Somewhere in Dzongu, North Sikkim, a long-lost Lepcha craft is being retrieved from the fringe of the forgotten — one fibre at a time.
The large black iron kadhai goes up the hill first. It is carried along the Mani Kyung stream in Hee Gyathang, a village in the lower reaches of Dzongu.
Beside the stream, running cold and clear, notebooks and cameras are readied to record what appears to be a simple, almost practical question: how do you turn nettle into thread?
By the end of the day, the answer is anything but simple. It involves ash and fire, river stones and wooden bats, and a kind of patience that modern supply chains do not possess the language to describe. It involves knowledge that belongs to this place — to these hills, these hands, these women — knowledge that had nearly slipped away entirely. What is unfolding here is not merely technique. It is retrieval.
From Forest to Fibre
The process begins in the wild. Mature nettle stalks are cut and stripped. The outer skin and fibre are separated from the inner marrow using a sickle, a bamphok, or sometimes one’s teeth. The fibres are then soaked in water — a step known as retting — to soften them and begin their slow transformation.
What follows is where old chemistry meets mountain ingenuity. Wood ash, called puru, is mixed into boiling water in an iron kadhai — iron, not aluminium — to create a strongly alkaline solution. The nettle fibres are submerged and boiled. The heat and ash work together to dissolve the lignin and the pectin-binding fibres that hold the stalk intact. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the fibres emerge leaner, softer, more pliable.
There are no synthetic chemicals. No factory additives. Only ash, water, fibre and time — the by-product of one natural process used to unlock another.
The fibres are then carried to the stream. They are laid on flat stones and beaten with wooden bats in a steady, almost meditative rhythm — “dang ki dang”, as Munu ama calls it. They are washed, beaten again, and rinsed until they lighten. Then they are soaked once more in ash, spread out in the sun and mountain air, and left to dry.
The result is a fibre the colour of ash, faintly lustrous, unexpectedly soft, produced entirely through processes the forest itself makes possible. In an era when sustainability is often reduced to branding, this is sustainability as practice.
More Than a Demonstration
The live demonstration by the Mani Kyung stream is part of something larger and more deliberate: the Sustainable Nettle Fibre Livelihoods Project. It is being implemented by Mutanchi Lom Aal Shezum (MLAS), a community-based organisation that has worked alongside Lepcha communities in Dzongu for over three decades. The project is technically supported by LA Echostream and funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
MLAS has long focused on strengthening livelihoods through locally grounded, ecologically responsible practice: community mobilisation, skill development, and the revival of traditional knowledge, with particular emphasis on women-led work. This nettle project extends those commitments. It transforms a plant that grows abundantly in the wild into a viable and dignified livelihood, while keeping cultural memory and ecological balance at the centre.
LA Echostream, founded by Sonam T. Gyaltsen, moves fluidly across design, anthropology and environmental practice in the Himalayan states. His guiding ethic — empathy before creativity — is visible in the collaboration. This is not design imposed from outside; it is design that listens.
It is also not the first such partnership. In the nearby Lepcha village of Nom, MLAS and LA Echostream have worked since 2017 alongside the women-led Self Help Group Nom Amu Saksum, introducing new designs and techniques while reviving nettle fibre processing. The model proved viable. What began as revival has matured into enterprise.
The momentum has begun to travel beyond the hills. Earlier this year, for the Republic Day Presidential invitation from Sikkim, an artefact made by local weavers and artisans was selected. The nettle fabric used in that invitation was woven by the weavers of Dzongu, and the intricate embroidery was done by artisans of LA Echostream, representing Kanchendzonga National Park, India’s first UNESCO World Heritage site in the mixed category of nature and culture.
This recognition affirms what MLAS and LA Echostream have long understood: that the craft emerging from Dzongu is neither marginal nor ornamental, nor “just village work”. The hands from Nom and other villages became part of something that reached the office of the President of India. Their names may not have appeared in print, but their work travelled.
