Know yourroots.

Cotton fibres mineralised inside a copper bead at Mehrgarh, in present-day Pakistan, date to the first half of the sixth millennium BCE. They are the earliest known cotton fibres in the archaeological record: plant cloth was already part of life in this region.

The Atharva Veda contains hymns to plants and their healing power. Later traditions associate bhang with that sacred plant vocabulary. Translations and identifications vary, but the underlying idea is clear: useful plants were named, studied, and treated with care.

Later Ayurvedic and rasaśāstra texts record cannabis as bhangā or vijayā and describe prepared uses alongside dosage and adverse effects. The record treats it as a potent material to be handled deliberately, not a cure-all.

Across the western Himalaya, hemp stalks have been retted, stripped, spun, and woven into cordage and cloth. A surviving 1885 fibre sample from Punjab now sits in the Smithsonian collection; the material history is physical, not imagined.

The colonial Indian Hemp Drugs Commission gathered evidence across the subcontinent. Its report distinguished moderate from excessive use and concluded that moderate use was generally not associated with appreciable harm — a more complicated record than the prohibition story that followed.

India’s central law defined cannabis around resin and flowering or fruiting tops, excluding seeds and leaves when they are not accompanied by those tops. It also allows governments to permit cultivation for fibre, seed, or horticultural purposes.

Uttarakhand became the first Indian state to regulate hemp cultivation and later issued the first commercial pilot licence for high-quality fibre. The return is licensed and measured, but it reconnects the crop with one of its oldest uses.

Rootwear is a continuation: hemp grown as a crop, spun into cloth, and carried into a new garment. Every drop is a small act of remembering. You are holding one end of a very old thread.