The Unwillingness to Unlearn: The Ethical Formation of Gendered Subjectivity in Majuli, Assam

This article examines how the process of unlearning shapes the emergence of gendered subjectivities in the context of a religious reform unfolding among the Mising tribal community in Majuli, Assam. Individuals of the Mising tribe have historically practiced a form of religiosity which they believe has developed over four or five centuries as their ancestral practices blended in with practices they adopted from the many streams of religious practices in the Brahmaputra Valley, particularly nav-Vaishnavism.¹ Over the past century, Hindu revivals and reforms sweeping across India as part of a larger anti-colonial nationalist movement have inspired nav-Vaishnav monasteries (satras) in Majuli to revive their religious ethics in continuity with Hinduism in other parts of India, but distinct from “non-Hindu” religious traditions in the Brahmaputra Valley. Simultaneously, an indigenous revivalist movement that began in the 1980s in Arunachal Pradesh and then spread to Assam has been striving to revive the ancestral practices of the Adi and Mising tribes, in the form of a separate religious discourse called Donyipolo.² As these movements discursively constitute Donyipolo and nav-Vaishnavism as distinct religious traditions, they begin to highlight the incommensurable differences and obscure the confluences between these historically coeval religious discourses. This emerging emphasis on religious differences between nav-Vaishnavites and the Mising tribes creates grounds for Mising individuals in Majuli to see their current religious tradition as a “mixed” formation that is neither an ideal form of nav-Vaishnavism, nor an ideal form of Donyipolo.

Thinking with my Mising interlocutors in Majuli who have begun to aspire to reform and to orient themselves to the emerging religious discourse of Donyipolo, this article asks how the desire to become ethical subjects of Donyipolo shapes their attitudes towards elements of their previous practices that they have now come to identify as distinctly Hindu in origin. In particular, I take up the sindoor (vermillion) that married women wear in the parting of their hair as a site to explore the reinscription and reification of the differences between Donyipolo and Hinduism. Examining how regularized practices such as wearing sindoor and the embodiment of precepts emerging from the historical confluence of coexisting religious discourses render my Mising interlocutors culturally legible to themselves, to the community within which they make life, and to the network within which they are absorbed as they turn to Donyipolo, this article comments on how unlearning – a process which, alongside learning, allows the subject to contend with emerging emphasis on the differences between coeval religious discourses – becomes crucial to the study of agency and the production of a gendered subject in the context of religious reform. Drawing on the works of feminist scholars like Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, this paper works with feminist readings of performativity and ethics to examine the role of pedagogy – learning and unlearning – in shaping the relationship of an ethical subject of reform to herself.

Since 2016, I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the revival, institutionalization, and practice of Donyipolo in Majuli, a river island in the Assamese segment of the river Brahmaputra. A large number of my interlocutors are Mising individuals who are closely examining their current religious practices and identifying elements that seem extraneous to Donyipolo and, therefore, in need of reform. The religious traditions of the Mising have to be understood in relation to the particular histories of the Brahmaputra Valley. As several scholars have pointed out, the history of the Northeast is best understood through a transnational approach that looks beyond the borders of the modern Indian state, and becomes attentive to the region’s historic continuity with China and South East Asia.³ As Saikia and Baishya note the Brahmaputra Valley is a “place of relations” shaped by historic migrations from China, South East Asia, Bangladesh, and from India’s Gangetic plains – an area that the Northeast today refers to a “mainland India.”⁴ Historians like Indrani Chatterjee demonstrate the role of monasteries and their land-owning patrons in producing ethical knowledges and promoting ethical education that allowed various religious traditions to flourish across the Valley.⁵ My project examines the messy and awkward relationship between the tribes and the nav-Vaishnavite monastic traditions in Majuli, examining how shifting notions of caste have allowed the tribes to learn on and off from the monastic traditions, creating religious traditions that discursively blended monastic ethics with tribal ethics.⁶ Today, as nav-Vaishnavism becomes continuous with a more unified Hinduism, the mosaic practices of the tribes stand apart as “unethical” practices, or practices that do not adhere to the ethical norms of the now Hindu order of nav-Vaishnavism.

Similarly, the desire of the Mising tribe to address this exclusion by desiring to becoming ethical Donyipolo subjects must be understood vis-à-vis particular colonial and postcolonial histories. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of modern secular governance in the Valley was guided by colonial and capitalist intent to convert the valley into the “North-East Frontier Province” that was to be an extraction zone for coal, gas, timber, and most importantly, tea.⁷ These modification of the landscape, particularly the emergence of protected areas, led to the isolation of valleys from the hills reifying pre-existing differences between valley tribes like the Mising and hill tribes like the Adi.⁸ Despite the distances produced between the Mising and the other tribes, state processes located them with other tribes in a “savage slot” that acts as a foil both for the supposedly more civilized Hinduism as well as for modernity in the Northeast.⁹ Although today the Mising are able to draw on the precolonial histories of connection and unite over the revival and institutionalization of Donyipolo, this article draws on the ways in which the Adi come to see the Mising as a migrant tribe that has adopted “Hindu” practices, even as the two tribes simultaneously form solidarities over their relative marginalization in relation to the discourses of modernity and Hinduism.

What is central to this article is the ways in which the tribes themselves contend with the complex history that has placed them outside the folds of Hinduism and in an awkward relationship with other tribes. Thus, as they strive to become ethical tribal subjectivities through the adoption of Donyipolo, it becomes important for them to identify certain practices as “Hindu” practices that now need reform. Two of my interlocutors, independently of each other identified¹⁰ the sindoor as a good example of a Hindu practice that the Mising had adopted into the Mising religious tradition. They hypothesized that the practice had seeped into the Mising traditional repertoire in the centuries during which their ancestors had gradually migrated from the hills, where they lived among other Donyipolo-practicing tribes like the Adi, to the plains, where they had made their home among adherents of different forms of Hinduism. Through years of reiterative practice, the sindoor had become integral to the ethical repertoire that made a Mising woman legible as an ideal wife to herself, to her husband and family, and to her community in Majuli. However, today, as Mising and Adi individuals met each other through their involvement in the movement to revive Donyipolo, the red sindoor on the foreheads of my Mising interlocutors seemed to belie their historic connection to the Adis. It stood out, instead, as a testament of Mising migration away from the home of the Adis, their proximity to the Hindus in the valley, and the “mixed” religious tradition that they now believed needed reform. But, even as my interlocutors aspired to reform themselves and become ethical subjects of Donyipolo, they wondered if they should – or in fact could – now unlearn ostensibly Hindu practices like wearing sindoorthat had over centuries become wrapped up in processes that rendered them legible as ethical gendered subjectivities to their communities within Majuli, and more importantly, to themselves.

