“WE USED TO GROW OUR OWN CLOTHES”

Hemalata Borgohain’s traditional silver madoli earrings, locket and bangles shine brightly against the evening sun in Dhemaji, a district at the foothills of the Himalayas. Her muga riha, with its indigo-dyed cotton border, is faded and dotted with blemishes but, like the eighty-five-year-old wearer, brims with stories of the past.

As a child, Annai would carry her spindle to her sisters’ looms after school to learn the craft. Girls were taught to weave their own wedding dresses, called Bor Kapur and Eri Kapur, along with other textiles that would be passed from generation to generation.

“All [of] us women would sit out in the fields weaving during the harvest season and look up to the sky, towards Nature, for inspiration, singing songs of celebration while working on our xaals (looms),” Annai said. “We used to ‘grow’ our own clothes, weaving into the silk the shapes of butterflies and flowers. Those were the days—self-sufficient, simple, yet beautiful.”

The day I meet her, Annai is preparing to visit a family friend for her daughter’s Toloni Biya ceremony, which celebrates a girl’s coming of age. Annai will be gifting her a riha made of muga, one of the finest and most durable varieties of silk, and a symbol of Assamese heritage. The riha is a piece of cloth draped over the upper body. Before the spread of stitched garments, the riha used to be worn under the chador.

Muga came to Assam in the thirteenth century. According to the Ahom Chronicles, a set of medieval manuscripts, Chaolung Sukaphaa was the prince of Mong Mao, a kingdom located in the present-day Yunnan Province, when he led his people on a long and arduous journey down the Mekong river and reached the Brahmaputra in present-day Bangladesh. Travelling upstream from there, the party reached Upper Assam and established the Ahom kingdom, with Sukhapaa as its first king. As folklore has it, it was the women who carried the looms on their shoulders, along with baskets of eri and muga silkworms.