For children: How the delicate made-in-India muslin fabric inspired the freedom movement

Made-in-India fabric has been renowned across the world for a long time. The skilled artisans of the country could weave many ornamental fabrics with silk. Textile trade with distant lands like Greece and Rome was carried out through sea routes from the 1st century AD. An anonymous Greek sailor wrote a book titled Periplus of the Erythraean Sea around the middle of the 1st century, in which he wrote of textile trade with various regions of India. His writings reveal that a fine silk fabric used to be made in Gujarat. There was a port at the mouth of the Narmada River, in Barygaza (today’s Bharuch) of Gujarat, from where silk used to be exported to the West. The cloth trade flourished in the Ter and Paithan areas of Maharashtra too. Archaeologists have found several ancient vats for dying fabrics in these areas. The Greek sailor’s book also mentions muslin from Bengal. A special kind of cotton, known locally as phooti karpash, was cultivated on the banks of the Meghna River, and from it the skilled weavers of Dhaka and its surrounding villages made expensive muslin garments. Beginning two thousand years earlier, muslin trade continued till the arrival of the...

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