The process of unlearning came up again in conversations on the use of meat and alcohol in Mising sacred rites. While nav-Vaishnavite norms have strictly forbidden animal sacrifice and alcohol consumption since its inception in the fifteenth century, and more emphatically since its recent revival as a school of Hinduism, my interlocutors believed that the Mising would never unlearn their practice of using meat and alcohol in religious rituals. Traditionally, the sacrifice of animals raised in Mising homes along with beer brewed from rice grown on Mising farms become gifts used to appease deceased ancestors and to strengthen genealogical ties with them. Even after the Mising had begun to include the names of nav-Vaishnav gods in these ancestral rituals alongside the names of the ancestral spirits, the Mising continued to use meat and alcohol both as part of the sacred rites and during the feasts that followed. Although my Mising interlocutors were interpellated by nav-Vaishnavites as unethical subjects who submitted to improper, profaning practices in sacred spaces, my Mising interlocutors spoke with pride of the tenacity with which they had refused to unlearn this ancestral practice. They believed that they had made their life historically in a multi-ethnic context, both by learning new practices and by demonstrating an unwillingness to unlearn ancestral tribal norms that helped them maintain meaningful relations with their ancestral genealogies. Often calling themselves a “mixed” people who had become “neither proper Hindu nor proper Donyipolo,” but “a little bit of both,” my interlocutors referred to the space they come to occupy an “in-between space” that needed reform so that they could become ethical tribal subjectivities.

As they embarked on this reform, however, my interlocutors became increasingly aware that the practices they had learned after settling in the Valley – like wearing sindoor – allowed them to negotiate their relationship within the multi-ethnic community among which they had settled in Majuli. More importantly these practices had become, over time, significant additions to the everyday repertoire through which the Mising became legible to themselves as ethical tribal subjects of Majuli. Although they were learning to identify these practices as “extraneous Hindu practices” that they had learned or adopted after settling in the Brahmaputra Valley, my interlocutors started to see how these practices also shaped their own sense of who they were. This article focuses on the inner dissonance these women felt as they contended with the new norms that they would adopt in place of their existing practices. I show that this dissonance led to reflections on their relationships to the values that they had adopted after settling in the Brahmaputra Valley, and what reforming some of these values could actually mean for them. This reflection, I show, allows them to stay with the “in-betweenness” and learn to pace their transformation. As agents of their self-reform and self-transformation, they show both a willingness to learn desirable values, and an unwillingness to unlearn pre-existing values that have not become undesirable yet. In the process, they come to see how the migratory history has become an indelible part of who they are.

While this article works with my interlocutors’ reflections on values and virtues that emerged at the confluence of religious discourses, they do not demonstrate any a prioriknowledge of co-constitution. Rather, as Hindu and Donyipolo revivalism begin to outline ethical norms and ethical subjectivity, my interlocutors find themselves being interpellated by those well within the nav-Vaishnavite tradition as a transgressive figure that encroaches upon but does not align completely with their practices. Similarly, practices she has adopted in the borderlands, such as wearing sindoor, belie her historic connection to the hills, producing her as a subjectivity distanced from the ethical ancestral figure through migration and blending. While this interpellation led my interlocutors to adopt the appellation of being a “mixed” or “in-between” people, they themselves came to understand the role of the in-betweenness in constituting them only after they embarked on the journey of reform and self-transformation. It is only when new values they were asked to learn did not feel right, and created a sense of dissonance that my interlocutors became aware of the role of the values they had learned from an “in-between” or “mixed” discourse in constituting them. Thus even as the Mising woman demonstrates her agency through the concerted efforts to learn the emerging norms of Donyipolo, I will try to show that she also demonstrates her agency through her unwillingness to unlearn norms that allow her to materialize in a way that matters to her within the discursive space of Majuli. While the figure of the Mising woman demonstrating the unwillingness to unlearn might raise questions about a knowing subject whose unwillingness can be read as a form of resistance, and the consequence of rationalized negotiations and decisions, I argue that the unwillingness is a reflexive act that springs from the Mising woman’s sense of alignment with the values she has embodied through the reiterative everyday practices that help her make life in the complex discursive space of Majuli legible both to herself and others.

Embodiment:

My interlocutor Momi Narah asked me to tea one day to discuss something she believed was relevant to my ethnographic fieldwork on the revival of Donyipolo. We had run into each other on the bridge that leads from her village, Chitadhar Chuk, to the town of Goramur, where I had a rented a room for that period of my research. Offering me a ride to town on her bike, she took me to a friend’s restaurant for some tea and sweets. As we seated ourselves, she asked me to pull out my notebook and began talking to me about the complexities of navigating the religious reform. She had already told me, on several occasions, that the Mising were a “mixed” people, who, during their migration from the hills to the plains, had taken up Hindu, particularly nav-Vaishnav, values. On a long walk down the Luhit, a tributary of the Brahmaputra that skirts her village, she once pointed to the blue hills in the distance and talked about living with the sense of having moved not simply from one physical home to another, but also from the folds of one religious discourses into another one that emerged through dwelling in the place where the Mising had settled. As we made our way to a sacred rite that one of our common friends was conducting in his fields, she told me that it was not easy to understand Mising life in Majuli unless I was attentive to the intricate ways in which they had braided together learnings from the hills with learnings from the valley to create a rich religious tradition. I expressed surprise at how reflexive she was about the formation of her religious tradition, and she told me that she had not really thought about it herself, until she had become involved with the movement to reform their existing practices and submit completely to Donyipolo. Individuals attempting to revive Donyipolo had first visited Majuli from Arunachal Pradesh in the 1990s, when she was a young girl. But Majuli was drawn into the movement only around 2006, when local Mising leaders had begun working with the revivalists to conduct workshops and meetings about the ancestral religion that had slowly devolved after Mising migration into the valley. Momi had become a part of this movement in 2008, when she had also married her husband, Horen Narah, and moved to Chitadhar Chuk. Now, a mother raising her two children to become ethical Donyipolo subjects, Momi strove every day to incorporate the teachings of this religion in her life. As she began to engage deeply with the discourse, it raised for her, as it did for several adherents I had spoken to, questions about the existing religious tradition they follow. As they identify areas of their lives that need reform, they begin to question the origins of the practices that are already a part of their lives. Sometimes, this deconstruction leads them to reflect on their relationship to those elements of their practice that they now labeled as Hindu.¹¹

