Muga & Eri: The Wild Silks of Assam

In 1554, the saint Sankaradeva commissioned a sixty-foot Muga silk tapestry called the Vrindavani Vastra. Five centuries later, the golden thread still glows. But the worm that makes it is now in trouble.

Around 1554, in a weaver village near the Brahmaputra, the Assamese saint Sankaradeva designed a sixty-foot tapestry showing the life of Krishna. He chose a golden wild silk called Muga, a thread that can only be grown in Assam. The cloth was woven under his instruction and given to the Koch king. A large fragment of it hangs today behind glass in the British Museum in London. Its golden threads still glow. This lesson tells the story of Muga and its non-violent cousin Eri: how the Ahom kings made Muga the royal silk of Assam, how the mekhela chador became the quiet flag of Assamese identity, how climate change is now killing the trees the worm feeds on, and how a second wild silk called Eri, woven without killing the worm, is quietly going global as the world's only real ahimsa silk.

A Village by the Brahmaputra

In the weaver village of Tantikuchi, a few miles from the Brahmaputra, in the year 1554, a man in saffron robes stood over a row of strange cocoons. The cocoons were pale tan, the colour of old honey. They had been brought in that morning from a grove of Som trees by a farmer's son. The man in robes was Srimanta Sankaradeva, poet, playwright, and founder of the Ekasarana faith of Assam. He was an old man by this time, long past ninety by traditional Assamese reckoning. And he had an idea for a cloth that had never been woven before.

Sankaradeva wanted a single tapestry that would carry the whole of Krishna's childhood in Vrindavan. The cloth would be more than sixty feet long. It would show scenes the farm children already knew by heart: Krishna dancing on the hood of the serpent Kaliya, Krishna lifting the Govardhana hill on one finger, Krishna playing the flute under a Kadamba tree. The tapestry would be woven from the golden wild silk of Assam, a thread no other land on earth could produce. A group of village weavers at Tantikuchi would do the work. They would be supervised by his disciple Madhavdeva. The weaving would take roughly six months.

The thread he chose was Muga (pronounced mooga). The cocoons on the ground were the shells of Antheraea assamensis, a semi-wild silk moth that lives nowhere else on earth. Its larvae feed on only two trees, Som and Soalu, that grow in a few lowland districts of Assam and nowhere else at scale. The raw silk reeled off these cocoons is a natural golden yellow from the very first moment. And then something unusual happens to it. Every time the cloth is washed, the gold becomes brighter. A Muga mekhela chador woven for a grandmother in 1900 glows richer in 2026 than the day it was made.