Doungel Clan
Thadou
At a glance
- Called a
- Clan
- Community
- Thadou
- Found in
- Manipur
About
Doungel is a clan of the hills of Manipur, one of the four main families of the Thadou that Shakespear (1912) named, with the Sitlhou, Haokip and Kipgen. It stands in an older branch of the genealogy than Thadou himself: Shakespear makes its founder Thadou's elder brother, and the genealogy Shaw recorded places him generations earlier. Shaw (1929) found the Doungel to the north-east of the Manipur valley. It is a clan in its own system, not a gotra.
What “Clan” means for the Thadou
Shaw (1929) writes in English of clans, branches and sub-clans and gives no Thadou word for them; Shakespear (1912) counts the Doungel among the four main families of the Thadou. Descent is through the father, and a person marries outside his or her clan.
Every clan of the Thadou, with how the clan system works: the Thadou page.
Name and Origin
In Shakespear's account (1912, p. 190) the whole Thado clan traces its genealogy back to Thado and his elder brother Dongel, and the Dongel are descended from that elder brother; the people said the clan took Thado's name rather than Dongel's because Thado was the greater warrior. In the genealogy Shaw's informants gave (1929, p. 27), the Doungel descend from Titou, in a branch older than Thadou's, and Hutton, editing Shaw, noted that in that genealogy Doungel lived three generations before Thadou (p. 138). Tradition remembers Doungel at Nanglengbung, the first of the old village sites, where he buried the chontul, the weapon used only to kill mithun at the Chon feast (p. 30).
Historical Journey
Shaw (1929, p. 11) placed the Doungel to the north-east of the Manipur valley and named Chengjapao as their chief. Accounts of the clan's standing differ. Shaw, writing chiefly from the Sitlhou side, recorded his informants' view that the senior Doungel line had died out in the male line. Hutton, who edited Shaw's notes, rejected that view, printed a Doungel pedigree in an appendix (pp. 137-138) and recorded that Chengjapao was accepted as the rightful descendant of Doungel by kinsmen whose own descent was not in doubt. The page reports both accounts without choosing between them. Later writers note that some Doungel families, like other clans that stand above Thadou in the genealogy, do not call themselves Thadou; this page follows the grouping of Shaw and Shakespear.
How the Clan Is Kept
The Thadou are patrilineal and exogamous, and a man's proper marriage is with his mother's brother's daughter (Shaw, p. 140). The Chon, the highest feast of merit, needed the chontul, of which there was only one, kept by the head of the Thadou, who was of the Doungel clan; Shaw writes that it was buried and lost long ago after a quarrel between the Doungel and Thadou families, so that the Chon could no longer be performed properly (pp. 30, 76). No family deity in the Hindu sense is named in the sources checked.
Stories and Legends
The lost chontul
Shaw (1929, pp. 30 and 76) records that the chontul, the one weapon with which mithun could be killed at the Chon, the greatest of the Thadou feasts, was kept by the head of the Thadou, of the Doungel clan, and was buried at Nanglengbung. After a quarrel between the Doungel and Thadou families it was lost for good, and the Chon, first given by Thadou himself, was seldom if ever performed properly again.