CDS (I) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 38 of 120

Correct — B, Arunachal Pradesh. The Nyishi are the most populous tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, about 249,824 people at the 2011 Census, just ahead of the Adi. They are spread across a broad belt of the state — Kra Daadi, Kurung Kumey, East Kameng, West Kameng, Papum Pare, Keyi Panyor, Lower Subansiri, Kamle and Pakke Kessang — and spill over into Sonitpur and North Lakhimpur districts of Assam. The traditional man's headgear is a cane helmet topped by a hornbill beak, called pudum or padam, and the demand for beaks once told badly on hornbill numbers. Since 2011 the Hornbill Nest Adoption Programme has turned Nyishi men who used to hunt the birds into paid protectors of their nests in the forests around Pakke Tiger Reserve.

• (a)Andaman and Nicobar — The islands' communities are quite separate — Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese in the Andamans, Nicobarese and Shompen in the Nicobars. None is called Nyishi.
• (c)Nilgiri-Kerala — The Nilgiri hills and the Kerala uplands are the country of the Toda, Kota, Badaga, Kurumba and Irula, and of the Kadar and Paniya further south. The Nyishi are a north-eastern people.
• (d)Kashmir Valley — The Scheduled Tribes of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are the Gujjar, Bakarwal, Gaddi, Sippi, Bot, Balti, Brokpa, Changpa and others. The Nyishi belong to the eastern Himalaya, not the western.

Arunachal Pradesh is the most ethnically varied state in India, with more than two dozen major tribes and a hundred-odd sub-groups. The largest are the Nyishi and the Adi, followed by the Galo, Apatani, Tagin, Mishmi, Monpa, Wancho, Nocte and Khampti. Most speak Tibeto-Burman languages, and the older animist tradition, Donyi-Polo, takes its name from the sun and the moon.

Tribe-to-state questions come up in every paper of this family, so the efficient thing to learn is a short list per region and one anchor fact for each. For Arunachal the anchors are easy: the Apatani for the terraced wet-rice fields of the Ziro valley, the Monpa for Tawang and Buddhism, the Nyishi for the hornbill-beak headgear and for being the state's largest tribe. The distractors here are all from other zones, so recognising the north-eastern name is enough. UPSC has set the same pairing from the other side, matching Apatani to Arunachal Pradesh.

• The Nyishi are the most populous tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, about 249,824 people at the 2011 Census.
• They live in nine or more districts of the state and in parts of Sonitpur and North Lakhimpur districts of Assam.
• The traditional cane helmet is surmounted by a hornbill beak, known as pudum or padam.
• The Hornbill Nest Adoption Programme, running since 2011, employs Nyishi villagers as nest protectors around Pakke Tiger Reserve.
• The Adi are the next largest tribe of Arunachal Pradesh after the Nyishi.

• Confusing Nyishi with Nishad or with the Nicobarese on the strength of the first syllable.
• Assuming the largest tribe of a north-eastern state is the one with the best-known festival; the Nyishi are the most numerous in Arunachal, not the Monpa or the Apatani.

As a tribe-to-state match, or embedded in a list where one pair is deliberately mismatched.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Apatani, known for their terraced wet-rice cultivation in the Ziro valley, live in which one of the following states?

  • (a)Nagaland
  • (b)Arunachal Pradesh
  • (c)Mizoram
  • (d)Meghalaya

  Answer(b) Arunachal Pradesh — the Ziro valley is in Lower Subansiri district, and the Apatani terraces are on India's UNESCO tentative list.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs of tribe and state is NOT correctly matched?

  • (a)Toda : Tamil Nadu
  • (b)Konyak : Nagaland
  • (c)Shompen : Andaman and Nicobar Islands
  • (d)Nyishi : Meghalaya

  Answer(d) Nyishi : Meghalaya — the Nyishi are the largest tribe of Arunachal Pradesh; Meghalaya's principal communities are the Khasi, Garo and Jaintia.