‘Woven air': Ancient fabric spun across history makes comeback amid lies and climate change

Straits Times

11-07-2025

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Mr Peter Lee, a textile collector, has many 18th and 19th century muslin fabrics. Here, he holds a modern muslin sari he bought from Bangladesh's revival project.
The sari was gorgeous, sheer – and dubious. The advertisement said it was made of muslin, an elegant, luxuriously soft cotton fabric once favoured by Mughal and European queens.
Dr Pritha Dasmahapatra was intrigued: At 2,000 rupees (S$30), this would be a steal. But how was it possible?
This 46-year-old obstetrician from London and textile hobbyist, who grew up in Kolkata, India, has loved saris for as long as she can remember. She knew that muslin was a rare and exotic fabric, often called 'woven air' for its transparency and lightness. She also knew that it had many impostors.
Muslin was a wonder-cloth from erstwhile Bengal – now split between Bangladesh and West Bengal in India – patronised by Mughal royalty, worn by Roman nobles, loved by French queen Marie Antoinette and embroidered by author Jane Austen. Its sheerness was its glamour; it could famously pass through a ring but was so strong that a needle could not easily pierce it.
But the growing global demand for this miraculous fabric also led to its demise. Fine handwoven muslin vanished in the late 18th century, edged out by machine-made imitations in England and the extinction of the fragile indigenous cotton plant in the incessant floods of Dhaka. Expert spinners and weavers fell to debt bondage and the Indian census of 1901 says that many abandoned the loom for the plough.
So what is the muslin out there in the markets today?
In Singapore, baby swaddles, soft but thick, are sold as muslin. In the US, some people call thin cheesecloth or jam strainers muslin. It is thought in Europe to be the backdrop in photo studios. But these could not possibly be the same material that had enthralled the world's elite for a century.
Was muslin truly gone then, or was it hiding in plain sight? Dr Dasmahapatra had found a mystery she desperately needed to solve.
Finding old muslin
The hunt for answers took her to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2022 , where she had completed a course on the textiles of South Asia some years earlier . The museum has an enviable collection of colonial-era muslin and, at Dr Dasmahapatra's request, the curator brought out four categories of muslin from the mid-1800s.
They had to be run on one's fingers – it was the only way to know the real deal.
'It was unlike any fabric I have ever touched – until then or since,' Dr Dasmahapatra told The Straits Times, adding that even average-grade muslin from the 1800s felt 'more luxurious than the best cotton we are used to today'.
The finest muslin, the mulmul khas reserved for royalty, was so translucent and weightless that she understood why court poets described it as morning dew. She could barely feel it on her skin.
It was so airy not because muslin is a loose weave, but because it is densely packed with the finest, thinnest yarn – the kind that is still impossible to make in cloth mills or automated looms. The threads came from the cotton plant Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta – locally known as phuti karpas – that once grew near the Meghna river near Dhaka city , and gave the fabric its lightness and tensile strength .
Thousands of spinners – mostly women – and weavers from undivided Bengal used their skill, eagle-eyes and dextrous fingers to turn this brittle raw cotton into the finest quality fabric in the world in at least 16 time-consuming steps.
'Historic muslin might have had a thread count of at least 1,000 to 1,800 per square inch,' Dr Dasmahapatra said. To compare, a premium cotton shirt from a designer brand today has a thread count of not more than 80 to 100.
'All muslin is transparent and soft, but not everything transparent is muslin,' she added.
Dr Dasmahapatra learnt that muslin wasn't yet another handmade item that had become less perfect with time. Without phuti karpas and highly skilled spinners and weavers, high-quality muslin is legitimately painstaking – and almost impossible – to make today.
But it has not stopped people from trying. Even though the fabric that fell like water over the body is no more, muslin's brand and legend still endure, not just as a promise of textile magic or coveted piece of luxury, but almost as an unreachable ideal.
Dr Pritha Dasmahapatra on one of her research trips from London to villages in West Bengal's weaving zones.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF PRITHA DASMAHAPATRA
Revival in Bangladesh
To some, like Mr Saiful Islam, muslin was a piece of lost heritage that had to be resurrected.
The engineer and former businessman living in London was incensed that the best pieces of Bengal muslin were all stored in museums and private collections outside Bangladesh, where he is from.
