Reviving a gossamer yarn
Dhaka muslin was so fine, it was translucent. Worn by royalty for centuries, then lost, researchers are trying to recreate it, and finding that it’s even harder than they imagined
It’s one of the abiding mysteries of the ancient world. How did they build the pyramids? What exactly is Stonehenge? And how on earth did they make Dhaka muslin? The fabric, popular all the way from the 2nd century BCE to 18th century CE, is the stuff of legend: Woven so fine that it was translucent, with a thread count so high that a six-yard sari could pass through a wedding ring.
It was worn by Greek aristocracy and Mughal and French royalty; written about by Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy; described as “woven air”. Production ceased in the 19th century, as an industrialising Britain crushed India’s once-thriving weaver communities.
The cotton plant it was made from is now extinct. The strain of bamboo used in the loom is extinct too. The finest weavers today say they wouldn’t know where to begin trying to replicate it.
But a new effort aims to revive Dhaka muslin. And while they’re still only at a thread count of 400 (up from an average of 60 to 80 for handwoven cotton saris but still nowhere near the fabled 1,200), a small first batch of saris has been made.
“When we started this project, it felt like we were operating in a vacuum,” says researcher Saiful Islam, who has been spearheading the Bengal Muslin initiative since 2014, supported by the Dhaka-based cultural non-profit Drik.
Islam and his team of photographers, researchers, curators and other contributors at Drik, where he was CEO from 2012 to 2016, have travelled across 11 countries, including
India, Turkey and China, meeting academics, historians and crafts people. They all said the same thing: the fabric was made in the East Bengal region, but the plant (Gossypium arboreum var neglecta, known locally as phuti karpas) has gone extinct.
Using close to 100 books, some written in England, others in Bangladesh, still others by Chinese, Dutch and Arab travellers, Islam and his team began piecing together a comprehensive picture of the Dhaka muslin economy. Using descriptions from these sources, the researchers also began to piece together the production process. They found that the fabric was the result of an elaborate 16-step process (each with its own sub-processes), involving 16 different communities, across religions, castes and genders.
The phuti karpas, which grew only on the banks of the river Meghna, had unusual tensile properties that allowed it to be stretched thin enough to achieve the high thread counts (that’s the number of threads woven into a square inch of fabric) of 300 to 1,200.
To try and find a variety of cotton similar to the phuti karpas, the researchers collected samples from in and around Kapasia, an island in the Meghna river. “DNA analysis showed a 70% match with one of the samples,” says Islam. So they started cultivating it on small patches in Kapasia and along the Meghna, in an attempt to replicate soil and climate conditions as closely as possible.
The first crop of this new phuti karpas was harvested in 2017. “But we weren’t able to produce high quality yarn immediately because the spinners, traditionally Hindu women, had long since left the region,” say Islam.
So the team brought the raw cotton to India and had it spun at a type of manual spinning machine called the ambar charkha, traditionally used in Murshidabad, West Bengal. Over and over, in India and Bangladesh, the yarn kept snapping at the loom. They could not get the weave fine enough. “Static electricity was building up because of the dry weather, so we had to use humidifiers and temperature gauges,” says Islam.
It took four months to produce a sari with a thread count of 300; eight months to reach a count of 400. The team has hit 500, but only for a few inches.
“It’s mainly because we are still learning to work with such fine yarn. It’s maddening in some ways,” says Islam, laughing. “I suspect this is as fine as we will go.”
If they can cross a thread count of 1,000, a new cycle could begin. And the world could finally have an answer to the mystery of just how they did it, all those years ago.