Muslin

What it is

Muslin is a plain-woven cotton cloth that comes in many weights, from gauzy sheers to coarse sheeting. The celebrated Dhaka cloth was spun from a local cotton called phuti carpus, found only in Bangladesh, on yarn of at least 300 count, so sheer that writers compared it to glass. Old accounts list some 28 varieties of Bengal muslin; jamdani, one of them, is still widely woven today. Because every step was done by hand, a single length could take more than five months, and the finest work was set in the rainy season, when damp air kept the threads supple and few snapped.

A borrowed name

Europeans met the cloth under a name they took from trade. The usual story, recorded in Hobson-Jobson, the dictionary compiled by Henry Yule and S. C. Burnell, traces muslin to Mosul in Iraq, a trading city that made very fine cloth of its own in the 12th century and later, which Arab merchants carried west. Marco Polo described Mosul cloth in 1298. Other scholars point instead to Masulipatnam, now Machilipatnam, a port on India's Coromandel Coast that shipped light cottons to Arab, Persian and European buyers, much as calico recalls Calicut and denim recalls Nîmes. Either way, the name names a marketplace, not the Bengal looms that made the cloth famous.

The Dhaka centuries

Fine cotton was woven in Bengal long before Europe took notice. In the ninth century the Arab merchant Sulaiman al-Tajir described a kingdom there, Ruhma, whose cloth was delicate enough to slip through a ring. Ibn Battuta praised the cloth of Sonargaon in the fourteenth century, and Chinese writers did the same a hundred years later; the Englishman Ralph Fitch, visiting in 1583, ranked Sonargaon's cloth the finest in India. Abul Fazl, a courtier of Akbar, praised the muslin of Sonargaon for its fineness and abundance, and when the Mughal capital moved from Rajmahal to Dhaka in 1610 the city became the hub of Bengal's trade. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Mughal Bengal led the world trade, and the cloth caught on in France before spreading across much of the West.

How it is woven

Every stage was manual. Fibres were cleaned and combed with a boalee, the upper jaw of a catfish, before spinning. Spinners drew out yarn of extraordinary fineness; counts of 300 and more were usual for the Dhaka cloth. Weavers worked in the rainy season, when the damp gave the yarn elasticity and saved it from breaking, and a single piece could occupy them for over five months. At least fifty different tools were needed, and when the craft died out in Bengal those tools vanished with it. Revival teams in Bangladesh had to reconstruct them, working from samples of old cloth held in India and Britain and from the genetic record of the cotton plant itself.

Decline and return

Under the East India Company, British cloth flooded into India and could not outsell Bengal's muslin, so the company turned to policies that suppressed the local industry; weaving all but ceased in the late eighteenth century. Stories that weavers had their thumbs cut off still circulate, but historians have dismissed them as a misreading of a 1772 report by William Bolts. Many weavers fled East Bengal for the eastern districts of West Bengal. India's revival began in the 1950s, when Kalicharan Sharma's six-spindle Ambar Charkha managed 500-count yarn, and West Bengal's Project Muslin, launched in 2013, has weavers reaching 700 counts. Bangladesh declared its fine Dhaka muslin officially revived in April 2022, and Dhakai Muslin gained Geographical Indication status in 2020.

How Muslin is kept

Spinners, ginners and weavers, all working by hand, pass the cloth from stage to stage. Fibres of phuti carpus cotton are cleaned and combed, then spun into very fine yarn, which is woven on handlooms, ideally in the rainy season; one length may take five months. In Bangladesh the Bangladesh Handloom Board oversees the revival: cotton is grown on a Meghna island, spun with Indian partners into 200 and 300 count yarn, and woven near Dhaka, where the Dhakai Muslin House opened at Rupganj in 2022. In West Bengal, trained weavers in seven districts produce muslin up to 700 count.

When and where

Muslin is a craft rather than a dated festival. Traditionally the fine weaving was done in the rainy season, when humid air made the yarn elastic and less likely to snap. In the revival, seeds of the rediscovered cotton were sown on a Meghna island in 2015, the first cotton was harvested that year, and Bangladesh announced the official revival of Dhaka muslin in April 2022.

Bengal is the historic home. Sonargaon, east of Dhaka, produced the finest cloth, and Dhaka grew into the trade's capital; in Central Asia the finest cloth was known simply as Daka, after the city. Today the craft is strongest around Dhaka and Narayanganj in Bangladesh, and in West Bengal, where Chowk Islampur in Murshidabad district spins and weaves.

What Muslin means

To the weavers who rebuilt it, muslin stands for a Bengali skill the world once knew by name and nearly lost under colonial rule. Its return is treated as heritage work rather than commerce: Bangladesh listed Dhakai Muslin as a Geographical Indication in 2020, West Bengal followed with Banglar Muslin in 2024, and UNESCO honoured jamdani weaving in 2013. A new 300-count sari is not yet the old Dhaka cloth, but weavers see it as proof that the thread is unbroken.

Questions people ask about Muslin

See also

Kolhapuri chappalHandcrafted braided leather slip-on sandals from western IndiaIkatA resist-dyeing craft from Southeast Asia, where yarns are tied and dyed before weavingSouth Asian truck artThe craft of painting and adorning cargo trucks and buses across India and Pakistan.PhulkariGeometric and floral threadwork embroidered by Punjabi women on handwoven cotton.

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle
• Legendary fabricDeccan Herald, Article
• The ancient fabric that no one knows how to makeBBC, Article
• Legendary fabricDeccan Herald, Article
• The ancient fabric that no one knows how to makeBBC, Article

• Muslin on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data

It may contain mistakes. Traditions differ from one family, village and community to the next, and the people who keep them know them best. If something is wrong, tell us. Last refreshed 2026-10-08.