On a crisp early winter morning, I stepped into a spacious handloom facility in the semi-urban landscape of Tarabo. Situated on the banks of the Shitalakshya River, the air around the facility was alive with the rhythmic clackety-clack and melodic plink, plink of charkhas and weaving looms. Trained artisans were busy weaving magic, employing dozens of hand-cranked spinning wheels and traditional looms.
Here, in the heart of Rupganj, not far from the capital, Dhaka, men and women are labouring to breathe life into a government-led revival of one of our most storied heritages: the world-famous Dhaka Muslin.
Muslin—celebrated in the travelogues of explorers such as Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo—had teetered on the edge of oblivion for nearly 200 years. Following the decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of European factory-made textiles produced at an industrial scale, the art was almost lost to time.
When the Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta visited Bengal nearly 700 years ago, he marvelled at the luxury of the local cotton. By the Mughal era, this fabric had reached such a pinnacle of fineness and translucency that it came to be known as baft-hawa—“woven air”.
Historical accounts suggest these breathable, soft-touch textiles were exported as far as Mosul in modern-day Iraq. This trade led the Venetian merchant Marco Polo to believe the cloth originated there, eventually naming the fabric “muslin” after the city of Mosul.
Seeking to reclaim this legacy, in recent years the Bangladesh government launched an experimental facility on the outskirts of Dhaka: the House of Dhaka Muslin.
I arrived on a late January morning, eager to witness the alchemy of Phuti Karpas—a cotton plant long thought extinct but recently rediscovered and cultivated specifically to fuel this revival.
Unlike modern long-staple cotton, Phuti Karpas produces short, silky and incredibly strong fibres.
In the courtyard, the plants stood ready for the upcoming harvest. Nearby, a group of jovial children played; they had come to visit their mothers—the master artisans—before heading off to school.
Inside the production shed, dozens of women were hand-spinning the cotton into threads of remarkable tensile strength. Traditional spinning wheels hummed as bobbins filled steadily with yarn.
At the next station, others were busy starching and sizing the yarn, preparing it for the looms, where weavers create iconic aniconic motifs and intricate designs.
It was pure magic to watch the maku—a small, boat-shaped wooden shuttle—fly back and forth, carrying the weft through the warp. The process is a symphony of sound: the firm, drum-like thwack of the beater pushing yarn into place, and the clinking rattle of harnesses and heddles. To many weavers, this mechanical rhythm is meditative—a centuries-old lullaby guiding the thread’s journey into fabric.
Before leaving, I visited the adjacent display centre. There, I witnessed the legendary “ring test”—a full muslin cloth passing effortlessly through a narrow finger ring, proving its ethereal lightness. When I asked my guide—a staffer involved in the Dhaka Muslin revival initiative—when we might see these muslins produced commercially, he explained that plans are underway to transition the project to private entrepreneurs.
As I watched a documentary detailing the government’s journey—from the scientific search for Phuti Karpas seeds to the training of a new generation of weavers—it became clear: the “woven air” of Dhaka is no longer a relic of the past. Its glory has finally returned.