Donyi-Polo is the designation given to a revivalist new religious movement of animistic and shamanic orientation, formalised among the Tani and other Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam in Northeast India from the late 1960s onwards. The name Donyi-Polo means 'Sun-Moon'; it was adopted as the brand of the movement during its revitalisation and institutionalisation, which occurred in response to the growth of Christianity in the region and to allow for possible absorption into Hinduism.
In scholarly literature, Donyi-Polo is generally characterised as a reformist or revivalist movement rather than as a continuous traditional religion, and is distinguished from the older, decentralised animistic beliefs and oral mythology of the Tani peoples that preceded it. Anthropologist Sarit Kumar Chaudhuri describes it as a reformist movement initiated by the Tani group from the late 1960s, with most of its institutional forms (prayer halls, hymn books, deity images, weekly congregational service) emerging in the 1980s and 1990s. Claire S. Scheid, writing in Internationales Asienforum, records that the formalisation involved preparing prayer books, refining the oral tradition, building prayer halls, introducing iconography of the divine, fixing holy days and assigning new roles to traditional priests; she characterises these as innovations introduced by cultural elites to address the absence of more conventionally organised forms found in other religions in the region.
According to the 2011 Census of India, the religion has approximately 363,853 followers, of whom 362,553 reside in Arunachal Pradesh and around 800 in Assam. A smaller number of adherents is reported across the border in Tibet, China. It has been stated that the census figure undercounts followers because the form does not list Donyi-Polo separately and many practitioners select Hindu rather than the residual "other" option.
The pioneer of the revival was Talom Rukbo. The institutional form of Donyi-Polo is related to the parallel Hemphu-Mukrang movement among the Karbi and the Nyezi-No movement among the Hruso, and has been compared in the literature with the Heraka reform movement of the Zeliangrong Nagas, which began in the 1920s and has followed a similar trajectory of institutionalisation and increasing proximity to Hindu nationalist organisations. Several scholars, including , , and , state that the institutionalisation of Donyi-Polo received patronage from Hindutva organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vivekananda Kendra, and that the new prayer halls, idols and ritual idiom draw from Hinduism rather than from the older Tani tradition.
History
Although Donyi-Polo is presented by its adherents as the historic faith of the Tani peoples, scholars have generally described the religion in its present organised form as a twentieth-century development, with most of its institutional features taking shape in the 1980s and 1990s. The pre-revival belief system of the Tani peoples was a diffuse and locally varied animism, transmitted orally through shamans (nyibu or miri), without permanent temples, anthropomorphic idols, congregational worship, a scriptural canon, a fixed day of weekly prayer, central organisation, or a single name uniting the various communities. Altars were erected only when a particular ritual required them, and were dismantled afterwards. The Adi philosopher Oshong Ering described the underlying notion as "a philosophy of life for the Adi with myths and superstitions which give the colour of a religion", rather than as an organised religion in the modern sense.
Scheid characterises the changes made by Talom Rukbo and his circle as innovations introduced by cultural elites to provide a more conventionally organised structure of religion in the Arunachali social sphere. The political scientist Soihiamlung Dangmei describes Donyi-Poloism as an attempt to construct an indigenous identity through a reform movement shaped by Hindutva ideology and directed against the spread of Christianity, classing it with the Heraka movement of the Zeliangrong Nagas as parallel cases of indigenous reform under Hindu nationalist influence. The present article accordingly addresses the new movement and its institutions, which are treated separately in the scholarly literature from the older traditional beliefs and mythology of the Tani peoples.
Origins On 28 August 1968, a meeting of Adi intellectuals was convened in Along (now Aalo), in what was then West Siang district, to discuss countermeasures against what they perceived as a gradual erosion of indigenous identity. The participants attributed this erosion both to India's post-Independence policy of integrating the frontier territories and, in particular, to the spread of Christianity in the region from the 1950s onwards. The meeting also aimed to unite the various Tibeto-Burman communities under a shared identity and set of values. Following the meeting, 36,954 inhabitants of the erstwhile Siang district identified themselves as adherents of Donyi-Polo in the 1971 census.
