Inside Delhi’s Crafts Museum, after weaving through a maze of displays celebrating India’s artisanal legacy, visitors will find something different this weekend: a hall devoted entirely to the shimmering legacy of Dhakaiya Jamdani.
From September 19 to 23, the walls will be dressed with some of the finest Jamdanis from Bangladesh–sarees of delicate cotton, in luminous colours and complex geometric patterns. Stacks of the garment are on display, ready to be admired or acquired.
In one corner, two national award–winning weavers, Mohammad Jamal Hossain and Mohammad Sajeeb, both with more than two decades of experience, sit at a traditional loom. Before a rapt audience, they show how the centuries-old textile is painstakingly woven, thread by thread.
Jamdani, still crafted in and around Dhaka, is the last surviving heir to Bengal’s once-fabled muslin weaving tradition, a craft systematically dismantled under British colonial rule.
What sets it apart is its method: unlike other sarees, its motifs are not embroidered or stamped but woven directly into the fabric. The practice is familial and handed down like an heirloom through generations.
At the heart of Dhakaiya Jamdani lies Phuti Karpas, a cotton that once grew only in the mineral-rich silt of the Meghna River in Bangladesh. Its handspun yarn, paired with the extraordinary precision of weavers, produced gossamer cloth that bore motifs–jaam (flower), dani (vase)--with Persian echoes.
Over time, those motifs transformed muslin into what the world now reveres as Jamdani. The idea to bring this heritage to India’s capital was, in the words of Bangladesh’s High Commissioner to New Delhi, M. Riaz Hamidullah, almost “serendipitous.”
“We had a small exhibition of Jamdani while marking our Independence Day earlier this year,” he told the audience at Friday’s inauguration. “It drew immediate attention, and we were urged to mount something on a larger scale. That is how this exposition was born.”
Mounting an exhibition of Jamdani is no simple feat. The weave itself - complex, labour-intensive, and nearly extinct - resists easy presentation. But for Bangladesh’s envoy in New Delhi, the task became lighter once he found two allies who knew the fabric as intimately as the weavers themselves.
“The two Chandrashekhars–one from Bangladesh, one from India. A unique bond,” High Commissioner M. Riaz Hamidullah said with a smile, introducing Chandrashekhar Saha and Chandrashekhar Bheda.
In Dhaka, Saha is revered among textile circles. A [former] driving force behind Aarong, now Bangladesh’s largest craft brand, he has spent decades documenting the traditional bulis--mathematical rhymes once whispered across looms--that guide the making of intricate Jamdani motifs. At the inauguration, his voice, gentle but assured, carried the weight of that heritage: “Once, Bengal’s muslin reigned supreme. Jamdani stands on that same pedestal – an art you must see and feel to grasp. May its legacy endure.”
If Saha represents Jamdani’s roots, Bheda brings its resonance across borders. A graduate of India’s National Institute of Design, he has spent more than three decades reviving handwoven traditions across the subcontinent. His view of Jamdani was characteristically unflinching:
“It cannot be replicated by machine,” he told the audience. “Its sheer transparency and delicacy are like weaving magic that floats in the air.”
Not long ago, Jamdani’s future seemed uncertain. The community of weavers that once clothed emperors and enchanted poets was dwindling. In the 1980s and 1990s, a revival effort led by Bangladesh’s Small and Cottage Industries Corporation, with help from designers, scholars and craft patrons, established the Jamdani Village in Sonargaon.
There, the old ways were protected: every saree still woven by hand, every motif built on patient hours rather than machines. A single piece can take anywhere from a week to a year to complete.
That painstaking devotion was what Indian designer Sunita Kohli, winner of the Padma Shri, sought to capture in her remarks at the inauguration. She invoked Jamdani’s storied past, once described as “woven air.”
“Emperors coveted it, traders carried it across seas, and poets struggled to capture its fineness,” she said. “UNESCO calls it intangible cultural heritage – I call it intangible luxury, measured not by price, but by patience, time, and the human hand.”
For Kohli, Jamdani is more than fabric. “We must celebrate it not just as a textile, but as a philosophy: proof that finesse and beauty outlast speed and disposability. As Dostoevsky said, ‘Beauty will save the world.’”
Filmmaker and designer Muzaffar Ali added his own cinematic flourish: Jamdani, he said, was “a true delight of light and texture, a beauty that can unite nations through a shared appreciation of craft.”
Faisal Mahmud is the Minister (Press) of the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi.
