New Karbi Religious Movements

Abstract

The Karbi people are one of the major indigenous groups residing in Northeast India, mainly in Assam. The history of Karbi identity has been one of misrepresentations, contestation, and negligence, mainly as a consequence of problematic colonial constructs and majoritarian cultural biases. In this paper, in order to analyze majoritarian influences, I focus on Lokhimon, a new religious movement among the Karbi, as an intersection, a dialogue space, of cultural exchange between old, traditional Karbi practices and mainstream Hindu religious traditions. Lokhimon serves as evidence of the continuously expanding impact of Hinduism, which has become profoundly embedded inside indigenous communities such as Karbi through subtle assimilation facilitated by media, politics, and prevailing knowledge systems. The foundation of Lokhimon is based on Hindu myths, and as dominant myths are hierarchical in nature, majoritarian narratives have come to dictate, dislocate, and dislodge aspects of identity, belonging, and representation of the Karbi lifeworld. Recently, Lokhimon has been gaining political influence, and local state-backed media is being used to facilitate the assimilation of the Karbi community into the Hindu majority. I analyze how this mythic, unified idea of Karbi belongingness to a larger Hindu tradition expressed through the mythopolitics of Hinduism affects Karbi lives while engaging with oral and new religious movement traditions among the Karbi community to understand identity formations.