Assam silk

What is Assam silk?

Assam silk is not one cloth but three, all reared in the same state: golden muga, white pat and warm eri. Muga comes from a silkworm endemic to Assam that feeds on som and sualu leaves; its thread is glossy, fine and famously durable. Pat, from mulberry-fed worms, is brilliant white or off-white, and its cloth can dry in shadow. Eri, raised on castor leaves, is soft and warm, and because its cocoons are opened only after the moth flies free it is called non-violent silk. Almost every household in Assam keeps a handloom, and Sualkuchi, a town on the Brahmaputra near Guwahati, is the commercial heart of the trade. The silk becomes sarees, traditional Assamese dress, and eri shawls and quilts.

Where does Assam silk come from?

Old Sanskrit texts knew Assam as a silk country. The Ramayana places a 'country of cocoon rearers' on the road east, and the Arthashastra of the 3rd century BC names cloth from Kamrupa whose fibre was 'the colour of butter' and 'as red as the sun', which scholars read as muga. The Kalika Purana records silk draping temple idols in worship. Sericulture probably reached Assam with Tibeto-Burman settlers from China between 3000 and 2000 BC, and traders carried its silk along a route through Burma that joined the main Silk Road in Turkmenistan. In the 7th century, King Bhaskarvarman of Kamrupa sent fine silk cloths to Harshavardhan's coronation. Genetic research traces the silkworms to two homes, the Garo Hills and Dhakuakhana. Sualkuchi itself was founded in the 11th century, when King Dharma Pala settled 26 weaver families from Tantikuchi there.

How is Assam silk made?

Each of the three begins with a different worm. Muga's Antheraea assamensis eats som and sualu leaves; pat's Bombyx textor eats mulberry; eri's Samia cynthia ricini eats castor, and its open-ended cocoons are collected only after the pupa has become a moth. The Arthashastra notes that the fibre was spun while wet. Weaving runs on throw and fly-shuttle handlooms, several lakh across Assam. Most are domestic, making a few metres of cloth for the family; others weave semi-commercially, often for a mahajan who supplies yarn and pays by the piece. In Sualkuchi, wartime demand pushed a few Tanti families into commercial workshops with hired weavers, and a 2002 census counted 13,752 active commercial looms, just over half worked by women hired from outside town.

Colours, motifs and borders

Colour sets the silks apart. Muga comes off the loom a natural gold; in olden times it was also reared as a white variety called Mejankari, and often dyed red with lac. Pat is brilliant white or off-white. Eri is the warm, soft one of the three. Muga was long believed impossible to dye because of low porosity, but that is wrong: it takes colour like any other silk. Hand washed, its lustre increases with every wash, and the cloth very often outlives its owner.

How Assam silk is worn

Silk clothing from Assam has been prized since ancient times; the 7th-century Harshacharita describes ksoma cloth from Kamrupa as luminous as an autumn moon. Today the yarn is woven into sarees and traditional Assamese dress. Most weaving still happens at home: families across the state weave a few metres for their own use, while Sualkuchi supplies the market, its cloth holding high social value inside and outside Assam. Eri, warm and soft, is most loved as shawls and quilts.

When Assam silk is worn

The oldest recorded use is sacred. The Kalika Purana, dated between the 10th and 11th centuries, tells how the idols at the Dikkarvasini pitha, the Tamreswari temple at Sadiya, were draped in red, yellow and white wild silk during worship of the deities. Outside the temple, silk belongs to everyday Assamese life: handlooms sit in homes across the state, and Sualkuchi's weavers supply the market. Muga is kept and treasured for a lifetime, very often outlasting its owner.

Styles of Assam silk

The name covers three distinct silks. Muga, the golden fibre, is made nowhere but Assam and has become so tied to the region that the state's silk is simply called Assam silk. Pat is the mulberry silk, brilliant white; eri, also called endi or errandi, is the non-violent one. In the past muga came as natural yellow and as white Mejankari, dyed red with lac. Sualkuchi's looms also make cotton textiles and khadi. Scale differs too, from home looms weaving for the family, to semi-commercial weavers working for mahajans who supply yarn, to commercial factories running on hired wage weavers.

Care and buying

Muga can be hand washed, and its lustre increases with every wash; the cloth is durable enough that it very often outlives its owner. The old report that muga could not be dyed or bleached because of low porosity has been proved wrong. Because genuine muga carries Geographical Indication status, look for the registered GI logo: the Central Silk Board inspects products and certifies authenticity before traders may use it.

What Assam silk means

Silk carries Assam's identity. Weaving crossed caste lines in Sualkuchi: once confined to the Tanti quarter, it now supports fishermen and Brahmin families alike, and nearly three-quarters of the town's households work in commercial weaving. When Gandhi visited Sualkuchi in 1946, the designer Rajen Dek presented a pat cloth with his portrait woven so finely that even his smile and broken front teeth showed; Gandhi's verdict was that the weavers could 'weave dreams' into cloth. In the 1950s Narayan Chandra Das's radio song about the loom's rhythmic sound set passers-by dancing. Muga has been GI-tagged since 2007, and in 2015 scientists in Hyderabad mapped the complete protein structure of its silk, publishing the finding in Nature Scientific Reports.

Questions people ask about Assam silk

Good reading and sources

• Assam silk on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data