At the tea shop in Goramur, Momi told me of one such Hindu element she had been thinking about – the sindoorshe wore in the parting of her hair. She believed that the sindoor was emblematic of the “mixing” that the Mising had undergone as they migrated and settled in the valley. She said that it would be difficult to locate a Mising woman who knew exactly when the Mising had started wearing the sindoor or why they had begun doing this. All they knew was that some of their ancestors had started wearing it, perhaps to avoid questions about their marital status, perhaps to avoid being questioned by Hindus for looking different, perhaps because they had found it meaningful. She could guess how it had begun, but she would never really know. All she could tell with certainty was that the practice had started well before her mother’s time, and she had grown up watching her mother, and then her two married older sisters, wear sindoor. When she married, she began wearing it as well.

This learning, passed on from mother to daughter, was not an articulated lesson. Like several other practices – for example, weaving at the Mising loom, fishing, or working in the fields – it was learned through observations and then through rehearsed reiterations. Bearing resonance with Paul Connerton’s arguments that collective memory is often transmitted as embodied knowledge through ritualized practiced learned through generations, Momi argued that her mother, or her sisters, or other female authority figures, had never really showed her how to put the sindoor on, or talked about what it stood for.¹² Neither did texts circulate on the value of sindoor. Rather, she had begun wearing the sindoorafter her marriage because of what she had remembered from watching other women. But now, having turned to Donyipolo, she had begun to wonder if this practice was not Hindu in its origins and if Mising Donyipolo followers needed to wear it at all. The thought had sprung up one morning as she was wearing the sindoor and she had begun to reflect deeply on it. When she sat down before me at the tea shop she had already arrived at an answer. “I don’t think I can give it up,” she said. “Everyone wears it in Majuli, and if I give it up, I will look odd. People will think I am rebelling or – worse – that I don’t care for my husband. But there is one other thing. It will feel wrong to me. I can’t tell you why because we do not really know why we started wearing it. But if we stopped it will feel like not doing something you have to do to show you care about your husband or your marriage. It has become a part of what we do as wives, you know? It is how we know and everyone else knows that this woman is married and has a husband she cares for.”

Throughout our conversation, Momi expressed her apprehensions about becoming an oddity if she gave up the sindoor, and stressed on how wrong it would also feel to do so. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler’s classical work on the production, stabilization, and normalization of gender, she builds on the works of Michel Foucault and J.L. Austin among others, to examine what the body does within a discursive space to become culturally intelligible as a gendered body. This legibility is stabilized as the body performs specific tactics activities and tactics in a regularized, ritualized manner over time. Similarly, the sindoor works as a tactic that through reiterations over a person’s lifetime and over generations has the capacity to render a woman legible as a wife within the discursive space of Majuli where all women – Mising or otherwise – wear it once they are married. Not wearing the sindoor would make Momi conspicuous as an oddity within the discursive space where the sindoor’s indexicality has been stabilized through reiterative practice.

While Butler’s uses examples of such variations from normative principles to show how categories that we take for granted come to be destabilized, Momi’s fears that it would feel wrong to vary from the norm resonate with Mahmood’s evocation of Butler in her remarkable ethnography on piety movements in Cairo. Mahmood’s interlocutors through carefully rehearsed reiterations of outwardly tactics learn to embody virtues prescribed by the mosque-based piety movement they belong. Building on Aristotle, Mahmood shows how exteriority becomes the means for cultivating inner attitudes and virtues that are prescribed within a discourse. This rehearsed alignment between the outwardly expression and the inner attitude allows a subject to experience a prescribed norm as an embodied and spontaneous virtue.

While I turn to Mahmood’s theorization of embodiment to understand Momi’s inner dissonance about giving up the sindoor, I also want to underline that the two situations are not entirely similar. Writing within the folds of a very particular discursive religious tradition, Mahmood draws attention to conscientious learning in her ethnography. Her interlocutors, as agents of their self-transformation, attend to the virtues they hope to embody by concertedly adopting particular outwardly practices, and learning to understand exteriority as a means of cultivating an inner, embodied sense of propriety. Momi on the other hand did not learn to wear the sindoorbecause she intended to make herself into an ethical wife. Despite this difference in the two cases vis-à-vis the process of learning, Momi, like Mahmood’s interlocutors came to experience the act of wearing sindooras a practice through which she was cultivating herself as a good wife. Over the years, wearing sindoor– although not deliberately rehearsed – had developed into a spontaneous or reflexive practice that allowed her to align her inner desire with an attitude of ethical wifehood. Momi, in her conversation on the sindoor, remarked about the care she cultivates for her husband and their marriage by wearing it regularly. In other conversations on her marriage, she has elaborated on how she comes to feel this care for her husband and their family through activities she undertakes every day in her home and in the businesses they run together. This care, enacted through acts of cooking, cleaning, and bookkeeping, also extends to care for herself. Noting with pride that her husband had called her the lynchpin without whom everything they built together would fall apart, Momi also talked to me about the attention she began to show for her own health and well-being after her marriage. Thus, the sindoor, working alongside these other activities and tactics allows Momi to cultivate and embody the virtue of care.

