FROM SUN DOWN TO SON UP:

Indian state fights to preserve animist religion (Alpana Sarma, May 17, 2005, Reuters)

Tamo Mindo, a slight man with creased eyes, stares intently at the liver of a chicken he has just killed.

Mindo, a 58-year-old shaman belonging to the animist Donyi Polo religion, is looking for clues to help him tell which spirit has possessed a woman he has been asked to cure.

Mindo is among the few people trying to preserve his religion from the increasing influence of Hinduism and Christianity in the remote northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Donyi Polo, one of a few surviving centuries-old animist religions in the hilly state home to about 20 major tribes, means sun and moon. The tribes believe the sun and moon are the eyes of god and nothing can ever be hidden from god.

While Arunachal Pradesh, or land of the rising sun, is still largely animist unlike India's other northeastern states which have become heavily Christianized, the number of Christian converts has increased over the years.

The number of Christians had increased to about 18 percent of the sparsely populated state of a little over 1 million in 2001 from 10.3 percent in 1991. Christians account for barely 2 percent of India's total population of more than a billion.

"What is alarming is not how many Christians there are, but the pace at which conversions have taken place from the 1990s," said filmmaker Moji Riba, who has been documenting changes among tribes in Arunachal Pradesh.

You don't have to be Jeanne Dixon to know that the future of India isn't animist.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2005 1:22 PM