Shira Chatchi
Garo
At a glance
- Called a
- Chatchi
- Community
- Garo
- Found in
- Meghalaya, Bangladesh
About
Shira is a Garo (A·chik) clan, counted today as one of five chatchis with Sangma, Marak, Momin and Areng, and carried as a surname. Membership comes from the mother. Playfair, who wrote the name Sira in 1909, found it then on the way to becoming a chatchi of its own, named by some Garos as an independent exogamous group but not yet separate from its parent clan.
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 Shira or say which older clan it grew out of. Playfair (1909) saw new Garo clans forming as groups broke away from older ones, and named Sira, with Ebang and Areng, 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. Unlike Ebang and Areng, Sira does not appear in his list of machongs. A century later Shuvash Jengcham, writing for Banglapedia, counts Shira as one of five major Garo clans; the sources read do not say when it came to be treated as a chatchi.
How the Chatchi Is Kept
Shira 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. No source read says which chatchi, if any, Shira families still avoid marrying into, and none ties a family deity to the chatchi.