The Balija are a Telugu-speaking mercantile community primarily living in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and in smaller numbers in Telangana and Kerala.
[3][4] Another version for etymology states that Balija is derived from the Sanskrit word Bali, a sacrifice made during 'Yagna' ritual and Ja meaning born.
[7] The Vira Balanjyas, whose origins are often claimed to lie in the Ayyavolu, represented long-distance trading networks that employed fighters to protect their warehouses and goods in transit.
[17][18] Velcheru Narayana Rao et al. note that the Balijas were first mobilised politically by the Vijayanagara emperor Krishnadevaraya.
[20] The classification of people as Balija was one of many challenges for the census enumerators of the British Raj era, whose desire was to reduce a complex social system to one of administrative simplicity using theories of evolutionary anthropology.
[a] Early Raj census attempts in Madras Presidency recorded a wide variety of people claiming to be members of Balija subcastes but who appeared to share little in common and thus defied the administrative desire for what it considered to be a rational and convenient taxonomy.
[39] Some Balija families were appointed to supervise provinces as Nayaks (governors, commanders) by the Vijayanagara kings,[40] some of which are: Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam say that the emergence of left-hand caste Balijas as trader-warrior-kings in the Nayaka period is a consequence of conditions of new wealth produced by collapsing two varnas, Kshatriya and Vaishya, into one.
[48] Based on the Brahmanical conceptualisation of caste during the British Raj period, Balijas were accorded the Sat Shudra position.
[49] The fourfold Brahmanical varna concept has not been acceptable to non-Brahmin social groups and some of them challenged the authority of Brahmins who described them as Shudras.