Mishing people

Autonomy Movement

The Mishing tribe is currently enjoying constitutional autonomy under the Mising Autonomous Council, which was formed after Mising Autonomous Council Act,1995 passed by the Assam Legislative Assembly and assented to by the Governor of Assam following violent clashes in early 90's for greater autonomy. MAC includes 40 constituencies in eight upper Assam districts comprising core areas and satellite areas. Executive councillor (EC) from 36 constituency are elected democratically while 4 other members are represented by the ruling government of Assam. Tensions exist between the Mising tribe and other communities regarding inclusion of few Non-Mising villages in MAC although no violence occurred between Misings and Mipaks but some other Assamese unions clashed with the police. MAC areas constitute of more than 60% Mising population and other communities are a minority. In Assam's Dhemaji and North Lakhimpur District, bordering Arunachal Pradesh, the population of the Misings are largest followed by Majuli District.

Since 1983 Mising organizations have been demanding Sixth Schedule status under the Constitution of India in Mising dominated areas.

Various Mising nationalist organizations have been formed during the modern era of civilization like Takam Mising Porin Kébang (Mising Students' Union) and Mising Ba:né Kébang (Mising Council).

Music and Dance

A:bang It is a verse of hymn of praise and worship of gods and goddesses. A:bang is sung by the Mibu (priest) at rituals. There is also community A:bangs generally used in Pobua, a ritual festival, praying for better crops, health and happiness.

Kaban It is one of the oldest forms of Mising folk songs. It is lamentation music and recalls sad events. At the death of a dear one, the women burst out into a sort of cry and song which for an outsider may sound funny.

Tébo Tékang It is a romantic lyric, narrating some love encounters.

Sí:lung Ni:tom It is a melancholic song, sung in lonely places like jungle.

Bini: These are lullabies sung either at home or in the field, taking babies to places of work. The baby is tied to the back of the mother or the young babysitter.

Midang Ni:tom This is usually sung at the time of ushering in a bride to her new home, often in order to tease her. These too are rather melancholic, since they depict the sadness of brides wailing at being separated from her family, friends and the familiar childhood environment.

Oi Ni:tom It is the most popular form of Mishing folk song, sung by Mising youths when they are working or moving about the fields, woods, etc. It is an integral part of the Mising So:man (dance). It has a variety of themes ranging from romance, humour, tragedy, and socio-cultural motifs. Each line in an Oi-Nitom is of seven syllables.

Misings have rich folk music. Apart from dumdum, lu:pi, lé:nong, marbang, bali, etc. used in Gumrag dance and which are common to other locals, the following are the typical type of traditional instruments played in Mishing folk music: éjuk tapung, dérki: tapung, tumbo tapung, tu:tok tapung, ketpong tapung, gekre tapung, dendun, dumpak ko:rég, gunggang, tulung etc. These are mostly wind instruments made of bamboo. Yoksa (sword) is used as a musical instrument by the priest (Mibu) during religious dance.

There are many types of Mising dances, and each has their particular rules. Gumrag is performed five times in circles. Drums and cymbols are the usual musical instruments for the dances.

Mibu Dagnam

It is a priestly dance performed mostly during Po:rag, the harvesting festival, observed in the Murong, the community hall of the Mishings. The priest sings the A:bang while performing this ritual dance.

Selloi

This is a kind of merry-making song and dance often performed for fun, by young boys and girls with the accompaniment of drums or cymbals. It marks the beginning of influx of the Mishing people from hills to plains of Assam.

Lereli

Occasionally, all sections of Mising people indulge in singing and dancing lereli in sheer fun and merriment, especially at meeting old friends.

Ejug Tapung So:man

This is a very ancient form of dance performed to the accompaniment of ejug tapung, a wind instrument resembling the snake charmer’s been.

Gumrag So:man (Gumrag Paksong)

This dance is performed on the occasion of Ali-A:yé-Lígang and in Mishing Bihu.

Lotta So:man

This dance is performed on any occasion, as an expression of joy or community celebration. Old and young, all join in these dances

Marriage

The Misings are a patrilineal and patriarchal society and so, as per customary law, only the male children are entitled to inherit the property of a family. However, daughters can inherit the clothes and jewellery of their mothers.

