Handcraft as luxury in Bangladesh: Weaving jamdani in the twenty-first century

The practice of making things by hand in the Indian subcontinent is centuries old. Many, if not most, artefacts were handcrafted until the late twentieth century and some are still. From handwoven textiles made from handspun and hand-dyed cloth, printed and embroidered by hand; to brass water pots beaten out by hand, making a deafening noise, and handloom carpet weaving in the Indian town of Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Many of these crafts and their associated livelihoods are now almost extinct or under threat (Radzan 2007). By the late seventeenth century, Bengal in Western India had become the centre of a worldwide silk and cotton textile trade, notably in the largescale hand production of muslin and jamdani – exceptionally fine plain and figured woven cottons made specifically in the area around Dhaka, capital of independent Bangladesh since 1971. In the late eighteenth century, Dhaka, then part of Bengal, also had royal workshops devoted to producing fine cotton muslins exclusively for royal consumption (Latif 1997: 43). A length of Mulmul khas, or ‘special muslin’, measuring 22 yards by one yard (20.11 × 0.91 metres) took up to six months to weave. It could only be made when the air was moist enough to prevent the fibres from breaking. With a drastic decline in fine handweaving, however, the exceptional textile traditions of Bangladesh today are precarious. This article focuses on the situation of jamdani weaving, indigenous to a specific geographical area now in Bangladesh; it argues that the survival of traditional muslin and jamdani making has to be considered not as a ‘folk craft’, but as the production of the refined luxury fabric it was historically. While there are other traditional textiles being made by hand in Bangladesh today, this short article will focus on the handweaving of jamdani.