Nyishi Erotic

The Nyishi are the largest indigenous community in Arunachal Pradesh, spread across the central belt of the state — the Papum Pare, Kurung Kumey, Kra Daadi, East Kameng and Lower Subansiri districts — in country that runs from foothills up into densely forested mid-elevations. The name they use for themselves splits cleanly: nyi for human, shi for being. Historically the Nyishi were known to outsiders for the bopa, the cane helmet capped with the long, curved beak of the great hornbill, worn by men as a marker of standing. The hornbill beak has since become the moral problem the community has had to solve in public: the bird is endangered, and over the last two decades Nyishi leaders, churches and conservation groups have shifted the headgear toward fiberglass replicas, which now appear at festivals without much controversy.

Their language, Nishi, sits in the Tani branch of Sino-Tibetan, related to Apatani, Adi, Tagin and Galo — the cluster of tongues spoken across central Arunachal that are mutually intelligible only in patches and shade into one another along the river valleys. There is no traditional script; older oral genealogies, the long recited chains of patrilineal ancestors that establish a person's clan position, were carried entirely by ritual specialists. Society is organized around clans and the longhouse, and polygyny was historically practiced by men of means, partly as an economic arrangement — more wives meant more hands for jhum cultivation and more affinal alliances.

Religion is the part of Nyishi life that has shifted hardest in living memory. The indigenous tradition is Donyi-Polo, the worship of the sun (Donyi) and moon (Polo) as the watching, truth-enforcing principles of the universe, mediated by a class of priests called nyibu who recite, chant and conduct mithun sacrifice. Through the second half of the twentieth century, Baptist and Catholic missions made deep inroads, and a majority of Nyishi today identify as Christian — though the older system has not vanished. A reformist Donyi-Polo movement codified rituals, built prayer halls and pushed back against conversion, so that many villages now contain church and gangging side by side, and individual families negotiate which festivals they keep. Nyokum, the agrarian thanksgiving observed in February, is celebrated across both camps and has become the closest thing the Nyishi have to a unifying public holiday.