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When threads meet time: Dhakai Jamdani's voyage through changing hands

SOFIA NOOR RAFA | Wednesday, 18 December 2024


Amidst the clamorous hazard of traffic pollution, fried dim chop, and huddled, narrow streets, the remainder of a Jamdani is sensual to women in the country. The saree is a gentle reminder of the beautiful imperfections of life, like losing stuff unexpectedly and staying somewhat dissatisfied with life despite trying our best.
The wefts and warps of a lucid, glossy Dhakai Jamdani pop a message worth pondering in a saree lover's brain cells, life is fantastic. Never can life be dull when one wears a Dhakai Jamdani.


The older Dhaka gets, the older the tale of Dhakai Jamdani becomes. It is an odd, ubiquitous story of a saree spreading its wings furthest possible yet changing its grades concerning the wind of change, time.
The sharee's spread of trade continues to retain its old glare and flair. However, the materials of the sharee changed with time, demand, and product availability.
In the era of the Mughal rulers, Muslin was available and not a fine element locked away for display in a museum. Now, Muslin is sitting like a retired queen in the places where humans usually store their deeds of the past. But we have an impressive update on Muslin. The golden pride of Bengal, Muslin, is set to make a grand comeback.
It is safe to declare Jamdani, the ruler of the hearts of the go-to Bengali woman, who embraces sarees as her day-to-day work or household attire.
The saree competes with popular native sarees, such as 'the Deshi Taat er saree,'' the Indian Silk Kanchipuram South Indian Madurai Sunigudi,' or the illustrious 'Sylheti Monipuri.'
Dhakai Jamdani can be made of cotton, half silk, silk, or Muslin. Nefaul Hosein Rafel, a Jamdani entrepreneur, says the count or thinness of the saree is what the weavers (that is) tell us, but in reality, 40 counts can be as gross as 15-24 or very thick. For Muslin, the thread's thinness needs to be around 1000. The thinner, the better. So delicate is the thread of the Muslin, the weaver needs to rub fingers with vaseline to hold the thread.' The entrepreneur is indeed correct about the thinness of Jamdani threads. The half-silk Jamdani is the most widely celebrated and sold Jamdani in Bangladesh.
Jamdani looms are located around Shitalakkhya, in Narayanganj Bisic Jamdani Shilpo Nogori, a place of diligent working hours and detailed handloom expertise.
Around fifty people work at every medium-sized Jamdani, selling shops online and offline. F-commerce was a warning wave about the industrial boom.
The saree made in the Narayanganj Jamdani Shilpo Nagari in Narayanganj caters to sarees needing extra care by soaking them in pouring sunlight after dampening them with rice starch and clippers or 'kata.'
The ambience is of continuous warp and weft, two combined, four hands doing the magic. A Jamdani weaver never stays away from weaving and takes extremely short breaks compared to the office-going, so-called hustlers in the cities of Bangladesh. A weaver must keep making or fixing sarees with 'katawash.'
Jamdani, worn by aristocrats, is a celebratory perception of the Bangal's nerve. Saad, a Jamdani entrepreneur, is delighted about the variety of Jamdani available in the market despite being a transparent, Muslin-like luxurious mist, much like a beloved perfume.
Saad celebrates the market demand for the thicker thread variety of Jamdani. 'It includes all, even the ones incapable of making a living in our country,' Saad delightfully says.
Farzana Khan Chowwa, another Jamdani entrepreneur like Saad, opened her showroom of discrepant Jamdani sarees in the capital's Banasree. Her online showroom expanded quickly. "I plan to open showrooms outside Dhaka," 'she thrills.
Indian sarees are popular, embraced, and sold in our country by sharee lovers worldwide. Jamdani is equally popular in India. Saad says, 'India has Jamdani showrooms and brands.
Jamdani is quite popular in India.' While working at Dhakaiaa Jamdani, a Jamdani wholesaler and retailer, Saad figured that people often confuse cotton-made Jamdani with half-silk Jamdani. It gets tricky sometimes. Half-silk jamdani has two varieties and incorporates cotton threads in the basin of the saree. However, a cotton Jamdani lacks the gloss of a half-silk jamdani and costs much more than its half-silk counterparts. An interesting thing about the half-silk variety is that the thicker, less luxurious Nylon silk threads tend to be more robust than the as-costly-as-gold Cocoon silk threads, with the latter being more visible in high-end Jamdani sarees, mostly known by the term 'Ashi count shutar Jamdani (80 count thread Jamdani)'.
The Jamdani jam has indeed expanded. India brought out the machine varieties of Jamdani, but the weft and warp quickly caught the eye of regular Jamdani sharee-wearing women, associated weavers, and entrepreneurs in Bangladesh.
The step received wide criticism due to the deficiency of lucidity and handloom work found in Jamdani shares made in Dhaka.
To explain the Jamdani market, it is very easy for a new Jamdani enthusiast to sample a non-handloom saree, much more likely not to be a pure Dhakai Jamdani.
The surge of machine-generated Jamdanis mostly made in India contain the Jamdani motifs used in a handloom Dhakai Jamdani but lack the subtlety, quality, and acuity, cost much less, and contain thicker threads and motifs get done all over the basin of the saree, starting from the tip to the tail.
Some discreet clothing sellers tend to sell sarees with the Jamdani motif. The Jamdani patterns acutely rest over the non-Jamdani patterns, making it hard to detect their originality.
Designer Jamdanis of the likes of KhanSaab Studio, Kushimona - page expertise in producing the wide-adorned handloom half-silk Jamdani in Tangail can never indeed beat the originality of the half-silk category to the Jamdani-loving women and men in Bangladesh.
Although the efforts are widely appreciated by the class spectrum when designer Jamdani or handloom Jamdani is the subject, the likeliness of the Jamdanis to be bona fide depends on the availability of the maker, the weaver, or the Dhakai Jamdani 'taati', who wefts and warps because the hand never rests, the tendency conquests.
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