Muslin
[6][7] In the latter half of the 18th century, muslin weaving ceased in Bengal due to cheap fabrics from England and oppression by the colonialists.
[10] The dictionary Hobson Jobson published by two Englishmen named S.C. Burnell and Henry Yule mentions that the word muslin comes from 'Mosul'—a famous trading center and city in Iraq.
The earliest specimen of Indian fine cotton cloth (like muslin) was found in Egypt as a mummy shroud around 2000 BC.
[11] Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveler who came to Bengal in the middle of the 14th century, praised the cotton cloth made in Sonargaon in his book The Rihla.
The main muslin production centers in Bengal during this period were Dhaka and its surrounding areas, Shantipur, Malda and Hooghly.
Mughal Emperor Akbar's courtier, Abul Fazal, praised the fine cotton fabric produced in Sonargaon (near Dhaka).
Abul Fazl wrote "the Sarkar of Sonargaon produces a species of muslin very fine and in great quantity".
Advaitacharya Goswami's Shantipur Parichaẏa, Volume II mentions that the East India Company purchased £150,000 worth of muslin annually in the early 19th century.
It has been alleged that in some instances Indian weavers were rounded up and their thumbs chopped off, although this has been refuted by historians as a misreading of a report by William Bolts from 1772.
The quality, fineness and production volume of Bengali muslin declined as a result of these policies, continuing when India transitioned from Company rule to British Crown control.
Under the patronage of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Kalicharan Sharma took the lead in reviving the lost fame of muslin in Basowa, Birbhum district of West Bengal, with the help of some spinners.
Later he shifted his work center to the neighboring district of Murshidabad, and chose Chowk Islampur as the site of this weaving industry.
Chowk Islampur, situated on the banks of the Bairab River, a tributary of the Padma, is an ancient village famous for spinning and weaving since the days of the East India Company.
To concentrate on muslin spinning, the Khadi Society constructed a separate spacious two-storied building at Berhampore in 1966.
Through this project, weavers from Murshidabad, Nadia, Maldah, Burdwan, Birbhum, Hooghly and Jhargram districts who are capable of weaving muslin cloth were identified.
Muslin products produced in West Bengal include handkerchiefs, dhoti, bed sheets and men's and women's clothing.
Old maps of the Meghna River were examined and combined with modern satellite imagery to identify possible locations – where phuti carpus plants could still be found.
An island in the Meghna, 30 km north of Dhaka, was selected for the production of this corpus, where some seeds were sown experimentally in 2015, and the first cotton was harvested that year.
As a result, in joint venture with Indian spinners, a hybrid yarn of 200 and 300 count was produced by combining common and futi corpus cotton.
[25][26] In 2022, the Dhakai Muslin House was built on the banks of Shitalakshya river at Rupganj under Tarab municipality of Narayanganj district.
[29][30][31] Gaius Petronius Arbiter (1st century AD Roman courtier and author of the Satyricon) described the transparent nature of the muslin cloth as below:[32] Thy bride might as well clothe herself with a garment of the wind as stand forth publicly naked under her clouds of muslin.Certain delicate muslins were given poetic names such as Baft Hawa ("woven air"), Shabnam ("evening dew"), and āb-i-ravān ("flowing water").
It is often used to create nighttime scenes because when dyed, it often gets a wavy look with the color varying slightly, such that it resembles a night sky.
In the early days of silent film-making, and until the late 1910s, movie studios did not have the elaborate lights needed to illuminate indoor sets, so most interior scenes were sets built outdoors with large pieces of muslin hanging overhead to diffuse sunlight.
Surgeons use muslin gauze in cerebrovascular neurosurgery to wrap around aneurysms or intracranial vessels at risk for bleeding.
In 2013, the traditional art of Jamdani weaving in Bangladesh was included in the list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