'Muslin's story is one of immense attraction and enormous neglect. It was a world fabric once, and it came from Bengal. But we don't have even one sample of 18th-century muslin to our name,' he told ST.
Mr Islam wanted to not only set 'the distorted history' straight but also revive the legendary material.
'I saw it as a symbolic restoration of our identity,' he said , wanting the world to see Bangladesh as beyond a hub for cheap fast fashion and garment sweatshops, and as home to the world's finest craftspeople .
First, the original cotton plant had to be found. No seed sample survived, but he found a pressed phuti karpas plant in London's Kew Gardens, a botanical museum. A small team went to Bangladesh in 2014, searching for look-alikes by boat along the Meghna river , in the areas records show phuti karpas used to grow .
In 2017, they found one wild cotton plant near Dhaka, whose maple-like leaves looked excitingly similar to the painting they had. Genome matching in London and India resulted in a match – 'not a 100 per cent but good enough at 70 per cent'.
Mr Saiful Islam comparing a painting from Kew Gardens of the extinct phuti karpas plant, with a modern day variant in the fields near river Meghna in Bangladesh.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DRIK-BENGAL MUSLIN
Mr Islam's team tried to farm this rare wild cotton and succeeded after a few failed experiments.
With trained master weavers and spinners, his organisation, Bengal Muslin, has been gradually climbing the thread count from 100, 200, 300 to now producing a few grand samples of extremely fine muslin with 400 thread count , some of them even with intricately hand-embroidered jamdani patterns unique to Bangladesh .
Mr Islam calls it 'new muslin'. 'Our idea is not to commercialise muslin or make an industry. It is just to recapture the history and heritage, and recognise the time, artists and talents it takes to create this beautiful item.'
As Mr Islam's grand feat became the toast of textile nerds, in 2022, Singapore's textile collector and researcher Peter Lee quickly bought an off-white 300-count 'new muslin' sari – the highest count at the time.
The honorary curator of the National University of Singapore's Baba House, who has been collecting Asian textiles since the nineties, said he was drawn to muslin due to its 'historical mystique and aesthetic of transparency and fineness' that made it utterly stylish.
The muslin bought from a revival project in Bangladesh by Mr Peter Lee, a textile collector and curator.
ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM
In his collection, Mr Lee has a muslin sari made for the Deccani court with silver embroidery called khamdani, Dhaka jamdani saris made in the 20th century, muslin dresses and scarves exported to Europe in the 18th and 19th century, and even one 19th-century muslin dress made for the Malay world.
'It was so modern to see cotton so fine,' he said. As he learnt more about muslin, Mr Lee said he realised that the storied fabric was a glorious example of 'global connections that defy boundaries'.
Reborn in skilled hands
Across Bangladesh's borders in India, muslin's recent revival is focused on the hands that make it.
In Devipur village in West Bengal's Bardhaman district, Mr Sambhunath Guin stopped the rhythmic clack-clackety-clack of his wooden loom to twist a broken thread of shiny cotton. Readjusting his spectacles, he said dreamily that India had just sent an astronaut from Bengal to space.
'How far man has come! We are doing things that seemed impossible before,' he said.
Mr Guin, 60, and his spinner wife Kuheli, 48, do the impossible for eight to 12 hours daily – they make muslin with a 500 to 550 thread count, arguably the highest in the world right now. Only a handful of people in the world can do this, textile experts told ST.
Weaver Sambhunath Guin and his spinner wife Kuheli Guin are among the few in the world who can expertly make 500-thread count muslin.
ST PHOTO: ROHINI MOHAN
Fine muslin beyond a 200 thread count cannot be spun or woven in machines. Even today, the cotton must be spun in a hand-operated wheel called a charkha , delicate hands and sharp eyes arresting the frequently snapping fibres . Then, a person with decades of skill makes the dense warp and weft on a typical Bengali-style pit loom , starching every few centimetres with a homemade rice gum for durability .
Mr Guin inherited the skill from his father and grandfather , who may have woven muslin for export or local elites . Mrs Guin said the couple work at dawn and through dusk, because cool, humid weather keeps the fibres stuck and high temperatures dry them out.
They are often able to make only a single, perfect metre of plain muslin in a single day.
Today, the Guins are among a handful of artists in the world who produce the highest-quality muslin for the Matiary Kutir Shilpa Pratisthan, a government-certified cooperative that has trained 77 spinners and 35 weavers to make muslin over the past five years.