Unlike Mahmood’s interlocutors who concertedly learned to cultivate bodily practices that help them embody desirable inner virtue of modesty, Momi came to understand the connection between the bodily act of wearing the sindoorand the inner virtue of care only after she learned to identify the sindooras a Hindu practice that she was not required to follow as an ethical Donyipolo follower. In other words, she came to see the instrumentality of the sindoorin shaping her sense of who she was, when she felt a sense of inner dissonance about leaving it out of the everyday routine through which she expressed care for her marriage, her husband, and herself. This difference between Momi’s experience and the experiences of Mahmood’s interlocutors, I believe expands Mahmood’s argument on agency vis-à-vis self-transformation and embodiment, by demonstrating how women come to embody virtues by agentively performing practices that they learned more insidiously than what is possible in a mosque-based pedagogical network.

The lack of a pedagogical network made the discursive space that the Mising occupy seem bereft of ethical norms even to the Mising. It is not uncommon to hear my interlocutors call themselves a “mixed” people who are neither ethical Hindu nor ethical Donyipolo – and therefore lacking in ethical norms. It is this feeling of having deviated from an ethical path (by their own account) that often shapes their turn to Donyipolo. However, as the Mising learn to systematically orient themselves to a legible religious discourse with carefully prescribed norms, they begin to see the discursive space they already occupy differently. It is as they begin to change their routines in accordance with the new discourse they aspire to adopt that they come to think about the routines that are already a part of their lives. Thus, this effort to reform the self makes them aware of practices that are crucial to their pre-existing formation. In other words, it is only as the Mising begin to learn new modes of engaging with themselves that they begin to become attentive to the fact that they already do follow ethical norms, and that these norms – although adopted from multiple traditions – are instrumental in producing them.

In fact, the Mising woman recognizes these pre-existing norms only in as much as they shape her inner attitudes towards herself and those around her. As the Mising woman prepares herself to embark on a journey of rediscovering herself, she faces the task of re-organizing the routines that dictate her everyday life. It is as she replaces practices – or in the case of the sindoor­ considers giving them up – that she begins to recognize the role they have played in shaping her existing relationship with herself. This recognition begins from the sense of dissonance she feels as she considers leaving out practices from her routine. This alerts her to the sense of alignment between these outwardly tactics and her inner attitudes. For example, the sindoor became conspicuous to Momi only when she considered – even if only hypothetically – giving it up. Bent on reforming her “mixed” self, and on becoming an ethical Donyipolo subject, she had identified it as a practice that her migrating ancestors had learned from a discourse that fell outside the borders of their own ancestral discourse. It is only after she identified it as an extraneous norm and after she considered removing it from her routine that she came to consider the role of the sindoor in making her legible, even to herself, as a caring wife. This consideration does not spring from pre-existing knowledge about the symbolic value of these norms. In fact, as Momi said, few women in Majuli would be able to offer a rationale for the use of the sindoor. Most of them learnt it sans rationale by watching their mothers and sisters put on the sindoorevery morning. But the role of this more implicit pedagogy and the effect of their external practices on their inner attitudes is not necessarily apparent to women before these outwardly practices are removed – even hypothetically – from a routine. It is the sense of dissonance that follows the act of non-doing that allows the Mising woman to recognize her relationship to the norms that she has learned by occupying the discursive space at the confluence of historically coeval religious traditions. It is this dissonance that turns her attention to what she must unlearn in order to become an ethical subject of Donyipolo. From this dissonance springs her capacity to act and negotiate her relationship both with this embodied practice and with the new discourse she seeks to follow.

Unlearning:

As the Mising woman turns to Donyipolo, aspiring for reform, a question haunts her: how did she become “mixed” in the first place? Searching for this answer, the Mising woman uses her local networks to unearth her own history in Majuli, and finds that this is not first time she has had to encounter a sense of dissonance. In fact, as she attempts to historicize her religiosity, she finds that this feeling of dissonance – and the unlearning it provokes – have almost already been instrumental in the emergence of her subjectivity.

In tracing Mising attempts to unearth their own history, I found that several of my interlocutors turn to the figure of Paramananda, who surfaces in the writings of Shankardeva, the poet-saint who founded the nav-Vaishnav reform movement in the fifteenth century. Shankardeva mentions only one episode in Paramananda’s life: he met with Shankardeva and expressed his desire to become a bhakt, a devotee of the nav-Vaishnav discourse. This glimpse into Paramanda’s life evokes several imaginations among the Mising individuals I have interviewed. While some of my interlocutors believe he was an ethical nav-Vaishnav whose teachings his Mising disciples failed to adopt appropriately, others believe that Shankardeva gave him permission to continue performing Donyipolo rites and rituals, as long as they embraced the sole godhead of the nav-Vaishnavs – Hari.¹³ These speculations shape my interlocutors’ understanding that the Mising had engaged in nav-Vaishnavism since its inception, but had learned its norms only to weave them into their existing ancestral practices.

Over time, distinct Mising subjectivities were shaped by this interweaving of monastic teachings with ancestral teachings, and also with the evolution of new practices at this confluence. Interlocutors who grew up in bhakt families, in fact, have elaborate understandings of how such traditions were produced. They believe that men from Mising villages would visit nav-Vaishnav satras asking for sharan (refuge) and the permission to call themselves bhakts. Unlike Hindu bhakts, who received instruction from monks trained at the satras, Mising bhakts were often asked to return to their villages and find other Mising bakhtsto act as instructors. These returning bhaktswere particularly interested in learning the prescribed norms for the grihasta, the married man who strives to manage the affairs of his home and his family. These included elaborate rules on how to cook, how to clean the home, how to take care of the body, and through such self-care, how to turn the self into a devotee ready to feel union with the divine figure of Hari. However, these norms became sites where Mising bakhts blended in their ancestral notions of self-care and care of the household with nav-Vaishnav prescriptions to produce a new religious discourse on self-transformation. Momi offered a fine example of such blending. She had learned from observing women in her village and home that it was auspicious to wear a little bit of the ash from a home’s fireplace in her hair as she left home on long journeys. This practice ensured that the spirits of her ancestral spirits would watch over her even as she journeyed out of home. Wearing ash with the sindoor allowed her to discursively combine values attached to Hindu practices – like wearing the sindoor – with values attached to Mising practices – like wearing ash. Together, they showed a married Mising woman’s care for her marriage and marital home, and her respect for the ancestral spirits that guarded that home.

