Bangladesh used satellites and DNA to bring back a lost cotton
Dhaka muslin was spun from a local cotton called phuti carpus into yarn so fine the cloth looked like glass. When the trade collapsed, the plant vanished too. In the 2010s researchers combed old river maps, satellite images and plant genomes to find a close relative and weave the fabric again.
Muslin simply means plain-woven cotton, ranging from gauzy sheers to rough sheeting, but its finest form came from Bengal. Cloth from Sonargaon, near Dhaka, used yarn of at least 300 count, and a 9th-century Arab merchant described Bengali fabric so delicate a whole piece could slide through a ring. Ibn Battuta praised Sonargaon cloth in the 14th century, and the English traveller Ralph Fitch, visiting in 1583, called it the finest in all India. Weavers worked in the rainy season, when humidity kept threads supple, and a single piece could take more than five months.
The name's origin is disputed. The popular view ties it to Mosul in Iraq, where fine cotton was made from the 12th century and where Marco Polo located muslin in 1298. Some scholars instead point to Masulipatnam, an Indian cotton port, following the habit of naming fabrics after trading hubs, as with calico from Calicut.
After the Mughal governor moved Bengal's capital to Dhaka in 1610, its muslin reached distant markets, and in the 17th and 18th centuries Mughal Bengal led world exports. The cloth became a craze in 18th-century France. Then cheap English fabric and East India Company policies crushed the industry. A popular story that weavers had their thumbs cut off is rejected by historians as a misreading of a 1772 report.
Revival came in stages. In India, Kalicharan Sharma opened a training centre at Chowk Islampur in 1955 and built a six-spindle spinning wheel able to reach 500 count; West Bengal's Project Muslin later found weavers managing 700. In Bangladesh, a plant 70 percent identical to phuti carpus was sown on a Meghna river island in 2015, spun with Indian help into hybrid yarn, and woven on some 50 reinvented tools. Dhakai Muslin gained Geographical Indication status in December 2020, and jamdani weaving joined UNESCO's heritage list in 2013.
Source: Muslin
