Areng Chatchi
Garo
At a glance
- Called a
- Chatchi
- Community
- Garo
- Found in
- Meghalaya, Bangladesh
About
Areng is a Garo (A·chik) clan, counted today as one of five chatchis with Sangma, Marak, Momin and Shira, and carried as a surname. Membership comes from the mother. In 1909 Playfair found it still on the way to becoming a chatchi of its own: some Garos named Areng as an independent exogamous group, while his list of machongs places an Areng machong under Marak.
What “Chatchi” means for the Garo
A chatchi (Playfair, 1909, writes katchi) is one of the great exogamous clans of the Garo, taken from the mother. Each chatchi holds many machong, 'motherhoods', lines descended from one ancestress, and the chatchi name is carried as a surname. It is a Garo clan in its own system, not a gotra.
Every chatchi of the Garo, with how the clan system works: the Garo page.
Name and Origin
The sources read do not explain the name Areng. Playfair (1909) saw new Garo clans forming as groups broke away from older ones, and named Areng, with Ebang and Sira, as one that some Garos already treated as independent.
Historical Journey
Major A. Playfair, a Deputy Commissioner in the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, named three Garo katchis in The Garos (1909): Momin, Marak and Sangma. He added that the number of clans was still growing, and that Ebang, Areng and Sira were named by some as independent exogamous groups. They were not yet fully separate, he wrote, since a member would still refuse to marry into the clan his group came from, but he had no doubt that in time they would sever themselves from their parent clans. In his Appendix A of machongs, Areng is listed among the subdivisions of Marak. A century later Shuvash Jengcham, writing for Banglapedia, counts Areng as one of five major Garo clans, so that the change Playfair expected appears to have taken place; the sources read do not say when.
How the Chatchi Is Kept
Areng follows the rules of every Garo chatchi: a child belongs to the mother's chatchi and machong, husband and wife must come from different ones, and property passes to a daughter, whose husband, the nokrom, comes to live in her house. Whether Areng families still avoid marriage with Marak, as Playfair's account would suggest for 1909, is not stated in the sources read. No source ties a family deity to the chatchi.