Reiterations across time allowed these emergent norms of mixing the sindoorwith ash to become a part of the repertoire that constituted Mising religious tradition. When my Mising interlocutors speak of blending they do not refer to deliberate and rationalized attempts to mix specific Donyipolo and nav-Vaishnav norms. Instead, Mising instructors partake in what Kirin Narayan describes as “everyday creativity,” – the emergent norms were the result of unintended variations produced by Mising bhakts as they blended monastic norms with their pre-existing practices.¹⁴ These blended norms, as discussed before, were often learned without systematic pedagogical practices, and so were often subject to further variations. One interlocutor, accompanying me during three interviews I conducted among Mising bhakts, in fact, noted that their ancestors seemed to have passed on a pluralistic religious discourse that varied from village to village in the way it wove nav-Vaishnavism into Donyipolo.

Because of this “mixing” my Mising interlocutors do not think of their engagement with nav-Vaishnavism as a form of conversion. In Hermeneutic of the Subject Foucault notes two forms of conversions: Christian metanoia and the Hellenistic conversion to the self. Christian metanoia, he writes, requires a dramatic or drastic transformation of the self.¹⁵ Defined often in Christian texts as a movement from “death to life, darkness to light, mortality to immortality etc.,” these conversions foresee an abrupt change in the subject’s sense of self.¹⁶ Hellenistic conversions to the self, on the other hand, do not require the subject to break with the self and demonstrate dramatic change. Instead, the subject is required to break from her surroundings, turn her gaze onto herself, and advance towards the ideal self as an arrow might towards a target. The conversion to the self is shaped by prescriptive knowledge through which the subject learns to turn to the self and undergo self-transformation. Having heard the word “conversion” only after the advent of Baptist Christianity in the Brahmaputra valley in the mid- 1850s, my interlocutors use the word to connote what Foucault calls Christian metanoia – an abrupt change in the mode of being, arising from a break with the previous self. According to them, and according to scholarship on nav-Vaishnavite reform, the discourse of nav-Vaishnavism does not call for abrupt shifts in the sense of self. Instead, my interlocutors’ understanding of nav-Vaishnavism resembles Foucault’s description of Hellenistic conversions to the self.¹⁷ As aspiring ethical subjects of nav-Vaishnavism, those who receive sharan would submit to prescriptions that would allow them to focus on themselves and through self-care transform themselves into bakhts capable of experience ecstatic union with Hari. However, since the prescriptions that Mising bhaktslearned and passed down to other bhaktswere produced by blending Donyipolo norms with nav-Vaishnav prescriptions, the Mising believe that they did not prepare themselves to discover a single godhead in the figure of Hari. Instead, even as they chanted the name of Hari in their many ritualized activities, they remained oriented to the disciplinary power of the deities and spirits of their ancestral discourse. Very rarely, they bring up the names of individuals or families that have given up their ancestral discourse in its entirety and become “completely nav-Vaishnav.” During these conversations, some of my interlocutors use the word “conversion” to indicate a complete crossing over of these individuals from one discourse to another. In all other cases however, they become “mixed,” open to the teachings of nav-Vaishnavism but still also oriented to their ancestral discourse.

My interlocutors believe that this capacity to become oriented simultaneously to nav-Vaishnavism and Donyipolo sprung from their unwillingness to unlearn their ancestral norms, even as they engaged with nav-Vaishnavism. One of my interlocutors, Ranjana Doley, believed that this unwillingness was particularly evident in sacred rites, where the Mising continued to adhere to their ancestral practice of appeasing their deities and ancestral spirits using meat and alcohol, two substances that were strictly forbidden from nav-Vaishnav sacred spaces. Even if the Mising recognized that meat and alcohol were pronounced profane in the nav-Vaishnavite teachings, which they were in the process of embracing through their sharan at nav-Vaishnav monasteries, the Mising in her words, “could not give up these practices.” This refusal among the Mising to give up meat and alcohol is also noted by Mising scholars of the Mising religious tradition. Jatin Mipun’s sociological study¹⁸ on the formation of the Mising religious tradition from the 1980s as well as Indraneel Pegu’s recent scholarship on the Mising religious traditions in Majuli¹⁹ both note this tenacity that the Mising display when it comes to meat. One of Mipun’s interlocutors – a Mising individual from Majuli – speaks of how the Mising have changed over time because of the influences of the modern colonial and postcolonial states, in addition to the influence of nav-Vaishnavism. Yet he notes, “it does not mean that we have completely avoided our traditional food practices in pujas and rituals.”²⁰ My interlocutor, Ranjana Doley, notes that as a child she did not question Mising rites where bhakts called out to Hari even as they offered a cock to Donyipolo and Mising ancestral spirits. However, as she began to turn to Donyipolo, this practice rendered her a “mixed” subject. Now, working to reform these practices, Ranjana began to wonder why her ancestors had been unable to avoid using meat and alcohol in their sacred rites. “These practices are etched into our being,” she said. “We could never really forget our obligations to our ancestral spirits even after we started genuflecting to other gods here in the valley. That will not feel right to most Mising people. Only a very small number of people have been able to give up these practices and take up nav-Vaishnavism completely. Everyone else still believes that our ancestral spirits guard us at home and outside. We offer pig and chicken to them, and our home brewed apong (rice beer) to them in order to appease them. Their happiness shapes our well-being.”

