What a gamosa is
A rectangle of handwoven cotton, white with a red border and usually a woven motif at one end. It is not a towel, although it gets used as one, and it is not a scarf, although it gets worn like one.
It is what you put around the neck of a guest, drape over a xorai when offering something, hand to someone leaving, and hang in the prayer corner. At Bihu it is given by the armful. Calling it “the Assamese towel”, which a lot of English-language writing does, is technically not wrong and misses the entire point.
What it is not, ever: a floor cloth, or anything you would wipe your feet with. That is the one rule people outside Assam break without knowing, and it causes genuine offence. The full set of conventions is in the gamosa: meaning and rules.
The red will run
The first two or three washes will bleed. Cold water, by hand, on its own. This is what real dye on handloom cotton does, and a gamosa that does not bleed at all has usually been made with something else.
After that it settles and the cloth softens with every wash. A good gamosa is better at five years old than new.
Bihuwan and gamosa
A bihuwan is a gamosa given specifically at Bihu, often with a more worked motif. Every bihuwan is a gamosa; not every gamosa is a bihuwan. Shops outside Assam use the words interchangeably. Weavers do not.
