth
occasionally. He must have answered me, for he always did. Then—and from
here on my recollection is clear—he said, “Muslin.” Not knowing what
muslin was, I looked at him questioningly. “Our muslin. The British
destroyed it.”
“What’s muslin?”
Muslin, he said, was the name of a legendary cloth made of cotton,
fit for emperors, which used to be made way back in the past. Muslin
from Dacca had been the finest, he said, from where it used to be
shipped to the far corners of the world.
“Dacca?” I asked, surprised.
Pakistan from 1947 to 1971 consisted of two parts geographically
separated by 1,500 kilometers. At one side of the Indian subcontinent,
bordering Burma, was East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. On the
other side, bordering Afghanistan and Iran, was West Pakistan, which
became present-day Pakistan. We were Bengalis from East Pakistan, whose
capital was Dacca, which is now spelled Dhaka. It was then a provincial
town in which rickshaws plied quiet streets beneath a modest skyline.
Its old quarter by the river Buriganga was a maze of lanes, redolent
with Nawabi-style cooking. Life was slow. A major outing for the family
was going either to one of the two Chinese restaurants or to a movie at
one of the four cinema halls. To be told now that it had been
world-famous for a kind of cotton cloth was a bit of a shock.
But muslin, my father said, was no more.
“What happened?”
“The British,” he said, “wanted to sell their own cotton goods, and
they destroyed the local industry. In Dhaka, the weavers disappeared. So
did their muslin.”
A pause. Then he added, “They say the British cut off the thumbs of
the weavers so that they couldn’t make muslin anymore.” And with that,
he got up from his chair and walked away.
Generations of Bengali girls and boys have grown up with this legend,
largely apocryphal, but in its arc and symbolism, an indelible
metaphor. The story of muslin is one of contrasts and opposites: of
artistry and murder, of splendor and penury, of loss and memory.
MUSLIN FESTIVAL 2016 was held in Dhaka from February 6 to 8, with seminars, workshops, the launch of the comprehensive book, Muslin: Our Story, and a preview of a documentary video, “Legend of the Loom.” An evening program on the grounds of the old mansion of the Dhaka nawabs
featured a sound and light show, a dance drama and a runway of models
in saris of contemporary muslin. The centerpiece of the festival was the
exhibition “Muslin Revival,” held throughout the month of February at
the National Museum.
At the entrance to the exhibition, I walked into a long, narrow space
with hundreds of cotton threads—thin at the top and swelling to thicker
dimensions at the bottom—suspended from the high ceiling, blown by
fans. Twirling and spinning in the dark air, their motion replicated the
action of cotton yarn being soaked in the flowing waters of Bengal’s
rivers.
The word “muslin” is popularly believed to derive from Marco Polo’s description of the cotton trade in Mosul, Iraq. (The Bengali term is mul mul.) A more modern view is that of fashion historian Susan Greene, who wrote that the name arose in the 18th century from mousse, the French word for “foam.”
Muslin today has come to mean almost any lightweight, gauzy, mostly
inexpensive, machine-milled cotton cloth. The word has lost all
connection to the handwoven fabric that once came exclusively from
Bengal. Cotton, stated the historian Fernand Braudel, was first used by
the ancient civilizations on the Indus, while the art of weaving itself
has been traced back to much earlier times. This head start perhaps was
why ancient India became proficient in making cotton textiles. They
became a staple export commodity to the Roman Empire, and they expanded
in volume in the Middle Ages with the growth of the “maritime Silk Road”
in the Indian Ocean.
From the very first, Bengal was in the lead. As textile historians
John and Felicity Wild noted, while a great many varieties of “largely
plain cotton” were produced in the three areas of Gujarat, the
Coromandel Coast and Bengal, “it was the east coast and especially the
Ganges Valley [that] offered the finest qualities.”
Arab merchants came to dominate the Indian Ocean trade from the
eighth century onward, when considerable volumes of Bengal’s cotton
textiles began to reach Basra and Baghdad, as well as Makkah via Hajj
pilgrims. To the east, it went to Java and China, where in the early
14th century the traveler Ibn Battuta wrote that it was highly prized.
He noted that among the presents sent by the Delhi Sultan Muhammad ibn
Tughluq to the Yuan emperor in China were 100 pieces each of five
varieties of cloth: Four were from Bengal, named by Ibn Battuta as bayrami, salahiyya, shirinbaf and shanbaf.
While all travelers to the region waxed lyrical about Bengal’s fine cotton cloth, it was the first-century ce Roman author Petronius who, in Satyricon, formulated the dominant trope about muslin as ventus textilis
(woven wind): “Thy bride might as well clothe herself with a garment of
the wind as stand forth publicly naked under her clouds of muslin.”
So what made it so special, so translucent, so softly gossamer? How did Dhaka—and only Dhaka—produce this finest of muslin?
