The Golden Grass of Mithila

Sikki is a grass before it is a craft. It grows wild in the low, wet ground of the Mithila region of north Bihar, in the months when the land holds water. Cut and dried in the sun, the stalks lose their green and take on the colour that gives the work its name in every language it travels to: a pale, lit-from-inside gold, somewhere between straw and brass. Run a finished sikki box through your hands and the surface is smooth, faintly ribbed, cool to the touch. It smells, very slightly, of dry field.

A craft of coil and stitch

Sikki work is not weaving in the way cloth is woven. It is closer to sewing. The maker takes a bundle of coarser grass as a core and coils it round and round, the way you might coil a rope on a deck. Then, with a fine metal awl held in the fist, she splits and wraps strands of sikki tightly over that core, stitching each new coil to the one below it. The awl goes in, the golden strand follows, the coil grows. A basket rises from its own base in a slow spiral; there is no frame, no loom, no mould. The shape lives in the hands and nowhere else.

The grass takes dye well, so alongside the natural gold you will see deep pinks, greens, and purples worked into bands and diamond patterns. But many makers let the gold speak on its own, and it is easy to see why.

What sikki is made for

The classic sikki objects are containers: round lidded boxes, open baskets, trays. In Mithila households these were never ornaments first. A sikki box traditionally travelled with a bride to her new home, holding sindoor, jewellery, small precious things. Grain, dry sweets, sewing supplies, spices — the boxes kept whatever needed keeping. Makers also shape the grass into figures, birds, and animals, especially around festivals. The material suits dry storage well: it is light, surprisingly rigid once coiled, and lasts for years if kept away from damp.

That domestic origin is part of why the craft has stayed in women's hands. It was learned at home, from mothers and aunts and neighbours, practised in the gaps of the day — after cooking, between seasons of field work, in the afternoon hours when the household went quiet. It asks for no workshop, only grass, an awl, and time.

The people behind the coil

The women who practise sikki today in the villages of Mithila are not figures from a folk-art postcard. They are farmers' wives and farmers themselves, mothers, grandmothers teaching granddaughters, younger women deciding whether this skill is worth carrying forward. The work is genuinely slow — a single lidded box represents days of coiling and stitching — and slowness is expensive in any economy. Cheap plastic containers do everything a sikki box does, except the one thing that matters here: they were not made by anyone in particular.

When you buy a piece of sikki work, you are paying for a specific afternoon in a specific courtyard, for a skill held in a particular pair of hands, and for the plain fact that the grass was cut, dried, split, and coiled by the person who profits from its sale. At Loveknits that last part is the whole point. The gold in the grass is free; the hours are what you honour.