Apparel November 2019 Apparel November 2019 issue | Page 78

FABRIC SPEAK
Silken Weaves
From muga to mulberry, Chitra Balasubramaniam writes about India’s long-
standing tryst with silk and its many variants.
Silk, soft and alluring with an innate romantic
charm, has always fascinated mankind. The
story of silk and how it reached the world is
full of adventure and mysticism. It is usually
China, which is credited as the origin of silk,
and its production and popularity in the Western
world. However, an interesting paper titled New
Evidence for Early Silks in the Indus Civilisation by
I L Good, J M Kenoyer, and R H Meadow, speaks
of how silk was known in India much before it was
discovered in China. As the paper says, “There is
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evidence for silk from a bead thread at Nevasa in
peninsular India c. 1500 bc (Gulati 1961; see also
Good 1995; Janaway and Coningham 1995).
This new evidence of silk from both the recent
excavations at the site of Harappa and from the
Chanhu-daro collection curated at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, indicates that silk threads
were being produced nearly a millennium earlier
than the Nevasa finds, and were being used
in more than one Indus settlement during the
height of Indus urbanism. This new discovery of