This question lay at the heart of the exhibition. Wall-mounted videos
showed each step of this lost art, from the sloping riverbanks where
cotton plants flourished to the final bales of muslin ready for
shipping. The waters of the great Meghna river sloshed on speakers and
heaved on a huge screen as a background refrain to a display of
manuscripts, documents, photos and illustrations, books and coins, tools
of the trade—including a startlingly fine-toothed boalee (catfish)
jawbone that even now seemingly strained to catch debris from raw
cotton—Gandhian spinning wheels, a rough-hewn country boat, a full-sized
handloom and a series of muslin dresses scrupulously recreated from
famous collections.
The production process for Dhaka muslinwas spectacularly demanding from beginning to end. The cotton plant itself, phuti karpas (Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta),
not only was unique to the area, but also only grew, as the British
Commercial Resident in Dhaka James Taylor wrote in 1800, in “a tract of
land … twelve miles southeast of Dacca, along the banks of the Meghna.”
All attempts—and there were many—to grow it outside that one natural
habitat failed. Its fibers were the silkiest of all. Contrary to all
cotton logic, when soaked in the Meghna’s waters they shrank instead of
swelling and dissolving. Alternate sections of its ribbon-like structure
flattened and actually became stronger so that even the ultra-thin
thread spun from it could withstand the stress when wound in the frame
of the loom.
This thread was spun in intensely humid conditions, usually in the
morning and evening, and then only by young women, whose supple fingers
worked with water bowls around them to moisten the air, or else beside
riverbanks or on moored boats. They often sang as they spun, and if the
river was shrouded in fog, passing travelers brought back tales of
muslin being made by mermaids singing in the mist.
Even the seeds for the next planting season were specially treated to
keep them ready to germinate. After being carefully selected and dried
in the sun, they were put in an earthen pot in which ghee
(clarified butter) had been kept. Its mouth was sealed airtight, then it
was hung from the ceiling of the hut at the height of an average
individual over the kitchen fire to keep it moderately warm.
The most delicate, the very lightest of fibers were spun into muslin thread, and this was obtained by using a dhunkar,
a bamboo bow tautly strung with catgut. The special bow for muslin
cotton was small, and only women did the work—presumably because a light
touch was needed. When it was strummed (dhun also means a
light raga in classical Indian music) in a distinctive way, the lightest
fleece from the cotton pile separated from the heavier fibers and rose
into the air. One theory is that the strumming, by vibrating the air
over the cotton pile, reduced its pressure enough to allow the very
lightest fibers to be pulled upward. It was these finest of fibers—a
mere eight percent of the total cotton harvest—that went into the making
of the finest muslin.
Indeed, Dhaka muslin was woven out of air.
It was late in the afternoon
when I left the museum and hopped on a rickshaw to head home. All around
me cars, buses, vans, auto-rickshaws and motorbikes screeched, squealed
and caterwauled. Crowds jammed the pavements, spilling on to the
streets. Beggars implored; urchins scurried. Dhaka by any measure is the
most crowded city in the world, a metropolis lightyears removed from
the small town I had known when I first heard of muslin as a boy. It
seemed unreal that this was the place that had once produced that fabled
fabric. It seemed even more improbable still that it would do so ever
again.
And yet, hanging airily from the ceiling at the exhibition, there was
a freshly woven length of transparent cotton labeled, “New Age Muslin.”
Mughal emperors wore dresses
made of Dhaka muslin, and this became another crucial signifier of its
quality. In the Mughal scheme of things, all authority and power was
vested in the emperor, who manifested a God-given “radiance.” The
display of pomp and the magnificence of the imperial lifestyle,
therefore, was not merely personal gratification as much as it was
political expression, an essential display of the empire’s grandeur.
Muslin, by being worn by the emperor, became a part of the Mughal
apparatus of power.
Few dynasties in the world have had the artistic sensibilities of the
Mughal emperors, which they displayed in remarkably integrated forms of
architecture, literature, gardens, painting, calligraphy, vast imperial
libraries, public ceremonies and carpets. The Mughals often embellished
their muslin-wear with Persian-derived motifs called buti and embroidery known as chikankari.
More crucially, they incorporated it within their aesthetic framework,
giving names that drew on the idioms and images of classical Persian
poetry for the different varieties of muslin: abrawan (flowing water); shabnam (evening dew); tanzeb (ornament of the body); nayansukh (pleasing
to the eye); and more. Although Bengal was ruled by Muslims from the
13th century onwards, it was Emperor Akbar’s general Islam Khan who
re-cast Dhaka as Bengal’s capital, giving it distinct Mughal contours.
It was during Akbar’s half century of reign in the late 16th century
that mulmul khas (“special clothing,” or muslin diaphanously
fine) began to be made exclusively for the emperor and the imperial
household. It was Akbar again who deemed muslin suitable for India’s
summers and who designed the Mughal jama, men’s outerwear with fitted top and a pleated skirt falling to below the knees.
There are many stories about the translucent quality of the mulmul
khas. One of the most enduring is that of Emperor Aurangzeb chiding his
daughter princess Zeb-un-Nisa, a poet well-versed in astronomy,
mathematics and Islamic theology, for appearing in transparent dress in
court. She replied, to the astonishment of her father, that her dress,
in fact, consisted of seven separate layers of muslin.
