Nyishi

Clans and Kinship

Shukla (1959, pp. 53-56) gives the line of descent from Abo Teni through Atu Nyah, Herin and Ringdo, whose three sons, Dodum, Dol and Dopum, founded the three main divisions of the tribe; the Dodum and Dol are the large majority and the Dopum now few. These divisions do not govern marriage. Each is divided into exogamous phratries made of patrilineal clans, and each clan is named after an ancestor held to be real; clan members regard one another as brothers and sisters, so marriage within the clan and within the phratry is barred. The clan is not a territorial or political unit: kin and neighbours act together. The family is polygynous, and an extended family of several hearths may share one long house, which can run to more than fifty yards (pp. 11-13, 56). Shukla found no recognised chiefs or councils of elders with power to compel in the old order: a man settled a grievance with the support of his kin (p. 81). The Government later gave an influential man of each village a red coat as a mark of authority (p. 81, note).

A partial list from Shukla (1959, pp. 54-55), who recorded only the clans of the Panior, Palin and Khru valleys and the country round Nyapin, in his order and under his phratries; he refers to Fürer-Haimendorf's Ethnographic Notes on the Tribes of the Subansiri Region (1947) for a fuller account. A few names that could not be read reliably in the scan are left out. Spellings are Shukla's and may differ from the forms used as surnames today (his Nabom is now usually written Nabam).

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Arunachal Pradesh

  Listed as: Nyishi

  The entry was formerly 'Dafla'; the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order (Amendment) Act, 2008 replaced it with 'Nyishi'.

Census 2011 also counted 32,479 people under 'Nissi' and 2,849 under 'Nishang' in Arunachal Pradesh, apart from the 249,824 under 'Nyishi'. No listing in Assam was confirmed. 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

In Nyishi tradition, as Shukla recorded it (1959, pp. 4-5), all the people descend from Abo Teni, who lived at a place called Supuny in the far eastern Himalayas; his descendants came to Narba and, leaving village after village, crossed the Subansiri and then the Kamla, spread over the hills between the Kamla and the Khru, and later moved into the Palin and Panior hills, bringing mithun, pigs, Tibetan bells and metal plates. The same tradition makes Abo Teni the ancestor of the Apatani and other neighbours too. Priests and many others can recite their genealogies back to him. The name is usually explained from nyi, 'person', and shi, 'being'.

History

The Nyishi appear as Daflas in Ahom records and in British writing, and Dunbar (1915, p. 2) used Dafla for the tribes between the Subansiri and the Bhareli (Kameng). B. K. Shukla, of the North-East Frontier Agency's research staff, described the Daflas of the Panior, Palin and Khru valleys in 1959, as administration was being extended into their hills. The official name was changed from Dafla to Nyishi by an amendment of the Scheduled Tribes order in 2008, and Census 2011 enumerated them as Nyishi. In 2011 the largest numbers lived in the Papum Pare, Kurung Kumey and East Kameng districts.

Faith and Worship

Shukla (1959) describes a world full of spirits, wiyu, which live in great trees, water and the forest and may help or harm; the priest, nyub (Shukla writes nube), divines which spirit is at work and makes the offerings. A child is held to be a gift of the wiyu, and offerings are made at birth, illness and death. The Nyokum festival calls on the goddess of the land with all the spirits for good harvests and protection from famine and epidemic. Many Nyishi now follow Christianity, and others keep the older faith, now organised as Donyi-Polo.

Customs

The long house is the centre of life: a hall raised on posts, eighteen to twenty feet wide and as long as its number of hearths requires, with walls of twilled mats, a bamboo floor, a platform at the back where a small shrine of the hunting spirit Yobu Wiyu stands, and a low porch at the front with mortars for pounding grain (Shukla, 1959, pp. 11-13). A primary loyalty, Shukla writes, is to one's long house and its members, then to the lineage and other kin (p. 11). In the migration story the ancestors already wore their hair in a knot called podum and knew weaving and farming (p. 5); men traditionally wore a cane helmet topped with a hornbill's beak.

Festivals