By locating Mising obligation to their ancestors in the depths of Mising being, Ranjana pointed to an inner attitude, cultivated in the realm of the everyday through the reiteration of practices like applying the ash of the fireplace to the sindoor before a wife departs her marital home. In fact, these particular practices taking place within the realm of the home, and passed on from mother to daughter, generate a gendered subjectivity – a Mising woman who has embodied the value of care for her home and ancestors. These reiterations in the everyday realm allow Mising women to feel a deep-seated connection with the ancestral figures of the home they look after for their husbands. Ranjana also noted that during rituals conducted annually to appease these spirits, the Mising women who practice these everyday activities, draw on this deeply felt sense of connection. If these annual rituals are avoided in order to become nav-Vaishnavite, Ranjana believed that it “would not feel right” to those who have cultivated this sense of deep connection. This sense of dissonance has stretched across generations urging the Mising to continue these practices even as they take up nav-Vaishnav practices that draw them to the divine figure of Hari. In the discursive space where both discourses are able to assert their authority, the Mising woman began to combine these practices to use meat and alcohol in rituals and rites, while chanting the name of Hari alongside the names of their ancestral spirits. Now, as she attempted to reform her practices and remake herself in accordance to Donyipolo, this sense of dissonance told her that practices she had adopted previously, like the sindoor, had become embodied practices that could not be unlearned as long as they continued to be instrumental in cultivating the inner attitudes she considered elemental to the formation of her subjectivity.

Interpellation and the Desire for Transformation:

Even as the deep sense of dissonance continues to locate the Mising woman in a discursive space shaped by multiplicity, she has begun to desire for reform and to become an ethical subject of Donyipolo. This desire for reform is shaped by the ways in which the woman is interpellated as an “unethical subjectivity” by those who consider themselves “ethical subjectivities” of either nav-Vaishnavism or Donyipolo. This interpellation reconfigures her relationship not only to those who interpellate her as “unethical” but also to the discursive space that she has thus far inhabited.

According to my interlocutors, the practice of meat and alcohol use in sacred rites had been elemental in inscribing incommensurable differences between nav-Vaishnavism and their own ancestral practices. In order to allow a sense of union with Hari, nav-Vaishnav norms strictly prescribe what one can eat, how one must cook this food, and what foods one must avoid. Similarly, the discourse also prescribes what one can offer Hari as food to propitiate him and earn his goodwill. While the discourse looks leniently on bhakts consuming fish in non-ritual spaces, all seafood and meat, along with alcohol, are forbidden from ritual spaces where offerings are made to the divine figure of Hari. A classic Durkheimian opposition seems to operate through these norms, giving meat and alcohol the capacity to turn a sacred space profane.²¹ Yet, for the Mising, their rites to propitiate their ancestors are not complete unless these very substances are offered to them. Within the ritual space, the Mising see these substances as having the capacity to revitalize the connection between themselves and their ancestors. Chanting verses that render the meat and alcohol capable of establishing such connection, the Mising offer these substances to their ancestors in the hope that these spirits will ensure their well-being. Thus, what qualifies as profane for the nav-Vaishnavs is turned by Mising practices of gift giving into a revered offering. This difference, according to my Mising interlocutors, coupled with their unwillingness to give up this practice of appeasing the ancestors, has always placed them outside the folds of nav-Vaishnavism.

But it is their practice of including Hari’s name in these chants that provokes the attention of their nav-Vaishnav neighbors. Because of the inclusion of Hari, many of my nav-Vaishnav interlocutors in Majuli interpellated the Mising as people who had become Hindu, but practiced an improper form of Hinduism. This opinion was also shaped by the fact that the Mising ancestral practices were given a legible form only in the 1980s, when the movement to institutionalize Donyipolo began to take root in Arunachal Pradesh. Until then, these unnamed practices and their origins in different places were illegible to several nav-Vaishnavs. Even after I began my ethnographic work in Majuli in 2016, I came across several curious nav-Vaishnav individuals who were unaware of Donyipolo, and had believed until then that the Mising practiced an unethical form of nav-Vaishnavism because of their “attachment” to meat.

This interpellation of the Mising as unethical subjects, works alongside two other processes. In recent years, nav-Vaishnav institutions have become entangled with Hindu nationalist revivals, in an attempt to include nav-Vaishnavite principles in a pan-Indian Hinduism. Although, these Hindu nationalist networks also work with tribal networks across the Northeast in an attempt to absorb them into a sacred Hindu geography, they also work across India to promote vegetarianism and to profane meat eating practices.²² In Majuli, where meat and alcohol is already instrumental in carving Donyipolo/nav-Vaishnavism tensions, the focus on meat within Hindu nationalism does not always succeed in drawing the Mising into the Hindu nation it aspires to create. Instead, it deepens the fissures between Hinduism and Donyipolo.

Similarly, tactics of the postcolonial state deepen this border through bureaucratic process that operate in schools, colleges, and offices. My interlocutors Kogeswar and Rina Doley, a married couple, claimed to be particularly cognizant of this process. While Kogeswar worked in a government office issuing “tribal certificates” to students so that they could negotiate their admission in schools and colleges using their “scheduled tribe” status, Rina worked as a school teacher in the town of Goramur, teaching students who came from Mising and nav-Vaishnav homes. Both husband and wife shared the sense of apprehension they felt, as they worked every day with state categories that reinscribed the tribal-nontribal boundary in Majuli. In their experience it had always worked to reinscribe the border that already existed between the communities based on their religious differences. While both of them had grown up in and married into homes that had practiced the “mixed” religion, their rising frustration from being interpellated as “unethical” because of their “tribal differences” had convinced both of them to join the revival of Donyipolo and embrace their ancestral values.

Anand Pandian’s ethnography on the Kallar community in South India, delineates the role of prescriptive discourses and embodied virtues in shaping boundaries between castes.²³ Working together with epistemologies of the state that originated with the advent of colonial modernity in South India, these prescriptive discourses are instrumental in creating assumptions among both communities that the deeply ingrained differences between them are “natural” rather than a product of ethical cultivation. Similarly, the nav-Vaishnav norms on the profanity of meat and alcohol, working together with state categories of “scheduled tribe” and “non-tribal” work to make the Donyipolo/nav-Vaishnavite border so deep that it is not uncommon to hear both nav-Vaishnavite and Mising individuals claim that meat or alcohol consumption is in the “nature” of the Misings, making them “naturally different” from ethical nav-Vaishnavites who can renounce these substances through their rigorous practices.

