Petals in the Air

Jamdani and the winds of change

Guest edited by MAP ACADEMY

Jamdani is a patterned, hand-woven muslin textile from the Bengal region known for its extraordinary fineness and floral or geometric motifs woven using the extra-weft technique. Historically associated with the region of present-day Dhaka in Bangladesh, and often called Dhaka muslin, jamdani dates back to at least the fourth century BCE in the Indian subcontinent in an early form. Its production flourished under Tughlaq and Mughal patronage between the 14th and 18th centuries. Alongside plain Dhaka muslin, jamdani became an extremely valuable trade commodity from at least the 17th century, and its popularity in Europe during British colonial rule led to the proliferation of machine-made imitations there. These, combined with harsh British policies prohibiting the domestic production of cloth in colonial India and later the movement of artisans across newly drawn political borders, caused a decline in traditional jamdani weaving. Revived in the late 20th century, traditionally woven and machine-made jamdani is most popularly used for saris in contemporary Bengal.

One of the earliest references to a jamdani-like textile appears in 300 BCE in the writings of Megasthenes, an Ancient Greek historian and diplomat in Chandragupta Maurya’s (r. 321-297 BCE) court, who mentions Indians wearing “flowered garments of the finest muslin.” Muslin from the Bengal region is also mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit treatise Arthashastra, written by Chanakya in the third century BCE, and the first-century CE Greco-Roman manuscript Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which refers to a “Gangetic cotton.”

The decorative geometric motifs such as floral sprays that are characteristic of the jamdani today are believed to have been the influence of Persian artisans who arrived at the Delhi Sultanate during the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq (r. 1324-51). The name jamdani is also considered of Persian origin. However, its etymology is speculative, alluding to its floral characteristic as a “flower vase” or its intoxicating quality as a “wine receptacle”. The craft flourished to its peak under the patronage of Mughal rulers in the 17th century. Forbidden by religion from wearing silk, Mughal emperors saw Dhaka muslin as an equally luxurious alternative and patronised the production of extremely fine and intricately patterned jamdani. Under the Mughals, the Dhaka looms produced jamdani textiles woven at thread counts as high as 800 to 1200, indicating the number of threads in a square inch of the fabric; jamdani weaves of today generally have a thread count no higher than 100. Some striking visual records of the jamdani’s imperial popularity appear in the portraits of emperors such as Jahangir (r. 1605-27), who is often depicted wearing floral jamdani patkas (a long, embroidered sash worn around the waist that was an essential part of Mughal male attire).

Historically, the fibres of a particular variant of tree cotton (Gossypium arboreum) known as phuti karpas (G. arboreum var. neglecta) have been used to make the muslin for jamdani weaves. Now extinct, the plant is said to have grown only along the banks of the Meghna River in and around Dhaka, and its fibres were incredibly delicate and short, rendering it unsuitable for spinning into ordinary cotton yarn. The raw cotton was cleaned using a fine comb fashioned from the jawbone of a local fish and processed in a number of steps devised specifically to spin this variety of cotton.

These fibres had the peculiar property of shrinking rather than expanding on absorbing moisture – making them stronger and thereby making it possible to spin into yarn when wet. So the yarn was spun in humid conditions during the early mornings and evenings, and the spinners worked surrounded by bowls of water on the riverside or boats moored on the river. Girls and young women were considered best suited for the task because of their nimble fingers and sharp vision, as the fibres were too fine to be worked by older people. From the yarn spun in these specialised conditions, weavers of the region were able to create a fabric of such unusual lightness that it earned epithets such as baft hawa – Persian and Urdu for “woven air” – and led to myths that it was the creation of mermaids or fairies on the Meghna River.

Whilst the muslin yarn for jamdani was traditionally spun by Hindus, some of whom wove plain muslin, jamdani weaving has been mainly done by Muslims of the Julaha weaving community, who are also known as jamdani tantis, or weavers (from the Odia for loom – tanta). Each part of the intricate spinning and weaving process was the specialisation of a different local community or group. At various points in subsequent centuries, the tradition travelled to other parts of India through the movement of artisans.


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