Talom Rukbo

Talom Rukbo
Born	(1937-12-01)December 1, 1937 Balek village, near Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, India
Died	December 30, 2001(2001-12-30) (aged 64)
Alma mater	St. Edmund's College, Shillong, Shillong
Occupations	Cultural activist Government officer
Years active	1972–2001 (as a full-time cultural activist)
Organization(s)	Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang Arunachal Vikas Parishad
Known for	Institutionalisation of Donyi-Polo; founder of the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang
Parent(s)	Rukpaying Rukbo (father) Odam Rukbo (mother)
Title	Associated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Arunachal Pradesh
Religious life
Religion	Donyi Poloism
School	New Religious Movement, Vaishnavism

Talom Rukbo (1 December 1937 – 30 December 2001) was an Indian spiritual pandit from Arunachal Pradesh, Northeastern India, credited as the principal figure behind the creation of a neo-religion called Donyi-Polo. Rukbo's movement ran in close, well documented cooperation with Hindutva organisations, principally the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates the Vivekananda Kendra and the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA). A growing body of journalism and academic scholarship, including a 2024 investigative feature in Outlook headlined explicitly around the word "appropriating," and a 2021 academic monograph on Hindutva's expansion into Northeast India, treats this relationship as part of a broader, organised Sangh Parivar strategy to fold tribal and indigenous faiths into a Hindu identity, often described in the literature as saffronisation. Other scholars and Donyi-Polo office-bearers dispute the framing of the relationship as one of capture or manipulation, arguing that the similarities between Donyi-Polo and Hinduism are pre-existing rather than imposed.

Early life

According to an obituary notice published in The Arunachal Times, Rukbo was born on 1 December 1937 in Balek village near Pasighat, the son of Rukpaying Rukbo and Odam Rukbo. He matriculated from the Government High School in Pasighat and graduated from St Edmund's College in Shillong around 1960.

In the early 1960s, Rukbo entered government service and was appointed Language Officer at Pasighat. During the 1962 war with China, he worked with the border security force then being organised along India's northern frontiers, and he went on to hold the post of Special Officer of Cultural Affairs and to serve as the North-East Frontier Agency's Joint Director of Information. In 1972, he took early retirement from government service to work full time on Adi cultural revival.

Founding a New Religious Movement

Rukbo was responsible for founding the neo-religion called Donyi-Poloism. In August 1968, he attended a meeting of Adi and Galo community members in Aalo, West Siang district, where it was decided to build a community hall for Donyi-Polo worship, the religion's first physical place of worship. He helped found the Donyipolo Mission in Itanagar and the Adi Literary and Cultural Society in Pasighat. In the mid-1980s, he and his close associate Kaling Borang attended conferences of the International Association for Religious Freedom, where contact with the Seng Khasi, a Meghalaya-based group preserving indigenous Khasi religion against Christian conversion, reinforced Rukbo's conviction that Donyi-Polo needed a written scripture to survive.

Institutionalisation

The Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang, the faith's central organisational body founded by Rukbo, was formed in December 1986. Rukbo argued for the creation of a dedicated prayer building, known as a gangging, directly copying it from Christianity, so as to oppose Christians worshipping on Sundays. He used this to replace the indigenous bamboo altars previously used only for occasional rituals, and he pushed for a standardised saffronised iconography. The artist Komeng Dai was commissioned to illustrate the oral mythological narratives known as abangs, producing the first anthropomorphic depictions of Donyi-Polo deities such as Doying Bote and Kine Nane. Critics of the formalisation process point out that this turn toward fixed temples, standardised images and a written text moved Donyi-Polo structurally closer to Hinduism for future assimilation, and away from the original indigenous, image-free, animist practice that had existed before Rukbo's intervention.

Hindu nationalist patronage

The RSS and its affiliates have operated in Arunachal Pradesh since the early 1970s, and their growth ran in close parallel with, and according to multiple scholars actively shaped, the formalisation of Donyi-Polo. K A A Raja, the territory's first chief commissioner from 1975, oversaw and directed the then administration to attack and burn dozens of churches. He was also the mentor and guide of Rukbo, and he personally invited the RSS leader and Vivekananda Kendra founder Eknath Ranade to open schools in the region so as to convert the indigenous religion into another form of Hinduism. By 1977, Arunachal Pradesh had been formally adopted as a project area by the Vivekananda Kendra, and in 1978, the state legislature passed the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act restricting religious conversions.