Separated from the ethical nav-Vaishnavite by a border that is policed by precolonial norms and colonial discourses, the Mising woman begins to experience the “mixed” religious discourse as a place of exclusion. As the movement to institutionalize Donyipolo makes ancestral norms more easily legible, my Mising interlocutors become desirous of a reform that will render them ethical through either discourse. While very few of my interlocutors believe that they would like to try and become ethical nav-Vaishnav subjects, most of my interlocutors are drawn to Donyipolo, because it aligns with their firmly ingrained obligations to their ancestors and hence, feels like their own. But even as they are enthusiastic and even eager to turn away from the ethical borderlands, which they believe leads to undesirable interpellation, they have come to realize how deeply they have come to embody values they learned through their entanglement with nav-Vaishnavism. A sense of dissonance rears its head again, and asks them to either reconcile with their “mixed” subjectivity or to live with the dilemma of unlearning as they become ethical Donyipolo subjects.

Unlearning as a Site for Pacing Transformation:

A month after Momi brought up the sindoor by way of discussing the dilemma of unlearning, I met Yeham Borang, the wife of Kaling Borang, a literary giant in the Adi community and one of the founding members of the Donyipolo Yelam Kébang (the Committee to Institutionalize Donyipolo). In the 1990s, Yeham accompanied her husband on many of his trips around Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, noting the ways in which Donyipolo was practiced in these regions. Offering me a cup of hot tea at her home in Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh, she reminisced about her first visit to Majuli. Deeply embedded in the revival, and very intrigued by the revival’s capacity to renew the connections between the Adi communities in the foothills of Arunachal Pradesh and the Mising in the valleys of Assam, Yeham began to look for points of continuity between herself and the Mising women whose homes she visited in Majuli. Before the revival, Yeham noted that the two communities had forgotten their historic bonds, and were deeply biased against each other. As an historian of Assam might, Yeham believed that the strategic isolation of hill and valley tribes starting with colonial governance had produced some of these stereotypes, or at least reified pre-existing ones.²⁴ In Pasighat, where most families belonged to the Adi community, the Mising were often viewed as fraudulent petty thieves. This stereotype circulated because of the deep distrust that Adi homeowners had for Mising individuals who came to town looking for odd jobs. Yeham believed it was possible that some of these Mising individuals had indeed swindled their Adi employers. However, the rumors, repeated often, made the Mising legible only through this stereotype. In Mising homes, Yeham was pleasantly surprised to note practices the Mising shared with the Adi. Yet, even as she noted resonances in Mising clothes, food, and language, she also found herself turning to the differences between herself and the Mising women she met. Among these was the sindoor. It spoke of their migration away from the Adis, their adoption of Hindu norms and their proximity to the nav-Vaishnavs living in the valley.

Thus, even as the Mising woman begins to turn away from the “mixed” religious discourse, deeply embodied practices she has learned previously, continue to influence how she is interpellated beyond these discursive spaces. As she becomes oriented to the discourse of Donyipolo, she finds new interlocutors among the Adi who, looking at her, see someone who has become removed from them because of the adoption of values from the place of settling. When I mentioned Yeham’s observations to Momi, she agreed that her sindoor would make her look different from Adi women, and more like a Hindu woman from the valley. It seemed ironic to Momi that she would look more like someone who would not accept her into their fold, but different from someone who was keen to revitalize connections with the Mising. But referring back to the idea that unlearning the sindoor would create a sense of dissonance, she said, “I guess we will always wear signs of our migration. Something will always show that we Mising made a different lives for ourselves when we left the hills and came down to the valleys.”

I asked her if this adherence to the sindoor would make her a less ideal subject of Donyipolo. She thought about it for a minute and said, “It takes time to adjust to new practices. We are just learning about Donyipolo. Maybe if we follow it for years, we will naturally replace the sindoor with something else, and then we won’t think about it. But we cannot abruptly give up something while it is still meaningful to us in Majuli. Remember what I told you? It will be like we don’t care about being married.”

Deeply aware of how years of reiteration and pedagogy had made the sindoor meaningful in the first place, Momi also indicated that unlearning had to be a slow process. In other words, the turn to Donyipolo was not a dramatic transformation resembling Foucault’s description of Christian metanoia. Instead, this turn to Donyipolo was a turn to the self, allowing the Mising woman to reassess her relationship with herself as she aspired to leave the ethical borderlands for the ethical discourse of Donyipolo. During this reassessment, outward-facing tactics that she had picked up in the discursive space of Majuli continue to remain meaningful, as long as they help her cultivate inner attitudes that were crucial in her formation as a comprehensive subjectivity.

The unwillingness to unlearn, thus, helped the Mising woman act on her sense of dissonance by allowing her to orient herself to the gradual shift she preferred over abrupt transformation. Momi was open to the idea that the technologies available to her would change as she journeyed further along the path that Donyipolo laid before her. Being attentive to the dissonance, she felt, allowed her to negotiate the pace of her transformation, opening herself only to desirable transformative process, while turning away from undesirable and abrupt breaks with herself. This agency that the Mising woman demonstrates as she aspires to become an ethical subject, allows her to undergo the transformation she aspires for without feeling a sense of break with herself. Turning away from everything in her surroundings that distract her from desirable change, the Mising woman paces her journey towards the self she desires to become. While unlearning has once before allowed her to hold on to ancestral practices that were deeply significant to her relationship to her ancestors, unlearning once again allows her to negotiate her slow turn away from a “mixed” discursive space that has been crucial in her formation for years. While she now desires to leave, she is able to examine and assess her relationship with the norms that have shaped her formation in the borderlands. Open to the idea that she might always remain “mixed,” and always show signs of her historic migration and mixing, the Mising woman is able to reconcile with her existing self even as she departs on a journey of reform. This agency to negotiate the pace of her transformation, thus allows her to experience internal continuity even as she attempts self-transformation.

Conclusion:

This article is an invitation to think with my interlocutors about the role that unlearning plays in the formation and transformation of the self in a complex discursive space that has historically been shaped by the confluences and differences between coeval religious discourses. In the interviews with my Mising interlocutors, unlearning – a concept that I understand through my engagement with Foucauldian ethics – emerges as a site for the subject to understand the role of pre-existing pedagogical process in shaping her sense of self. As she attempts to learn emergent norms of the discourse she is orienting herself to, her unwillingness to unlearn allows her to negotiate her sense of self at every step of this process of reform. Thus, in my interlocutors’ understandings, unlearning becomes a site where they demonstrate their capacity for action.  