Unlike their Bangladesh counterpart, Mr Subhasis Chakraborty, the Pratishthan's secretary, said that their weavers and spinners use suvin cotton, an extra-long fibre cotton grown in South India's Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu states.
The cooperative is facilitating the West Bengal government's Project Muslin, an initiative established in 2018 to revive muslin. It has trained around 500 spinners and weavers to make muslin with a higher than 400 thread count , invested in traditional looms and spinning wheels, and expanded muslin's market around the country.
The West Bengal state government has focused its efforts on nine districts including Nadia, Malda, Murshidabad and Santipur, the very regions of Bengal, along with Dhaka, which once wove fine muslin of world renown. In 2024, the Indian government gave muslin from this region a geographical indication tag, which means that only cotton with over 200 thread count from these districts can be called muslin.
'We found some weavers and spinners who have inherited the knowledge of producing muslin – we want to grow their numbers , before more of them quit the trade amid stagnant incomes to work at malls, farms and construction sites ,' said Mr Mridul Haldar, the chief executive of the West Bengal Khadi and Village Industries Board that helms Project Muslin.
What's heartbreaking, though, is that the world's most sought-after muslin artisans like the Guins earn barely 8,000 rupees a month. They are paid around 3,600 rupees for the standard 11 metres of 500-count white muslin, which takes them 15 days to produce.
Living on the edge of poverty, the Guins were forced to take microfinance loans for their two daughters' weddings and their half-built house has been gathering moss for five years as they save up to afford doors, paint and tiles .
The Pratisthan sells the fabric at a wholesale rate of 4,350 rupees per metre. In retail stores in Kolkata, ST found the same fabric sold for 6,000 to 8,000 rupees per metre.
At the Biswa Bangla store in Kolkata's Park Street, a middle-aged woman marvelled at a lemon yellow muslin sari woven with silver embroidery, but when she heard the price – 130,000 rupees – she dropped it like a hot potato. 'For a cotton sari?' she mumbled. A regular cotton sari can cost between 300 and 10,000 rupees.
Muslin today
Muslin is seeing a resurrection today, but the fabric's slow, fussy, handmade essence stands in contrast to our fast, consumerist lives. In that very contrast lies muslin's allure – and its struggle.
Ms Rajeswari Mavuri, who runs the boutique Label Rama in Hyderabad, sources muslin from West Bengal weavers for her well-heeled customers in India and France , for whom handmade spells luxury .
'Very few people understand that handcrafted goods are premium. Hundreds of brands say they are sustainable but use chemical dyes, use polyester or silk threads in muslin yardage, or pass off loosely woven unstarched cotton as muslin,' she said.
Mr Biren Kumar Basak, a national award-winning master weaver from Fulia, who works with muslin specialists to create meenakari jamdani , said: 'There is no shortage of demand or respect for muslin today, but most customers do not want to pay the high rates.
'I can name the 500-count weavers left in Bengal. They are all aged. In 10 years, who knows if anyone will be left to make muslin,' he added.
Several spinners and weavers told ST that they did not want their children to continue the profession.
Mr Badal Rai and his wife Chobi Rai, who make 300 to 400 thread count muslin in Nabadwip, told ST they educated their son 'to get smart enough to get a government job'. Mr Tinku Basak in Fulia in West Bengal worried every time his nine-year-old daughter came to hang around the wooden loom he has spent his lifetime on. 'This is beautiful work, but it is also thankless, low-paying work,' he said.
When customers don't pay the right rates, cheaper versions fill the market.
Dr Dasmahapatra said that ever since muslin made a comeback, she has had a feeling of deja vu.
'Everything we blamed the British for, we are doing today. Muslin ceased to exist because they wanted it cheap and fast, which was not sustainable, leading to weavers being underpaid and overworked, the handwoven stuff losing finesse, and cheap knock-offs filling the pent-up demand. We are repeating that now,' she told ST.
She said stories of muslin revival and curiosity about its famed softness 'are creating Fomo (fear of missing out) among textile lovers, but since most cannot afford real muslin, they buy fake ones'.
A balance between pricing and demand is key to protecting the exclusivity of muslin, she felt.
'Ownership is not the point. Have an interest in the textile, be mesmerised by its beauty , marvel at something that is the pinnacle of human skill . Everyone doesn't need to buy it.'