Marriages amongst the Misings take place in four ways: (i) formal marriages through negotiation, (ii) marriage by elopement, (iii) marriage through a very simple ceremony, and (iv) marriage by force (this was not a practice of the mising tribe but was the mentality of the parents like other people too). The last one, in which a man makes a woman his wife against her will by whisking her away from some place and starting to live together, is no longer in practice. Extreme poverty or inconvenience force families to arrange a marriage of the third kind, in which a few elders, invited to the house of the groom, bless the would-be couple over a few bowls of rice beer – and the wedding is over. The most common form of marriage in rural areas even today is the one by elopement. When a boy is in love with a girl and intends to marry her, but cannot afford the cost of a formal marriage, or expects some opposition to the marriage from some quarter, or would like to start a conjugal life without delay, he chooses elopement with the girl as the best option. More often than not, marriages by elopement are followed by due social recognition through simple formalities. Formal marriages are arranged through two or three stages of negotiation, but although arranged by parents or guardians, the marriage of a boy and a girl totally unknown to each other, would be very rare. Formal marriages amongst them appear to have been influenced to a great extent by the practice of such marriages amongst their neighbours in the valley. It is now common for the educated and the well-to-do parents to perform the marriages of their children in the formal way. Polygamy is permissible as per customary law, but it is not looked upon as an act of honour anymore. Polyandry is unknown altogether. Widows or widowers can remarry. Customary law allows divorces, but they are not very common. It is also customary for a groom’s parents or guardians to pay bride price – mostly nominal – to the parents or guardians of the bride. Clan endogamy is taboo.

Social structure

The Mishings believe Abotani as their ancestor is supposed to be a son of mother Sun and father Moon of the Heavenly abode. The Mishing people inhabiting by the plains believe Gu:mín as one of the earliest ancestors, the forefather of a lineal family of Abotani. The sons of Gu:mín are grouped in clans (opín), the names of which are represented by the existing surnames in the society. They are all blood related brothers with a social restriction of matrimonial relationship among them.

The traditional chief of a Mishing village was called a Ga:m. He presided at the sittings of the village Kebang (the village council), which deliberated upon different matters concerning the wellbeing of the village community as well as complaints of individual members or groups in the community. The Kebang was the legal, judicial and executive authority of the community, although the final say on all matters, barring the ones relating to their faith, was that of the Ga:m. Cases of social and criminal offences were heard by the Kebang, and persons found guilty were penalized. The Gam has been replaced with Gambura (gaonburha in mipak language) a petty village level agent of the government, since the days of the British. Kebang now denotes an association.

Housing

A traditional Mishing house is stilted. It has a thatched top and is patterned simply like the letter 'I.' It is built usually with wooden posts, beams, truss and supporting forks, but bamboo is used extensively for flooring and roofing. The more the number of nuclear families living in the same house, the longer the ‘ I ’ would be. The granary is built a little close to the house and a cowshed too would not be far away. Mishing villages are generally large in size, consisting of around fifty-to-sixty households on an average.

Clothing

Traditional Mising dress

The traditional craft of weaving is a very bright aspect of Mishing culture. It is an exclusive preserve of the Mishing woman, who starts her training in the craft even before she reaches her teens. For the male, she weaves cotton jackets, light cotton towels, endi shawls, thick loin cloths, and, occasionally, even shirtings. For women she weaves a variety of clothes, such as ege "the lower garment of Mishing women", rihbi (a sheet with narrow stripes, wrapped to cover the lower garment and the blouse), gaseng (used for the same purpose as that of a rihbi, but having, unlike a rihbi, broad stripes of contrastive colours), gero (a sheet, usually off-white, wrapped round the waist to cover the lower part of the body, or round the chest to cover the body down to the knees or so), seleng gasor (a light cotton sheet, worn occasionally instead of a rihbi or a gaseng), riya (a long, comparatively narrow, sheet, wrapped, a bit tightly, round the chest), segrek (a loose piece of cloth, wrapped round the waist by married women to cover the eagey down to the knees), a pohtub (a scarf used to protect the head from the sun, dirt, etc.), and nisek (a piece of cloth to carry a baby with). Before yarn, produced by modern textile factories, was available in the market, Misings used to grow cotton and obtain cotton yarn by spinning. The use of endi yarn, obtained from worms fed on leaves of castor-oil plants, was probably common amongst them. However, they learnt the use of muga (silk obtained from silkworms fed on a kind of tall tree, called som in Assamese) and of paat (silk obtained from silkworms fed mulberry leaves) from their neighbours (other indigenous Assamese communities) in the valley. Even now Mishing women weave cloths, using muga and paat silk, very sparingly. Thus weaving cotton clothes is the principal domain of the Mishing weaver. She has good traditional knowledge of natural dyes.

