The song of Eri Silk

Woven on hope and a prayer, this fabric of peace needs the spotlight more than ever. A global platform like Silk In Lyon might just give it this, Faye Remedios hopes

The book Indian Textiles: Past and Present by G. K. Ghosh and Shukla Ghosh offers an early record dating back over 300 years that described eri as “a silk, that is remarkably soft, white or yellowish, and the filaments so exceedingly delicate as to render it impracticable to wind off the silk.” The reason, the authors went on to write, is why the open-mouthed eri cocoon is spun like cotton, instead of being reeled like tassar or mulberry or muga cocoons. An alkaline solution made of specific plant ashes is heated and used to soften and degum the cocoon. This is then carefully opened by hand to extract the chrysalids, and the flattened cocoons are washed, kneaded, sun-dried, drawn into threads and spun into a fabric that is “finer than tassar silk but less fine than mulberry”.As for the moth itself?

It emerges without disturbing the cocoon or its fibre, giving eri silk its other name – Ahimsa or peace silk. Yet, for all these properties, way back in 1903, the future of eri silk wasn’t considered favourable. In his classic book titled, A Monograph on the Silk Fabrics of Bengal, author N G Mukerji noted that “the eri silk industry is not so lucrative as the mulberry silk industry, the product of the eri cocoon being a spunsilk and not reeled silk. All attempts to reel the eri cocoon have hithero failed.”