The administrative context of the early revival period is also relevant. K.A.A. Raja, who served as the first Chief Commissioner of the renamed territory from 1972 and subsequently as the first Lieutenant Governor of the Union Territory of Arunachal Pradesh, presided over a period in which the entry of Christian missionaries continued to be restricted under policies inherited from the NEFA administration. K.A.A Raja was also involved in radicalizing factions and establishing legal mandates that led to the destruction of multiple churches, creating space for the new religious infrastructure of a saffronized Donyi-Polo. He made Talom Rukbo the principal architect of Donyi-Poloism, the term coined for the institutionalised form of the Tibeto-Burman folk religion with heavy influence from Hinduism. Rukbo identified this opportunity and the lack of a written scriptural canon as a main reason for the erosion of traditional culture. With the aim of recording, and in some cases composing, rituals, prayers and hymns, three cultural organisations were founded by 1986: the Tani Jagriti Foundation, the Donyi-Polo Youth Federation, and the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang. Rukbo's circle described the institutional faith as an effort to give the inherited social character of the community a defined religious form for the modern era. During his tenure, Raja invited Eknath Ranade, founder of the Vivekananda Kendra, to establish the first Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalayas in the territory in 1977, opening an institutional space within which Talom Rukbo and other indigenous-faith leaders subsequently developed the Donyi-Polo revival. According to a recollection by Arunachali political figure Wanglat published in The Arunachal Times in March 2025, Raja had communicated to local leaders his concern that the Central Intelligence Agency intended to encourage the formation of a Christian-majority buffer state along the Sino-Indian and Sino-Myanmar borders, a perception that Wanglat identifies as one of the contributing factors behind the framing of Christianity as a "foreign religion" and the subsequent enactment of the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 1978.
Rukbo's ideas were taken up by other Adi and Tani intellectuals, and the movement spread across the tribes and beyond the Tani peoples. 31 December, the day on which the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang was founded in 1986, has since been observed annually as "Donyi-Polo Day".
Temple precincts (gangging) began to be consecrated from the 1990s, and religious literature and prayer hymns have since been collected, codified and published. To meet the growing number of adherents, the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang established biannual orientation courses and trained groups of youth who were sent back to their home villages with books and icons to encourage the construction of temples and the conduct of regular prayers. Between 1970 and 2010, Chaudhuri records ten Donyi-Polo prayer halls constructed in Adi areas against twelve churches built in the same period, a figure he relates to the movement's institutional position alongside mission Christianity. Over the subsequent two decades the revival spread across the whole of Arunachal Pradesh.
Supporters of the revival have popularised the slogan «Loss of culture is loss of identity»; Chaudhuri notes that the indirect implication is that those who convert to Christianity forfeit their culture and hence their identity.
Relationship to Christianity Several scholars and journalists report that the trigger for the Donyi-Polo movement was the growth of Christianity in Arunachal Pradesh from the 1950s onwards, and that the movement's organisational forms were modelled on those of the rival religion rather than drawn from older Tani practice. Christianity in the state grew from around one per cent of the population in 1971 to about thirty per cent in 2011, and the founding meetings of the movement named missionary activity as the threat to be countered. observes that in some districts the rate of conversion to Christianity has been reported to exceed ninety per cent, and characterises the movement's institutional architecture as a response to that scale of change rather than as a survival of pre-contact tradition.
According to Chaudhuri, the forms adopted by the new movement are similar to those of the rival, and include Sunday services with seated congregants, a sermon by a priest, communal singing of standardised hymns from a printed book, segregated seating, and a weekly cycle of attendance. Chaudhuri states that none of these features is documented in pre-revival Tani worship, in which ritual was occasional, household-based or village-based, and conducted by the nyibu rather than in a fixed sanctuary. The journalist Ranju Dodum, reporting for the Pulitzer Center, records that the pictorial representations of Donyi and Polo, and of the earth goddess Kine Nané, now hanging in many homes did not exist as iconography until a few decades earlier.
Reporting in The Federal notes that physical forms with similarities to Hindu deities have been generated for tribal supreme spirits previously held to be formless, including Donyi-Polo, Amik Matai Ringya Jawmallu, Rangfra, Nani Intaya and Nyezi-No, and that worship practices including the lighting of oil lamps and incense sticks before idols have been introduced. Donyi-Polo therefore "looks like" a religion in the conventional Western and Hindu sense because it was designed to do so, with the aim of competing with Christianity for tribal allegiance.
Role of Hindutva organisations While Donyi-Polo is presented by its adherents as an indigenous revival, scholars have documented that its institutional infrastructure was built with overt and covert support from Hindu nationalist organisations active in the state, and that the movement's ideological content was shaped accordingly. Chaudhuri identifies the Ramakrishna Mission, the Vivekananda Mission, the Sharada Mission and the Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalaya network as the principal external patrons, with the last being the most influential. He notes that the parallel Nyedar Namlo movement among the Nyishis and the Danyi-Piilo movement among the Apatanis received the same patronage.