A handloom rested on the floor
at the exhibition, the kind that once wove muslin. It was the Indian pit
treadle loom, one that has remained relatively unchanged over roughly
4,000 years. It was a thing of bamboo and rope, at which the weaver sat
with his feet in a pit dug below to operate the treadles. I walked
around it, looking at it from all sides, baffled that this rudimentary
construction had snared whole empires in its almost invisible threads.
Weaving is as old as Bengal, conspicuously present in its oldest literature. In the Charyapadas
of the 10th century, written on palm leaves in the oldest form of the
Bengali language yet known, the loom, yarn and weaving represent
mystical concepts. Weavers populate the mangalkavyas written by medieval Bengali poets; they are also present in older ballads, chants and songs as well as depicted in terra-cotta.
On the museum walls were photos of weavers and spinners, the women
and men behind the magic fabric. Faces of rural Bengal—sunburnt, lean,
teeth stained with paan, stoic. It was impossibly backbreaking,
mind-numbing labor, supported fore and aft by large groups of farmers,
washers, cleaners, dyers, sewers, embroiderers and balers, all
organized, in typically Indian fashion, by religion and caste.
How did they do it? How did they make a storied cloth that, when wet
with evening dew, became invisible against the grass below? German
scholar Annemarie Schimmel put it well when she wrote of their
“unsurpassed ability to create amazing works of art with tools which
appear extremely primitive today.… Who today could weave the fabric
described as ‘woven air’?”
Dhaka’s muslin was felled by
colonialism’s potent mix of the Industrial Revolution and the Maxim gun.
Before that fall, though, there was another rise. Europeans came to
India at the beginning of the 16th century and were astonished not only
at the quality and volume of its cotton textiles, but also by its
extensive, far-flung trade. Soon Indian cotton textiles were exported
more than ever to Europe, in exponentially increasing volumes, with
Bengal taking the lion’s share. Fortunes were made. As the economist K.
N. Chaudhuri noted, from the earliest times “exports from eastern India …
were a perennial source of prosperity to merchants of every nation.”
The Muslin festival capped two years of intensive research
At its peak, muslin was on display at the French court where, at the
close of the 18th century, Empress Josephine’s muslin dresses set the
course for the Empire Line style in France and later in Regency-era
Britain. That style centered around muslin, since only “filmy muslin,”
wrote Christine Kortsch, author of Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction, “clung Greek-like to the body … and no color would do but white.”
But muslin’s days were numbered. The British colonial apparatus,
whether in the form of the East India Company or as direct rule by the
Crown, was a vast extractive machine. So too had been the Mughal state,
which had herded the weavers into designated workshops called kothis
to labor in harsh, even punitive, conditions. But compared to the
pitiless operations of the British, the Mughals were models of mercy. On
one side, both Company and Crown squeezed the farmers and the weavers
until nothing was left, then squeezed some more. On the other, a
factory-produced, mass-product “muslin” rolled off the newly invented
power looms in Lancashire cotton mills. Aided by a raft of tariffs,
duties and taxes, British cotton textiles flooded not only the European
markets, but the Indian ones as well, bringing Bengal’s handloom cotton
industry, and muslin, to its knees.
Along the riverbanks, phuti karpas became extinct. Famines swept
through the previously fertile land of Bengal, and spinners and weavers
changed occupations, fled from their villages or starved. Only jamdani, known as “figured muslin” due to the flower and abstract motifs woven on it, survived to the present times.
The muslin festival culminated
an arduous two-year effort by a small research team affiliated with Drik
Picture Library, a Dhaka nonprofit that began in the 1990s and has
since evolved into a cultural institution aiming to change
representations of Bangladesh. At Drik’s offices, where youthful energy
and defiant political posters underline a buoyant commitment to social
issues, I talked with Saiful Islam, its ceo and author of the exhibition’s book Muslin: Our Story
(and, I should add, my younger brother). He and his team pursued cotton
species and fabrics; sought out vanishing communities of handloom
weavers and spinners; and interviewed historians and fashion designers
on three continents as well across the length and breadth of Bangladesh.
“I have many wonderful memories,” he said. “Once, when I was staying
overnight with one weaver family, they laid out a hearty supper.
Afterwards, when I wanted to sleep, they brought in a bed that had been
made specially for my stay. I was a city guy, and they wouldn’t let me
sleep in the rough. Our village folks might be poor, but they are
amazingly hospitable.”
Drik, partnering with the National Museum and Aarong (the crafts division of brac, the globally known ngo
based in Bangladesh), capped its efforts by recreating a fabric close
to the muslin of old: “New Age Muslin.” It has located a plant that
could be the phuti karpas. “We will know for sure,” he said,
“once the complex lab tests are done.” It was also gratifying, he said,
“to see the general rise in the public awareness of the extent to which
muslin is part of Bangladesh’s heritage and history.” But “it is now up
to Bangladesh, its government and people, to take it forward.”
Dhaka’s muslin awaits the next chapter of its history. So does, I am
sure, my father, who died in 1984, but who is no doubt looking down from
somewhere up there with considerable interest
Khademul Islam is a writer and translator. He is currently working on a nonfiction book forthcoming from Bloomsbury UK.
