The story of the lost ancient fabric

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I'm from Dhaka and have been fascinated with Muslin all my life. The sad thing is there are ancient fabrics disappearing every day. Rajshahi silk is gone, as is real Tussore and even proper khadi. One thing you perhaps skipped either for the sake of time or to avoid sensation is that in line with the Calico Acts the production of fabric was outlawed in India. Raw cotton was grown, harvested and shipped to Manchester where it was spun into very crude industrial cloth and shipped back to be sold to natives who initially had no interest in buying it. The solution was to ban spinning and weaving, a ban enforced by removing the thumbs of anyone caught with a wheel or a loom in their posession. You may recall that one of Mahatma Gandhi's first acts of rebellion was to spin cloth at a wheel. This was an urbane chap, a trained lawyer who wore suits but when he became a freedom activist he learned first to spin and weave his own cloth and for the rest of his life that was all he would ever wear. Today the spinning wheel is at the centre of India's flag. All because the Calico Acts were so emblematic of (greater) India's subjugation. Secondly cultivation of carpas was replaced by the British with jute and in some places indigo. They had no use for carpas cotton because their mills couldn't use it and its continued cultivation posed a threat to their monopoly. These two reasons, banning the local manufacture of cloth and destroying the plant are the main reasons why Muslin disappeared and as for the 16 steps, Saiful Islam's team eventually concluded that there was something missing. Perhaps as some small act of resistance, the workers had not revealed all of their secrets to their overlords. Want to know what I consider poetic justice? Bangladesh has come back today as the world's largest manufacturer of clothing (bar China of course, the anomalous outlier in every industry).

I'll sum up: the British took over production (despite not having the know-how) and chopped off the hands of or killed the craftspeople who were making it in India, thus removing all knowledge of how to produce such fine linens.

😊A good quality chemise could reportedly be drawn through a wedding ring. That is incredibly fine fabric.

Fun fact from a Bangladeshi, cotton clothes were so oppressive to British wool that the East India Company resorted to destroying looms & cutting of the thumbs of the weavers which were used to operate the looms.

Dhaka Muslin is making its comeback here in Bangladesh and hopefully soon around the world.

You don't mention that many of the Indian artisans were actually put out of work by cutting off their fingers in order for the English manufacturing to get ahead. It was a horrible, cruel time.

It's not true that longer fibers were more appropriate for industrially produced fabric, across the board. Flax plants were actually bred to have shorter fibers, because the fine, long, thin fibers would break in the machines, so that the linen we have today is coarser than linen that was available pre-industrialization. (Kristine Vike has a good video on that.) Good video, though!

I knew the story, but not with the happier ending. How great is it that someone actually took it upon himself to bring this fabric and cotton plant back? In my opinion he’s a hero. Loved this video. Very well put together. Thank you for sharing this.

I work in textile manufacturing; this is absolutely fascinating. The thread count gives you that real sense of how difficult that could have been just to simply engineer it.

It’s not just the fashion industry that is obsessed with cost cutting. Greed and stupidity abound across all industries. Boeing springs to mind.

We were taught in fashion design that the Romans would take imported Chinese silk, unweave it and reweave it into a more sheer version, to increase profit on the rare product. Then someone snuck silk worms out and the silk industry spread.

As one who spins fine yarns/thread (and does a lot of fiber based arts/crafts) the shorter fibers would be easier for traditional hand spinning of cotton. The crimp or physical twisty structure of the fiber may also be a contributing factor in how fine the cotton can be spun and remained strong. The smoother the fiber the more likely it will be to not create a strong thread - you'll need more fibers or a mix to keep things together while spinning. I do hope that the plant gets stable and widespread enough for folks like me to get fiber to spin for ourselves. There are many of us out there all over the world that keep traditional fiber arts alive and well. There are other threads and fibers that were used in lacemaking and clothing that have also been lost or can't be reproduced as fine as they were hundreds of years ago. This gives me hope.

I come from a family from Dhaka which used to deal in muslin. Please refer to the pages of history, the main reason of death of Dhaka muslin was entirely different. When the Britishers found that their British textile was unable to compete with Dhaka muslin, one day all the master muslin weavers of Dhaka were assembled and their thumbs were chopped off. Since the muslin weavers' finesse depended on their ability to feel the threads with their thumbs, this gory 'operation' by the British ensured that these ' master weavers could no longer create their master pieces. This actually brought an end to the famous Dhaka muslin.

That fabric sounds so lovely - what an interesting story. I hope they will be able to re-create it. I'm not at all surprised that the fabric disappeared because of greed. Time and time again, corporate greed has resulted in substantially inferior products and services for consumers -- and massive suffering for their underpaid, overworked, expendable employees.

I feel like this would be very interesting to the historical costuming community, thank you for sharing!

Thank you for telling this story. My whole life, I heard about how ppl from my village lost their hands to the british and heard my elders tell stories about how the beautiful and fine this fabric was. My great grandmother had a Muslin saree she cherished so much that was so fine that you could fold it into the size of a match box! Such a shame we lost such important work and history

Love learning about different fibers. As someone allergic to polyester and synthetic materials I’ve gained more of an appreciation of different fibers and knowing the history really puts more into perspective thank you.

As a quilter, I love learning about other textiles. I don’t participate in fast fashion, and I think it’s a real shame that ancient threads, fabrics and sewing techniques are disappearing. Thank you for making this video; bringing it back to life!

The fine ancient fabric contrasts with the common modern perception of our ancestors running around in dirty rags.