Adi

Clans and Kinship

Roy (1960, pp. 211-215) describes the Adi as rings within rings: the outer ring is formed by groups such as the Padam, Minyong and Pasi; each group by clans; each clan by sub-clans, which are groups of families. Each group traces its descent to one ancestor, and the clans to brothers a few generations below him; when a clan grows or moves, after seven generations or more, it splits into sub-clans. The Minyong have a further division into two halves, Kumuing and Kuri, descended, Dunbar was told, from two brothers of those names (1915, p. 9). Clans were once exogamous and Roy found the rule loosening, but sub-clans were strictly exogamous: marriage within six generations of a sub-clan was not allowed. Descent and inheritance pass through the father. Each village is independent and governed by its council, the kebang, whose members, the kebang-abu, include the gam who represent clans and others chosen for their skill in speaking; disputes are argued before it in long traditional speeches that open with the history of the people (pp. 222-223). Young men slept in the moshup, the men's house, where councils were held, and the girls in their clan's rasheng (pp. 200-201).

The clans of the Padam found at Damroh and the fifteen Kumuing and sixteen Kuri clans of the Minyong, in Roy's order (1960, pp. 212-214). Dunbar's lists from Riga and Riu villages (1915, p. 9) agree in many names (Tapak, Jamo, Tali, Gao, Siram, Taki, Tangu; Muije, Jerang, Talom). Clans of the other Adi groups are not given in these sources.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Arunachal Pradesh

  Listed as: Adi

  The Arunachal Pradesh list also keeps the older entry 'Abor'; Census 2011 counted 1,672 people under it.

Census 2011 enumerated many Adi groups under their own names as well as under 'Adi': for example Adi Minyong (25,112), Adi Padam (13,467), Minyong (5,668), Bokar (4,710), Bori (3,383), Adi Pasi (3,065), Simong (2,547) and Padam (2,334). The entries 'Galong' and 'Adi Gallong' and the Tagin are counted separately. The compilation used may not show amendments made between 2022 and 2024.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Sachin Roy (1960, pp. 1-5) records that the people had recently begun to call themselves Adi, 'hill people', in place of Abor, and that the Administration accepted it; they had come to dislike Abor because it means unruly. The word is Assamese, from a, 'not', and bori, 'subject', and was once used for all the independent hill peoples round the Assam valley before it came to mean the people between the Dibang and the Subansiri (Roy; Dunbar, 1915, p. 1). Lorrain's dictionary, as Roy notes, gives Tani, 'a man', as a word the people used of themselves. In a tradition Dunbar heard at Rotung, the Abor, the Galong and the Mishmi all came from a stone of creation in the north and settled together, until the Minyong drew their daos and drove the others apart (pp. 9-10).

History

Dunbar's 'Abors and Galongs' (1915) rests on about four years' study of the people in the years round 1911-12; he worked among the Galong and the western Minyong villages and drew on Upper Abor, Dafla and Mishmi material for comparison. Sachin Roy, an anthropologist of the North-East Frontier Agency, first went among the Adi for a survey of physical measurements and published Aspects of Padam-Minyong Culture in 1960, with a foreword by Verrier Elwin. Roy put the Adi country at over 8,000 square miles on both banks of the Siang and the Yamne, from the Tibetan border to a few miles below Pasighat (pp. 6-7). In 2011 most of the people enumerated as Adi lived in the East Siang, Upper Siang, West Siang, Lower Dibang Valley and Lohit districts.

Faith and Worship

In the older religion as Roy recorded it (1960, pp. 243-244), Donyi the sun and Polo the moon stand above the spirits as the guardians of truth and right: they are not creators, but they watch over the world, and they are called on at the start of a kebang to show the truth and expose the false. The miri, the singer-priest, chants the sacred songs at the festivals, among them the abang on the origin of crops. Many Adi keep the older faith, now organised as Donyi-Polo, and many are Christian.

Customs

Roy (pp. 131-133) follows the farming year: when the clearing of the fields is done the village keeps Aran, five days without field work, with offerings to the spirits of the house and the fields; after the first weeding the women keep Lune Solung; and before the last weeding comes Luttor Solung, for the prosperity of the mithun, when every family brings its mithun home from the jungle and the Solung dance is held each night near the moshup while the miri sings of the origin of crops and of the mithun. Disputes are settled by compensation rather than punishment, and the kebang tries to find a settlement both sides accept (p. 234).

Festivals

Stories and Legends