It is easy to see the unwillingness to unlearn as an act of resistance. However, my interlocutors do not think of their tenacity to hold on to norms as an act of resistance. When they feel it is wrong to give up their ancestral practices, they do not act out of a need to push back against nav-Vaishnavism, but from the desire to remain oriented to their ancestors. Similarly, as they take up the discourse of Donyipolo, my interlocutors do not attempt to resist its disciplinary force by holding on to the practices they acquired through their previous orientation to nav-Vaishnavism. Instead, the unwillingness to unlearn springs from a desire to maintain internal continuity as they undergo a much desired transformation.

Similarly, this unwillingness is the result of embodied practice, and not affinities to ideologies. While my interlocutors are very articulate about this unwillingness, they come to recognize this unwillingness because of their attentiveness to the inner attitudes that they have come to feel through years of embodied practice within the discursive space that produces them. It is the sense of dissonance they feel as they turn away from a norm that alerts them to the formative role of that norm in their lives. In desiring to maintain a continuity with their previous selves, they do not show an ideological affinity to the norm they refuse to unlearn, but rather demonstrate a deep sense of attunement to the self, and a capacity to act on their inner disposition.  

Works Cited:

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Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Carol Cosman, trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1912].

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1. Nav-Vaishnavism or neo-Vaishnavism is the name adherents give to a wave of the bhakti movement that swept across Assam in the fifteenth century. Its founding figures, Shankardev and Madhavdev, are credited today for being social reformers who introduced ethical reform within the multi-ethnic Assamese society where people already practiced several forms of Hinduism, including Shaivism (practices organized around the figure of Shiva), Shaktism (practices organized around the figure of the Devi or the divine feminine), and Vaishnavism (practices organized around the figure of Vishnu). Nav-Vaishnavism strove to reform these multiple schools, while it also invited devotees from other discursive traditions, including tribal practices, Buddhism, and Islam. [↩]
2. Mising and Adi ancestral practices are organized around the idea that the world, with its human and nonhuman formations, have emerged from the ancestral force Do:nyiPo:lo: (also written as Donyipolo/DonyiPolo). Since the 1980s, people of the Mising tribe working with people of the Adi tribe have been striving to revive their ancestral practices as an institutionalized religion named after the force, Donyipolo. Although the religious discourse was previously called Donyi-Polo (Donyi meaning sun and Polo meaning moon in the Mising and Adi languages), the revivalists insist that the words must be fused together in order to show that Donyipolo is one force that has the capacity to manifest in plural forms, including the sun and the moon, in the physical realm. Some adherents also refer to the institutionalized discourse as Donyipoloism, in order to demarcate it from the previous variants. [↩]
3. Yasmin Saikia and Amit Basihya, Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Yasmin Saikia, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). [↩]
4. Yasmin Saikia and Amit Basihya, Northeast India: A Place of Relations. [↩]
5. Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014). [↩]
6. Unmilan Kalita and Abhilash Chetia Wanniang, “Assessing the Socio-Religious Trends of Medieval Assam from Tantricism to Neo-Vaishnavism and their Impact on the Ahom State,” in The Dwima Collective, accessed March 21, 2021, https://dwima-collective.org/2021/02/07/assessing-the-socio-religious-trends-of-medieval-assam-from-tantricism-to-neo-vaishnavism-and-their-impact-on-the-ahom-state/. [↩]
7. Alamendu Guha, From Planter Raj to Swaraj (New York:Columbia University Press, 1977). [↩]
8. Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). [↩]
9. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). [↩]
10. In ethnographic vignettes, I deploy the past tense instead of the ethnographic present because my interlocutors liked to imagine themselves reading my work at a future time, when “the interview time,” would seem more like a “there and then” rather than a “here and now.” They often imagined themselves using these essays to remind themselves of how they felt at another point in their lives. In fact, many of them firmly noted that it would be good for their “future selves” to have a record of their “past selves.” [↩]
11. Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart, Syncreticism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Studies (London: Routledge, 1994). Shaw and Stewart’s category of anti-syncretism is useful in understanding the deconstruction of pre-existing practices by the Mising. Shaw and Stewart propose anti-syncretism as a process by which the boundaries between religions come to be reified, allowing practices that evolved in the confluence of these religious discourses to be deconstructed into their constitutive elements. My interlocutors’ experiences seem to suggest that while heterodox formations may have been previously experienced as coherent discourses by those practicing them, the reification of the religious boundaries seem to create fracture lines that are experienced by the Mising subject in their everyday interactions with those that now fall well within these bounded religious categories. [↩]
12. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). [↩]
13. Nav-Vaishnavism like Vaishanvism is organized around the figure of Vishnu. He goes by name names, one of which is Hari. [↩]
14. Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). [↩]
15. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collége de France, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005 [1981]). [↩]
16. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 211. [↩]
17. Maheswar Neog, The Vaiṣṇava Faith and Movement in Assam: Sankaradeva and His Times. (Guwahati: Guwahati University Publication, 1965); Benudhar Sharma, The Dakhinpat Satra. (Guwahati: Kamarupa Anusandhana Samiti Publication, 1967); Satyendranath Sarma, The Neo-Vaishnavite Movement and the Satra Institution of Assam (Guwahati: Lawyers Book Stall, 1999); Tirtha Nath Sharma, Auni Ati Satra: A History (New Delhi: Motilal Benarasidas Publications, 2011). [↩]
18. Jatin Mipun, The Mishings (Miris) of Assam: Development of a New Lifestyle (Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1987). [↩]
19. Indraneel Pegu, Religious Beliefs and Practices of the Misings of Assam: A Case Study of Majuli. (Guwahati: Purbanchal Prakash Publications, 2017). [↩]
20. Mipun, The Mishings (Miris) of Assam, 62. [↩]
21. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Emile, 2008 [1912]). [↩]
22. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Arkotong Longkumer, The Greater India Project: Hindutva and the North East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). [↩]
23. Anand Pandian, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). [↩]
24. For example, Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). [↩]