Three days ago, I had a friendly argument with a shopkeeper who was trying, with an alarming amount of confidence, to sell me mercerized cotton as muslin. He’s a good man. A friend even. And the cotton was, objectively, very high quality. But it wasn't muslin. I spent twenty minutes trying to convince him, but I failed. You can’t win an argument against someone who sells you clothes you wear.
I went home and let my brain wheel spin because I was so annoyed. When we say cotton (the non-stretch one), we usually refer to Cambric. It is a fine, plain-weave cloth made in a factory. It is slightly glazed often. And I am quite fond of it. Most of our Kalamkaris and Ajrakhs use cambric quite regularly (Even the digital ones).
I understand that most people don't know poplin from cambric because it’s not important to them. But I find it incredibly important to maintain the nomenclature of fabric to the finest detail I can. Textiles are important to me. I didn't do a graduation in fashion, but you learn a thing or two about fabric when you're selling it. I have simply resorted to the fact that I need as much detail about the process and story of textiles that people do about their neighbours or colleagues. If I lose the precision of the words, I might as well lose the integrity of the textile.
Real Muslin, our OG textile, named Mulmul by Bengal, came from the Phuti karpas, a temperamental little plant that only wanted to grow in the silt of the Meghna River. I am certain that it only wanted to grow there because numerous attempts were made to cultivate it elsewhere, for it to fail. It was never the same as the one on the banks of Meghna River (in Now Dhaka).
Most cotton seeds swell up when they hit water, but this Phuti Karpas flattens and shrinks. This quirk of biology gave the thread its strength, allowing it to be spun into counts that would snap any other fibre.
To separate these fibres, you needed fingers that were nimble and quick and hadn't been hardened. They tasked young women with it, and it could only happen at dusk or dawn, when the air was heavy with moisture. If the air got too dry, the fibre became brittle and just... snapped. Lore says they used to sing while doing it, and I like to imagine those riverbanks reverberating with songs of joy and grief while the rest of the world was still asleep. It’s the ultimate irony: we now have machines that can do a thousand things, but they can't replicate the lives of women singing in the fog.
Then they combed the fiber using a Boalee fish jaw. A catfish. It has thousands of tiny, needle-fine teeth. Since it was delicate enough to clean the cotton without destroying it.
It took fifty specialized tools and a level of effort just to "weave air."
Muslin obviously became a global obsession because it was ethereally beautiful, sheer enough to be called "woven wind." In England, it was once more expensive than silk.
The Mughals, who knew how to live in 45-degree heat without losing their minds, gave it names like Shabnam (Evening Dew), Abrawan (Flowing Water), and Nayansukh (Pleasing to the eye). The Greeks, the Romans, the Japanese, everyone wanted a piece of the Bengal mist.
I read recently that in Dhaka, they practically had to hold an exhibition to remind people that this wasn't a myth. The industry was systematically dismantled by colonial policies that wanted us to buy machine-made polyester instead.
In India, real Muslin is still more expensive than Cambric. Partially because it is handwoven and it is superior in quality. Mulmul and Mangoes are usually my cue that summer heat has begun. The main question remains, will i argue with you if you misname a fabric? Chances are high. This isn't because of holding any superior moral ground of textile taxonomy but because if we don't etch these names in our language, if we manage to forget what we call them, we may forget our way back to the river bank.