The Mistweavers' Museum

In March 2025, about two months after my 648-page doorstopper of a novel had been pubished, I received a Whatsapp message from my friend Argha...

The book, and the project issuing from it, is about a fish-shaped land between the rivers Hooghly and Saraswati (now almost dead) stretching from Betore on the west of Kolkata across the Hooghly to Tribeni, about 55 kilometers on the north, where the river Bhagirathi unbraided. Satgaon  was its center. 

Satgaon was a port town by the river Saraswati and the capital of Bengal since the 10th century, where Arab, Chinese and later the European sea merchants came to trade in coveted Bengal muslin and other commodities like silk, ivory, yak-hair wool etc. World travelers, from Ibn Battuta to Ralph Fitch, had sung the glory of Satgaon, which even minted its own currency. In the 17th century, the river Saraswati declined and the Portuguese built a fort town named Hooghly on the contiguous bank of the other river, also renamed the Hooghly. In two hundred years, three other major European maritime powers—the Dutch, the French and the Danes, (also the Armenians)—built their forts, factories and churches  on the Hooghly’s downstream. They ushered in a glorious chapter in the history of Bengal, a uniquely cosmopolitan culture mediated by the exchange of knowledge and technology. 

A syncretic tradition rooted in this land stretched back to the Middle Ages. From Sufi dervishes to former Abyssinian slaves, men from diverse origins have been settling on this land between the two rivers. In the 13th century, a Turkish warrior named Zafar Khan Ghazi had ruled Satgaon. He built a terracotta mosque and composed a Ganga hymn in Sanskrit. The Bengali language is replete with words taken from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and the Portuguese. So is our culinary tradition—from Bandel cheese to potoler dolma, stuffed drum gourd improvised from the Armenian dolma, minced meat wrapped in grape leaves. 

Unfortunately, other than these vestiges, and a few old buildings in mofussilized Srirampur, Chandernagore, Chinsura and Bandel, this glorious chapter of history has almost been erased from public memory—by the hegemonic power of Calcutta-centric Anglophone history and cultural narratives.

Through the Mistweavers Museum Project, we are excavating a Bengali identity beyond the Anglophone Calcutta-centric bhadralok: the Rooted Cosmopolitan. For this, we have formed a collective of like-minded historians, food anthropologists, curators, geographers, and amateur collectors. We have been collecting and recreating an archive of material culture with the help of local artisans.