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Concept
Mising people
Summary
The Mising people, sometimes called Miri people, are a Tibeto-Burmese indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the Northeast Indian states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. They are part of Tani group of people of Northeast India.
Mising is an endonym and literally means "man of the soil." Miri, on the other hand, is an exonym commonly applied by plains Assamese people. There is still much scholarly debate on the origins of this term: some colonial scholars argued 'miri' referred to their status as intermediaries between plains peoples in the Brahmaputra Valley and hill tribes to the north, while others such as Grierson (1909) thought it meant "gentleman," while Crooks interpreted it as "hill man." More recent scholarship associated miri with religious functionaries in some Tani hill-tribes. According to this view, when the Misings migrated to the plains they were identified as coming from the Miri pahar ('Miri hills'), whose feats of magic would have been well-known back then, and the name stuck.
Lhoba people and Derung people
The Misings belong to the greater group of Tani people, who speak Tibeto-Burmese languages of the Sino-Tibetan family, inhabiting parts of the Indian states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Tibetans refers the Tani people as the Lhobhas (); lho means south and bha means people, Lhobhas means "southerners" i.e. the people who reside in South Tibet and the area inhabited by them in ancient Tibetan text were called Lhoyü which is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and some parts of Tibet.
In older times, Mishing and other Tani people traded swords and other metals to Tibetans in exchange for meat and wool and used Tibetan language for written communication as they had no written language of their own.
The earliest mention of the Misings comes from the Ahom Buranjis in the early 17th century, when the Misings were still independent hill-tribes to the north of the Brahmaputra valley. In 1615, the Misings raided Ahom territory and the force sent to subdue them failed.
Official source
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