With wooden spinning wheels and hand-drawn looms, Bangladesh is painstakingly resurrecting a fabric once worn by Marie Antoinette and Jane Austen, but long thought forever lost to history.
Dhaka muslin was stitched from threads so fine that popular folklore in European parlors held that a change in the light or a sudden rain shower would render its wearer apparently naked.
The textile once brought magnificent riches to the lands where it was spun.
Photo: AFP
However, to revive it, botanists had to hunt halfway across the world and back for a plant believed gone from the face of the Earth.
“Nobody knew how it was made,” said Ayub Ali, a senior government official helping shepherd the revival project.
“We lost the famous cotton plant, which provided the special fine yarn for Dhaka muslin,” he told reporters.
The muslin trade at one time helped turn the Ganges Delta and what is now Bangladesh into one of the most prosperous parts of the world, historians say. Flowing dress garments weaved from the cloth were worn by generations of the Mughal Dynasty then ruling India, before the fabric enchanted European aristocrats and other notables at the end of the 18th century.
A muslin shawl belonging to Austen — supposedly hand-embroidered by the Pride and Prejudice author herself — is on display at her former home in Hampshire, England, while a 1783 portrait of Marie Antoinette depicts the French queen in a muslin dress.
However, the industry collapsed in the years after the 18th century conquest of the Bengal Delta by the East India Company, paving the way for British colonial rule.
The mills and factories that sprung up in England after the industrial revolution produced much cheaper textiles, while European tariffs killed the foreign market for the delicate fabric.
The quest to bring back Bangladeshi muslin began with a painstaking five-year search for the specific flower used to weave the fabric, which only grows near the capital, Dhaka.
“Muslin can’t be woven without Phuti Carpus cotton. So to revive Dhaka Muslin, we needed to find this rare and possibly extinct cotton plant,” said Monzur Hossain, the botanist who led the effort.
His team consulted a seminal book on plants by the 18th century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus along with a later historical tome on Dhaka muslin to narrow down a candidate among 39 different wild species collected from across Bangladesh. With local museums lacking any specimen of Dhaka muslin clothing, Hossain and his colleagues went to India, Egypt and the UK for samples.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, curators showed them hundreds of pieces imported from Mughal-era Dhaka by East India Company merchants.
Genetic samples revealed that the missing plant was already in their hands, found by the botanists in the riverside town of Kapasia north of the capital.
“It was a 100 percent match, and some history books say Kapasia was one of the places where Phuti Carpus was grown,” Hossain told reporters.
The plant is now being grown in experimental farms in an effort to raise yields and scale up production.
However, the revival project immediately ran into another roadblock — finding weavers nimble enough to weave the plant’s ultra-fine threads.
In the two centuries since the muslin trade collapsed, Bangladesh has again become a world textile hub, albeit with an industry no longer catering to royalty or other international elites. Instead Dhaka is now home to countless bustling factories of the global fast fashion trade, supplying huge brands such as H&M and Walmart, with its US$35 billion in yearly apparel exports second only to China.
The country has no shortage of garment workers, but the muslin project needed to source artisans from the small cottage industry of spinners and weavers working with fragile threads. They found candidates from villages around Dhaka where small workshops make intricate saris from jamdari, a fine cotton produced in a similar way to muslin.
“I don’t how I did it, but it needs supreme concentration,” said Mohsina Akhter, one of the spinners brought into the project. “To do it you have to be in perfect mind. If you are angry or worried, you can’t hand-spin such a fine yarn.”
It took months for the team to master the craft, working with threads four or more times finer than jamdari, with two people taking eight hours of non-stop labor to weave an inch or less of cloth.
“It is like doing prayers. You need to have full concentration. Any lapse will tear up the yarn and set your work backwards,” said Abu Taher, a weaver.
“The more I work, the more I wonder how our ancestors wove such a fine clothing. It is almost impossible,” he told reporters.
The intense labor needed means that any garments stitched from Dhaka muslin will always remain a boutique product, but the government has found some tentative interest from established industry players.
“We want to make it a top global fashion item. It has a great history,” said Parvez Ibrahim, whose family owns a factory supplying global fashion retailers.
“But to bring down cost, we have to speed up the production process. Otherwise, reviving Dhaka muslin won’t mean anything,” he told reporters.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the