I arrived in Bhagalpur on a Tuesday morning. The train from Patna pulled into the station just before six, the platform still wrapped in the grey half-light of dawn. By the time my auto-rickshaw turned into the lanes of Nathnagar — the neighbourhood that has been the heart of India’s silk weaving tradition for over two centuries — I could already hear the looms.

Not see them. Hear them.

A low, rhythmic clack-and-thud. The sound of a shuttle moving through warp threads. The sound of a city that has been making silk since before any of us were born, and will be making it long after we are gone — if we let it.

This is that story. All of it. From the ancient kingdom of Anga to the Instagram reels of 2025.

Where It All Begins: The Kingdom of Anga

Long before it was called Bhagalpur, this city on the southern banks of the Ganga was known as Champa — the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Anga. You will find Anga in the Mahabharata. Karna, the great warrior, was its king. You will find it in the Ramayana. The city sat at the crossroads of trade routes connecting the Gangetic plains to the Persian Gulf, to Rome, to China. And along those routes, silk moved.

Contrary to popular belief, Bhagalpur’s strategic position on ancient trade routes suggests its silk heritage is considerably older than commonly assumed. The Silk Road, as most people understand it, was a Chinese export route. What fewer people know is that Bhagalpur’s weavers were sending their own silk westward — to the courts of the Mediterranean — centuries before Marco Polo ever set foot in Asia.

From the period of antiquity to the modern period, the silk industry survived in its indigenous form. In 1810–11, historian Buchanan Hamilton presented a detailed account of the Tussar of Bhagalpur — one of the earliest documented records of an industry that still, in its essential methods, operates the same way today.

The Mughal Years: When Bhagalpur Silk Meant Royalty

The medieval chapter of Bhagalpur silk is one of unabashed luxury. In the medieval era, Bhagalpur silk symbolised royalty, enjoying patronage from the elite. The Mughal era — especially Akbar’s reign — further cemented its status. The Emperor’s court demanded the finest textiles the subcontinent could produce. Bhagalpur answered.

European merchants who arrived in India during the 16th and 17th centuries documented what they found. They described four distinct varieties of Tussar fabric from the Bhagalpur region — each prized for its texture, its natural lustre, its warmth. They took samples back to Europe. The fabric travelled to courts that had never heard of Bihar. The city earned its name: Resham Nagri. Silk City.

I Walked Inside the Looms of Nathnagar

Nathnagar is about three kilometres from Bhagalpur railway station. You can take an auto for ₹50. But you will know you have arrived not from a sign but from a sound.

The looms in Nathnagar are called pit looms. They are sunk into the earthen floor of the weaving room — sometimes the same room where the family cooks, eats, and sleeps. The weaver sits at the edge of the pit, feet dangling below, working the pedals with their legs while their hands guide the shuttle through the warp.

I sat with one weaver — I will call him Ramesh — for most of that morning. He was in his late forties. His father had worked this same loom. His grandfather had built it. Setting up a single saree’s warp threads alone takes two full days. The weaving itself takes four to ten days for a simple design. A saree with a traditional Angika border — peacock or lotus motifs woven into the pallu — can take three full weeks.

Ramesh produces roughly 18 inches of fabric per day. Think about that the next time you hold a Bhagalpur saree.

The Silkworm That Lives in the Forest

The reason Bhagalpur silk is unlike anything else in the world begins not on a loom but in a forest. Bhagalpuri silk is made from the cocoons of Antheraea paphia silkworms — the Vanya silkworm, native to India. These silkworms live wild in forests, feeding on Arjun, Asan, and Sal trees in the Chotanagpur plateau. No one farms it in the conventional sense. It lives free.

This is what makes Tussar fundamentally different from mulberry silk. Mulberry silk comes from domesticated worms in controlled conditions. Tussar silk is wild silk. Forest silk. The result is a thread with characteristics no factory can engineer — a warm, living honey-gold colour that is entirely natural, a textured surface with tiny slubs that are marks of authenticity rather than defects, and a hypoallergenic quality that makes it gentle on sensitive skin.

Bihar produces over 100 million cocoons annually, yielding around 1,60,000 lbs of reeled yarn. Around 36,000 people — primarily from Scheduled Tribe communities — are engaged in rearing Tussar silkworms. These communities live in and around forests. The cocoon harvest connects them to the textile economy. Buy a genuine Bhagalpur saree and somewhere in that transaction, a tribal family in the forests of Jharkhand or Bihar has been paid for their labour.

From Cocoon to Saree: Seven Steps, Many Days

The process of making Bhagalpur silk is long, manual, and unforgiving of shortcuts. There is no fast version of this.

Step 1 — Forest rearing: Silkworms are reared wild on host trees. The process is semi-natural — weavers and tribal rearers manage the trees but the worms live free.
Step 2 — Cocoon harvest: Cocoons are collected by hand from trees, sorted, and brought to weaving clusters in Nathnagar, Champanagar, Aliganj, and Puraini.
Step 3 — Reeling: Cocoons are boiled in water and soda. Once boiled, silk strands are separated onto bamboo spools.
Step 4 — Spinning: Bamboo spools are transformed into loosely-coiled skeins, dried, then reeled onto bobbins to strengthen the thread.
Step 5 — Dyeing: Natural or chemical dyes applied. Organic dyeing is still highly prized globally and commands premium prices in export markets.
Step 6 — Warping: The weaver sets up the loom with up to 5,000 warp threads. This alone takes two days.
Step 7 — Weaving: 18 inches per day. Four to twenty-one days per saree. Every inch is human hands.

