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 British.

Everyone marvelled at the muslin. Weaving fabric from cotton was no simple task. The work had to be done slowly because of the fear of the thread snapping. Plus, it took a long time. Combs made with the slender teeth of the helicopter catfish, were used to clean the cotton. After this, the thread had to be extracted with great care, a task that women usually performed. This needed a moisture-laden wind, which made the thread stronger. So, the women did their work either during the monsoon, or in boats floating mid-river. Several more steps were needed before the thread could be woven into stunning saris and tunics. The fabric was so fine and light that some referred to it as baft-hawa or woven air. Some even claimed it could be passed through a ring.

Muslin was in great demand among the kings and queens of various countries. Beginning with trade with ancient Greece and Rome, the fame of muslin spread slowly through the royal courts of Europe. Arab traders began doing business with India in the 8th century AD, after which muslin was exported to Basra and Baghdad (in present-day Iraq). The fabric was such a favourite of the Mughal emperors that the muslin industry expanded greatly during their times. There are many paintings to be found from this period depicting Mughal badshahs and begums dressed in exquisite muslin clothes. It was no less popular among the royal families of England and France. It is said that in the 18th century, Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, had a portrait painted in a muslin gown. It caused a scandal in French society – imagine the queen of the country dressed in such transparent fabric! But no matter what the critics said, the popularity of muslin kept mounting.

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The fabric fell upon bad times from the 18th century onwards. In 1780, there was a terrible famine in Dhaka. The French Revolution of 1789 had sent Europe into a state of instability, which drove down sales of muslin. Meanwhile, by that time, the East India Company had established a base in India. Their objective was to increase the sales of fabrics made in their own country. They lowered the price they paid the muslin weavers of India, who had to borrow money to make a living. This forced them to join other trades.

Fabric and textiles played a leading role in the history of the British colonisation of India and oppression of Indians in various ways, followed by the struggle for independence from British rule. European traders used to come to India as far back as the 15th century to buy textiles here and sell them back home. The British East India Company grew to be the most powerful among them. In 1757, they defeated Shiraz-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, in the Battle of Plassey and annexed Bengal. Alongside trade, they extracted the rights to collect taxes on land. A company of traders turned into rulers. They took control of laws and law-making, and the road to plundering India’s resources became simpler. From 1760 onwards, the Industrial Revolution led to hundreds of mills and factories being set up across England. In 1764, the spinning jenny was invented. It was a machine used to make fabrics from cotton or wool much more quickly than by hand. Manufacturing more fabric in a shorter time at lower prices meant making more profits than before.

The Industrial Revolution took place in a country six thousand miles away, and the people of colonised countries like India had to pay a price for it. To ensure that the textiles and garments industry flourished in their own country, the British began to send raw materials like cotton to England from India. That wasn’t all, they also knew that huge profits could be made by selling clothes from their own factories in a vast market like India. So, the British began selling garments manufactured in England at low prices in the Indian market. At the same time, they imposed high taxes on the weavers making clothes in India. Of course, it wasn’t as though the entire garments industry collapsed overnight in every part of such a large country. But the muslin industry of Dhaka, which made expensive fabric and clothes, received a setback before any of the others. Looms did manage to survive for a long time in small towns and villages, but the overall economy of the country began to crumble. Eventually, made-in-Britain textiles swamped the Indian market. Many began buying them because, on the one hand, they were cheap. On the other, the tastes of one section of society began to change, and they gave up Indian clothes in favour of Western ones.

Castigating the British government, the Indian leaders said Great Britain had grown rich by robbing India, while the colonised country had continuously grown poorer. The British had destroyed India’s cottage industry of homespun fabrics and garments. The echoes of this criticism grew into the freedom movement in Bengal.

Excerpted with permission from ‘Clothing and Attire’ by Dev Kumar Jhanjh and Debarati Bagchi in The People Of India: A Remarkable History in 9 Chapters, edited by Anwesha Sengupta and Debarati Bagchi, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, Talking Cub.

Disclosure: Arunava Sinha is the editor of Books and Ideas section of Scroll.