Pat is the white silk of Assam, a lustrous ivory-and-cream cloth that completes the valley's family of three silks alongside golden muga and warm, matte eri. It is spun by the mulberry silkmoth Bombyx mori, the same domesticated worm that has clothed much of the world, and it is the only one of Assam's three silks that is neither native nor wild, being reared instead on the mulberry leaf. Its fine, glossy, brilliant-white filament is reeled rather than spun, which gives it the smooth sheen of classic silk. Above all it is the ceremonial cloth of the valley, the silk of the bride and the festival, the white mekhela sador, often bordered with muga gold, in which an Assamese woman is dressed for her wedding and her great occasions.
The mulberry silk of the valley
Silk rearing in Assam is old, held by tradition to have been carried in by the early Tibeto-Burman settlers. Muga is grown out of doors on the som and soalu, and eri on the castor leaf. Pat, by contrast, belongs to the mulberry. So it belongs to the worldwide tradition of sericulture, rather than to anything unique to Assam. The Bombyx mori larvae are reared indoors on mulberry leaf through their feeding life. The tree is the white mulberry, Morus alba, known in Assam as the nuni. It is the same leaf that feeds the mulberry silkworm across India and beyond, so pat is the valley's version of the world's most common silk. The mulberry orchards that feed the worm are tended in the sericulture villages of the valley. When each worm spins its single unbroken cocoon, it is reeled off as one continuous filament. This is the technique that yields silk's characteristic lustre and strength. It is the same reeling that muga undergoes, and the opposite of eri, whose open cocoon must be spun. Like reeled muga, drawing a continuous thread conventionally means stifling the pupa within the cocoon before the moth can break it. The reward is a fibre of exceptional fineness and brightness, the whitest and glossiest of the valley's silks. It takes dye cleanly and reflects light, where eri stays soft and muga glows gold.
The cloth of the bride
The mekhela sador is the garment most often woven in pat, the two-piece Assamese drape of a wrapped lower skirt and a folded upper length. The cloth is left in its natural ivory, or scattered with small woven motifs in red, green and gold across the white field. At her wedding the bride wears it with the riha, the third length of the full bridal set, draped over the sador. The riha with a pat or muga mekhela sador is regarded as the national dress of the Assamese woman.
Tradition also remembers two rare and precious pat weaves, the mejangkari pat and the kingkhap. In older times they were woven for the royal household alone, a mark of nobility. The demand for fine pat peaks in the wedding and festival months, when the weaving town of Sualkuchi swells with orders for bridal mekhela sador and pat-and-muga lengths. Pat is the least exotic of the valley's three silks in origin, the mulberry fibre woven across the world. Yet in Assamese life it is among the most important, the glossy white cloth of every wedding and formal welcome. How the looms of Sualkuchi gather pat with the other silks belongs to the place article on the town.