What Bhagalpur Makes: Four Silks, One City

Beyond sarees, Bhagalpur produces dupattas, stoles, dress material, kurtis, and home furnishings. Bhagalpur silk home furnishings are gradually becoming admired in overseas markets. The product range has expanded to serve every price point and occasion without compromising the handloom foundation.

The Chadar: Bhagalpur’s Everyday Luxury

Before the saree became the symbol of Bhagalpur silk, there was the silk chaddar — and it remains one of the most beloved products to come out of Nathnagar’s looms.

The Bhagalpur silk chaddar is a large wrap — lighter than a shawl, more versatile than a stole. Traditionally worn by men as a mark of dignity and occasion, and by women draped over the shoulder or as a dupatta, it has crossed into contemporary fashion as a lightweight luxury accessory worn from Bihar to Bhopal to Birmingham.

What makes a Bhagalpur chaddar immediately identifiable is the hand-knotted fringe border — each knot tied individually by the weaver or a family member. A single chaddar can take a full day to fringe. It is detail work, quiet work, the kind of work that happens after the main weaving is done, sitting in the evening light.

The chaddar in sunshine yellow above is a perfect example of Bhagalpur’s range: vivid, joyful, alive — yet rooted in the same natural tussar fibre and handloom tradition as the most formal bridal saree. This is the democratic luxury of Bhagalpur silk. It is available at every price point. What it is never is cheap in spirit.

The Crisis Nobody Talks About Loudly Enough

Here is the part of the story that most promotional content about Bhagalpur silk quietly steps around.

I sat in Ramesh’s weaving room for three hours. I asked him what he earned. He looked at the floor before he answered.

A 2024 report quoted the chairperson of the Bhagalpur Regional Handloom Weavers Co-operative Union as saying that annual industry business has shrunk from ₹600 crore in 2015 to just ₹150 crore today. The reasons are layered and structural:

• No yarn bank in Bhagalpur — yarn supply comes from Chennai, Kolkata, and cocoons from Jharkhand, giving open markets a monopoly and inflating prices to ₹150 per kilogram
• Weaving charges have dropped from ₹9 per metre to ₹5 per metre — below sustainable income
• Cheap Chinese silk imports undercutting handloom prices in domestic markets
• Powerloom competition producing imitations faster and cheaper
• Middlemen capturing the majority of retail profit while weavers receive a fraction
• The next generation leaving — Vikram Das, 25, whose family wove silk for five generations, now drives an auto-rickshaw in Delhi. “My father wanted me to stay, but I would earn meagre ₹200 a day doing what I loved.”

The craft is losing the generation that should be carrying it forward.

Every Government Scheme for Bhagalpur Weavers — Right Now

The government is not absent from this story. There are schemes. Several of them. The question — as always — is whether they reach the people who need them. Here is the complete current picture:

The honest assessment: The schemes exist on paper. Execution is where the story breaks down. A labyrinthine complexity persists in government policies targeted at weavers. Most benefits have not reached the target communities in the proportions needed. The yarn bank promised by NHDC remains unfulfilled after a decade.

The Biggest News of 2025: The PM MITRA Fight

PM MITRA — Mega Integrated Textile Regions and Apparel — is the central government’s flagship textile initiative, inspired by PM Modi’s 5F vision: Farm to Fibre to Factory to Fashion to Foreign. It is designed to create world-class industrial infrastructure, attract investment, and generate employment at scale.

If Bhagalpur is included in PM MITRA, it could be transformative — modern infrastructure, direct market access, investment at scale, and the end of the middlemen who have kept weavers poor for generations. If it continues to be excluded, the decline will accelerate. This is the most important policy story in Bhagalpur silk right now.

In August 2024, the central government had already approved new textile projects in Bihar, including development of the silk industry in Bhagalpur district and projects under the Small Cluster Development Programme for Meerachak in Bhagalpur. The State Handloom Expos in Patna and Gaya have also been approved. These are steps. Whether they are enough steps remains to be seen.

The Revival That Is Already Happening — From Looms to Instagram

Despite the crisis, something remarkable is simultaneously unfolding.

From Delhi to Mumbai, fashion weeks have started to feature Bhagalpur silks as “luxury heritage” rather than “rustic relics.” Designers who once overlooked handloom Bihar are now making the trip to Nathnagar. Collaborations between fashion designers and Bhagalpur weavers have produced collections shown at fashion weeks in Indian metros.

Young weavers like Priya Singh now sell directly through Instagram, cutting middlemen out of the equation entirely. “One reel showing my weaving process got 50,000 views,” she says. “Canada was ordering, France was ordering.” Innovation became the name of the game — Eri silk blends for winter wear, vegetable dyes for eco fashion, geometric paisleys alongside traditional peacock motifs.

The women-led Tussar Sutra Collective has become a symbol of what the revival can look like when it is weaver-owned. Artisans now sell directly via Amazon Karigar, Flipkart Samarth, and their own digital storefronts. The diaspora is paying attention. NRI buyers who grew up watching their grandmothers wear Bhagalpuri silk are now seeking out the authentic article — not the synthetic imitation, but the real thing, with the slubs and the warmth and the story attached.

What I Carried Back from Nathnagar

Before I left Ramesh’s weaving room that morning, his wife brought tea. Strong, sweet, in small glasses. We sat for a while without the translator needing to do much work.

On the loom in front of us, half-finished, was a saree in deep terracotta with a border of small geometric diamonds. It had been on the loom for nine days. It would take another five.

I asked Ramesh if his children would weave.

He was quiet for a long time.

“My son is in Patna,” he said finally. “He drives an Ola.”

That sentence is the entire story of Bhagalpur silk in 2025. The beauty and the urgency. The tradition and the threat. The saree on the loom and the empty stool beside it.

The reason this journal exists.