A special mention has to be made here of the Mishing textile piece, called gadu. It is the traditional Mishing blanket, fluffy on one side, and it is woven on a traditional loin loom. The warp consists of cotton spun into thick and strong yarn, and the weft of cotton, turned into soft yarn and cut into small pieces for insertion, piece by piece, to form the fluff. Weaving a gadu is a very laborious affair like weaving expensive carpets, requiring the weaver to spend a lot of time on her loin loom, and, as the younger women in a family would, generally, not have enough time for such a work, it is the ageing ones staying at home that do it. There has been a drastic decline of the gadu craft during the years after independence because of the availability of inexpensive blankets in the market.

Festivals

Mising people celebrate various festivals, though, the three chief traditional festivals of the Misings are the Ali-A:yé-Lígang, and the Po:rag, both connected with their agricultural cycle.

Ali-A:yé-Lígang
Ali means roots and shoots, A:yé means Fruit and Lígang means beginning. Thus the words means the beginning of sowing of seeds. Ali-A:yé-Lígang is celebrated in the second Wednesday of February month. The festival marks the beginning of the sowing season. The people of this community are mainly agrarian, so the festival of Ali-A:yé-Lígang mark the beginning of a new agricultural calendar for them. Ali-A:yé-Lígang is a five-day festival. The celebrations start on a Wednesday, which is considered an auspicious day by the Misings, with the heads of families sowing ceremonially rice paddy seeds in a corner of their respective rice fields in the morning hours and praying for a good crop during the year as well as for general plenty and wellbeing. Young men and women celebrate the occasion by singing and dancing at night in the courtyard of every household in the village to the accompaniment of drums, cymbals and a gong. The gong is not used on any festive occasion other than the Ali-Aye Leegang. Similarly, the drums have specific beats for this festival. The troupe accepts from each household offers of rice beer, fowls, and/or cash. After the singing and dancing in this way is over, the youths hold a feast on the third day. The fourth is a day of taboos: activities like cutting trees, using agricultural implements in any way, using fire in agricultural fields, eating eggs, fruit (especially sour ones), frying items of food etc. must not be done on this day. The taboos are over on the fifth day, and the festival concludes with eating and drinking in the evening. A kind of sticky rice, packed in leaves of wild cardamom and boiled, is a special item of food on such festive occasions.

Po:rag is the post-harvest festival of the Mishings. Harvesting of paddy rice in autumn is very common now amongst the Mishings and so a Po:rag is usually observed now sometime in early winter or early spring. But there was a time when a harvest in summer too was very common amongst them and so Po:rag was celebrated earlier in the months of August or September also. It is a very expensive three-day festival (reduced to two days or even one these days, depending on the extent of preparation on the part of the organizers in terms of items of food and drinks) and so held once in two-to-three years or so. Entertainment during the celebrations is open to everyone, young and old, of the village, and invitations are also extended formally to many guests, including some people of neighbouring villages, to join the celebrations. More significantly, it is customary on this occasion to invite the women who hail from the village but have been married to men of other villages and places, far and near. This makes Po:rag a grand festival of reunion. Moreover, apart from the husbands of the women so invited, a group of young men and women, who can sing and dance, is expected to accompany each of them. No formal singing, dancing and drumming contests are organized, but the congregation of many singers, dancers and drummers from different villages, in addition to the ones in the village, turns the festival into some kind of a friendly music and dance tournament, as it were. This has an amplifying effect on the air of joy that the festival exudes. The sole responsibility for organizing the festival is vested in a body of young men and women, called Meembiur-yahmey (literally, ‘young women-young men’). The organization is run with a good degree of discipline, following the provisions of an unwritten but well-respected code of conduct. Erring individuals are given hearings and penalized, if found guilty.

Another occasion called Dobur is an animistic rite performed occasionally by the village community by sacrificing a sow and some hens for different purposes, such as to avert a likely crop failure and ensure general well being of the community, or to avert the evil effects of a wrongdoing on the part of a member of the community, etc. The form of observance of Dobur varies according to the purpose. In the most common form, the younger male members of a village beat the walls of every house in the village from one end to the other with big sticks to drive away the ghosts and goblins hiding in nook and corner and perform the sacrificial rite at some distance away from the village, and hold a feast there. Anyone passing unwittingly through the venue of the rite has to stop in the place till evening or pay a fine.

Some of the features of Bihu dances in recent times, boys and girls dancing together, for instance, may have been borrowed from the Misings (an indigenous Assamese community).