Rukbo's own ties to this network began to deepen steadily from the late 1980s. He became the founding president of the Arunachal Vikas Parishad, the state-level wing of the RSS-run Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, in 1993, and travelled extensively with Dwarka Acharya, the VKA's organising secretary in Arunachal Pradesh. Borang told the journalist Angana Chakrabarti that he had personally warned Rukbo against spending so much time with RSS figures because of accusations that the movement was being Hinduised, but that Rukbo valued the organisation's resources and reach. In 1996, an RSS-affiliated body called the Bhaorao Deoras Seva Nyas formally honoured Rukbo, introducing him with the title "Dharmik Sant aur Sahitya Manishi," meaning Religious Saint and Learned Litterateur. By the early 2020s, the Arunachal Vikas Parishad was credited, in its own movement's reporting, with having helped build some 600 tribal prayer halls across the state, a figure that gives a sense of scale to the institutional investment behind the formalisation that Rukbo started.

After Rukbo's death, the relationship deepened further rather than receding. A 2016 report in CounterPunch states that Rukbo was made into an RSS icon, with portraits of RSS leaders and Hindu gods and goddesses displayed inside many ganggings alongside Donyi-Polo imagery, although that report incorrectly gives his death year as 2002 rather than 2001. The organisation that Rukbo had helped found, the Central Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang, went on to co-organise events with the Janajati Dharma-Sanskriti Suraksha Mancha (JDSSM), an RSS- and VKA-aligned body campaigning since the early 2000s for the removal of Scheduled Tribe status from Christian converts; a JDSSM event in Pasighat in February 2022 was titled, without euphemism, "Why delisting of Converted Persons from ST is Necessary." Separately, the Nyubu Nyvgam Yerko gurukul-style school, run by a trust called the Indigenous Faith and Culture Society of Arunachal Pradesh, has stated on its own website that its founding "could not have been possible" without the guidance of A Balakrishnan Iyer, a senior figure of the RSS-affiliated Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari and a former close aide of Eknath Ranade. After Arunachal Pradesh's BJP government created a state Department of Indigenous Faiths and Cultural Affairs, the department began codifying faiths including Donyi-Polo, Amik Matai, Nani-Intaya and Rangfrah, in the process giving the previously formless Tangsa spirit Rangfrah a Shiva-like iconographic form, a detail independently reported by two separate outlets. In 2024, the VKA's national president, Ramchandra Kharadi, described the broader campaign in language that explicitly merges indigenous and Hindu religious identity, calling on tribal communities to defend "our age-old Sanatan indigenous Dharma and culture."

Scholarly assessment

A substantial and growing literature treats the RSS's relationship with Rukbo and Donyi-Polo as one instance of a wider, deliberate Sangh Parivar project of appropriating indigenous religion across Northeast India, rather than as incidental cooperation between a tribal leader and a sympathetic outside group. The scholar Pralay Kanungo has argued that Rukbo had a particular tendency to draw parallels between Donyi-Polo and Hinduism, equating the Adi concept of primordial nothingness, keyum, with the Hindu concept of Aum, and comparing Donyi-Polo's abangs to Hindu shastras. The political scientist Soihiamlung Dangmei has documented a closely parallel process among the Zeliangrong Naga Heraka movement, finding that its association with Hindutva groups gave the movement access to higher-profile platforms in exchange for alignment with the Hindu nationalist narrative. Kaushtabh Deka, a political scientist at Dibrugarh University, has argued more bluntly that whenever a large, well-organised religion comes into contact with a small indigenous faith system, "certain kind of manipulations or appropriations is natural," and that the RSS in Arunachal Pradesh has been simultaneously protective of, and quietly reshaping, the indigenous worship it claims to defend.

The most extensive academic treatment is Arkotong Longkumer's 2021 ethnography The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast, based on years of fieldwork with both RSS activists and indigenous communities in Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, which situates the Donyi-Polo case within a deliberate, decades-long Sangh Parivar strategy to place Northeast India's tribal religions inside an "Akhand Bharat" framework of Hindu civilisational unity. An essay in the Social Science Research Council's The Immanent Frame places this pattern in a comparative frame, describing it as part of a broader set of "Hindutva appropriations of indigeneity" that bear structural similarities to nineteenth-century Christian missionary efforts to convert and reshape the religious practice of Native American communities. A separate academic survey of "saffronisation" across Northeast India situates the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram's work, including its role in Donyi-Polo's formalisation, as part of a wider postcolonial nationalist project of cultural homogenisation that subordinates pluralistic, localised tribal identities to a singular Hindu one.