The historical fibre of silk

Aarathi Prasad's book unspools the intricate threads of silk's story, tracing its journey from silkworms and spider silk to emperors' wardrobes

Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses

Authors: Aarathi Prasad

Publisher:Harper Collins India

Pages: 368

Price: Rs 699

This is a strange history; a history that hangs by a thread, prowls on eight legs, observes all, yet remains neglected somewhere in some overlooked nook. Writer, broadcaster, and molecular geneticist Aarathi Prasad presents a globetrotting and species-leaping volume, full of creepy-crawlies and fantastic beasts of the usually lurking-kinds. There are giant spiders, metre-long Mediterranean clams, and countless moth species. There are also lotus stems and mulberry leaves. From the fine shifting sands in deserts, to green tranquil ponds in dense forests, Silk brings together a diverse weave of tales that has long enveloped us, but remains covered in a fine layer of jargon and technicalities.

True to its title, this is a story of silk — the fibre, the fabric, the weave, and the material. Ms Prasad takes the reader from China, Indonesia, and India to the Latin Americas and Madagascar, and then to the Mediterranean. In this global trek, one lands briefly on “cloaks made of wool, not such as produced by sheep, but gathered from the sea,” before flitting to “woven clouds manufactured on a leaf.”

The craftsmen making these fine materials are usually tiny, hairy, of multiple legs or no legs at all, wondrous in shapes. The Chinese silkworm Bombyx mori holds centrestage, having played a leading role in our understanding of the natural world. Then there is the Antheraea Paphia, at home in Bihar, India, which spins cocoons of golden tasar silk and hangs them on its favourite trees. There’s also the Pinna nobilis molluscs, which extrude fine filaments of sea silk, even as they cling to the seafloor of the Mediterranean.

These creatures, of course, come accompanied by their human pets, fabric weavers, and moth whisperers. There’s Marcello Malpighi, who took an entire year to dissect a Bombyx mori for London’s Royal Society; and Georg Eberhardt Rumpf, whose obsession with moths in Indonesia led him down a surreal string of personal disasters; and the Midlands factory workers who figured out a way to bleach and print on tasar silk, triggering a boom in India’s silk exports.

And where there are humans, there’s industry, trade, and… war. Ms Prasad tells us silk’s extraordinary strength and lightness were exploited militarily, first by the Mongols for their under-armour, and later in the American West, where it was woven into some of the earliest bulletproof vests. During World War II, spider silk was a key component of “bombsights, gunsights, telescopes and microscopes.” Talk about crosshairs!

Ms Prasad structures her tales in three stages. The first part is centred on common silks derived from silkworms, primarily the domesticated Bombyx mori. But can be expected from a history of this nature, the tale meanders through accounts of industrial revolutions, local artisanal practices, logistical missteps, and accidental innovations that would go on to shape the production and trade of silk for the years to come.

The second stage is dedicated to lesser-known silks and their strange uses. We enter the wardrobe of emperors and find it infested with cobwebs. We are told that Napoleon’s first empress Josephine, and Charles III of Spain numbered among those wearing garments made of cobwebs. We also tumble into a “mound of graves” where scraps of silk were found in excavations of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Here, between 2450 and 1900 BC, skilled artisans wound the cocoons of three varieties of silkworm into their own “curious and wonderful cloths.”

The final stage, the third of the titular metamorphoses, peers past the present gossamer of trade routes and manufactories into “silken futures”, pondering on how the material will be made and used in years to come. Here, we are truly in the H G Wells and Arthur C Clarke territory, speculating on space elevators tethered to earth through silken threads, biodegradable implantable electronics that record our brain signals, and safely consumable edible sensors. Ms Prasad is bemused as she seeks to determine where these threads may stretch.

She soon turns back to more pressing questions, themes that she has carefully nurtured throughout the book, such as the vulnerability of silk-producing creatures, and how impediments in silk production have led to innovations in the study of germs and diseases.

Silk skips through time and space, threads and themes. The depth of Ms Prasad’s research shows, as does her confidence in her word-craft. Sure, the text meanders, or can even linger too long on a particularly fibrous eight-legged bug, as though the author is a child in a trance. Or, even become tedious in its hunt for historical thoroughness.

But readers would do well to not enter the book’s silken web believing it to be yet another material history. It’s a massively expansive weave. Like the cultivation of silk, it needs time and patience, and comes with its own healthy share of spiders.