Mishing= Mi + Anshing. "Mi" means man while Anshing/Toshing means worthiness or cool. So Mishing means man of worthiness. The word mi is familiar to every tribe of Southeast Asia. Mizo and Mishmi are one such example. To depict non tribal outsiders the word Mipak is used intensively which means man of unworthiness. So mipak is the opposite meaning of Mishing. The Mishing or Misíng also called Miri, are an ethnic tribal group inhabiting the districts of Dhemaji, North Lakhimpur, Sonitpur, Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sibsagar, Jorhat and Golaghat of the Assam state in India. They are the second largest tribal group in North-East India, first being the Bodos in Assam. They were earlier called Miris in historical days and the Constitution of India still refers to them as Miris.
The traditional craft of weaving is a very bright aspect of Mishing culture. It is an exclusive preserve of the Mishing woman, who starts her training in the craft even before she reaches her teens. For the male, she weaves cotton jackets, light cotton towels, endi shawls, thick loin cloths, and, occasionally, even shirting. For women she weaves a variety of clothes, such as ege ‘the lower garment of Mishing women’, rihbi (a sheet with narrow stripes, wrapped to cover the lower garment and the blouse), gaséng (used for the same purpose as that of a rihbi, but having, unlike a rihbi, broad stripes of contrastive colours), gero (a sheet, usually off-white, wrapped round the waist to cover the lower part of the body, or round the chest to cover the body down to the knees or so), seleng gasor (a light cotton sheet, worn occasionally instead of a rihbi or a gaseng), riya (a long, comparatively narrow, sheet, wrapped, a bit tightly, round the chest), segrek (a loose piece of cloth, wrapped round the waist by married women to cover the ege down to the knees), a pohtub (a scarf used to protect the head from the sun, dirt, etc.), and nisek ( a piece of cloth to carry a baby with). Before yarn, produced by modern textile factories, was available in the market, Mishings used to grow cotton and obtain cotton yarn by spinning. The use of endi/eri yarn, obtained from worms fed on leaves of castor-oil plants, was probably common amongst them. However, they learnt the use of muga (silk obtained from silkworms fed on a kind of tall tree, called som in Assamese) and of paat (silk obtained from silkworms fed mulberry leaves) from their neighbours in the valley. Even now Mishing women weave cloth, using muga and paat silk, very sparingly. Thus, weaving cotton clothes is the principal domain of the Mishing weaver. She has good traditional knowledge of natural dyes.
A special mention has to be made here of the Mishing textile piece, called gadu. It is the traditional Mishing blanket, fluffy on one side, and it is woven on a traditional loin loom. The warp consists of cotton spun into thick and strong yarn, and the weft of cotton, turned into soft yarn and cut into small pieces for insertion, piece by piece, to form the fluff. It is obvious that weaving a gadu is a very laborious affair like weaving expensive carpets, requiring the weaver to spend a lot of time on her loin loom, and, as the younger women in a family would, generally, not have enough time for such a work, it is the ageing ones staying at home that do it. There has been a drastic decline of the gadu craft during the years after independence because of the availability of inexpensive blankets in the market.