Hee Gyathang marks the next phase. Ten women from Sudur in Hee Gyathang are currently being trained in weaving. Twenty men and women from Shipgyer and ten more from Leek in upper Dzongu have completed training in nettle fibre extraction. The project’s immediate targets are concrete: thirty direct employees trained and livelihoods created for two hundred more within three months — through skill and labour rather than subsidy.
The Case for Nettle
Nettle offers a compelling alternative to resource-heavy fashion norms. It grows wild on steep Himalayan slopes. It requires no irrigation, fertiliser or pesticides, and its processing relies entirely on natural inputs: ash, river water, sun and air. Nothing harmful is left behind.
The resulting fibre is breathable, durable and skin-friendly. The plant itself is climate-resilient. Unlike conventional supply chains that depend on distant factories and volatile markets, a nettle-based one depends on the forest, the stream and human hands.
Sustainable fibre, in its fullest sense, sustains the land, the body and the community producing it simultaneously.
For the Lepcha people, however, nettle has never been merely a fibre. The Lepcha word for nettle is surong, which also means “present” or “today”. The cloth woven from its fibre is called kuzu-dum, spun from kuzu-kee, and it carries what might best be described as the warmth of accumulated intention.
Before synthetic fabrics arrived in Dzongu, there was only the plant, the hands and the purpose behind both. The women of the household — grandmothers, mothers, daughters — wove for the men who went out foraging and hunting. The process was not experienced simply as labour but as care. Threads were wound with unspoken prayers for safe return, full nets and good fortune on the trail.
Surong also appears at the table, brewed into soups and teas for its calming, gut-gentle properties. At Lepcha weddings, it enters the bree timrey surong chot ceremony with playful mischief: the bride’s party greets the groom’s with nettle brooms, brushing and stinging and laughing, warding off spirits that may have followed them in. Even as a weapon, the plant is generous.
Sungkyong Nyukung, ninety-one years old and a lifelong practitioner of this craft, has been making carry bags and belts from nettle fibre her entire life, long before any training programme arrived in Hee Gyathang. She learnt it from her mother and grandmother. The knowledge, she says, has deep roots. What the project does is not introduce something new; it restores continuity.
What It Means to Retrieve a Skill
Global conversations about ethical and natural textiles — conducted in design studios and sustainability forums far from Hee Gyathang — may not yet be visible at the stream where women beat fibre against stone. But they exist, and they are expanding. The question is whether those conversations are prepared to recognise places like Dzongu as origin points rather than peripheral curiosities.
For now, what this work offers is something more immediate than market access. It offers awareness: that what these women are learning has value beyond the village; that the old paths, walked again, lead somewhere.
Every woman learning to extract and soften nettle fibre is contributing to cultural recovery. In that same gesture, she is also actualising something for herself: the possibility of earning, of economic independence, of possessing a craft her hands will remember and pass on.
Two hundred livelihoods are expected to ripple outward from this beginning — families, communities, supply chains branching from one stream, one hillside, these particular hands. In development vocabulary, this is scale. In lived vocabulary, it is continuity.
The Thread Continues
Watch the water move. Watch the hands move.
Women holding and beating lengths of damp nettle fibre by the Mani Kyung stream are also holding what their great-grandparents once held. Not the same fibre, but the same knowledge. The same relationship with the plant, the river, the place.
The project has helped begin something. It is a livelihood initiative, certainly. It is a sustainability effort, undeniably. But it is also something quieter and more radical: the careful mending of a thread that was never entirely broken, merely obscured by the noise of a world that moves faster than memory.
In Dzongu — in its hills and rivers, and in the hands of its women — memory has not disappeared. It has been found again, fibre by fibre.
The Sustainable Nettle Fibre Livelihoods Project is being implemented by Mutanchi Lom Aal Shezum (MLAS) in Hee Gyathang, Dzongu, North Sikkim, with technical support from LA Echostream and funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
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