Talom Rukbo

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. 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.

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. 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." 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. 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.