How it began
Dhaka muslin was made in and around Dhaka and Sonargaon, in present-day Bangladesh, from a cotton that grew along the Meghna river and is known locally as phuti karpas. The techniques were developed over a very long time. A 9th century Arab merchant, Sulaiman, described a kingdom in Bengal that produced cotton cloth so fine that a piece could be drawn through a ring.
How it works
The short, easily frayed fibers of phuti karpas could not be handled by ordinary methods, so local people used a long series of steps to clean, spin and weave them. Thread was spun to counts of 300 and above, and the cloth was woven by hand at very high thread counts. The yield was tiny: about eight grams of fine muslin from one kilogram of cotton. The result was light and almost transparent.
How it spread
The cloth was traded across the world long before it reached European fashion. In the 17th and 18th centuries Mughal Bengal was the leading exporter of muslin, with Dhaka as the center of the trade. It was shown in Britain at the Great Exhibition of 1851. European buyers found it hard to believe that it had been made by human hands.
Who pushed back
The design historian Sonia Ashmore told the BBC that the trade was built up and destroyed by the British East India Company. The company replaced the weavers' usual customers, pressed them for output and drove them into debt. Cheaper machine-made muslin from Britain, woven from ordinary cotton at lower thread counts, then took the market. By the early 20th century Dhaka muslin had disappeared, the method was forgotten and phuti karpas was thought extinct. Of about 28 varieties of muslin, jamdani is the one still widely woven.
Where it stands today
From 2013 the Dhaka organization Drik led a project that found a plant with a 70 percent genetic match to phuti karpas, grew it on a riverbank and wove a hybrid thread with Indian spinners. Dhakai Muslin was registered as a Geographical Indication product of Bangladesh in 2020.
