Banjara
[2][3] Motiraj Rathod believes that the community became known as banjara from around the fourteenth century AD and previously had some association with the Laman, who claim a 3,000-year history.
[4] Irfan Habib believes the origin of banjara lies in the Sanskrit word variously rendered as vanij, vanik, and banik, as does the name of the Bania caste, which historically was India's "pre-eminent" trading community.
[6] Irfan Habib writes that their constituent groups may not in fact share a common origin, with the theories that suggest otherwise reflecting the systemic bias of 19th-century British ethnographers who were keen to create simple classifications.
Banjaras were historically pastoralists, traders, breeders, and transporters of goods in the inland regions of India, for which they used boats, carts, camels, oxen, donkeys, and sometimes the relatively scarce horse, hence controlling a large section of trade and economy.
[20] They could be huge assemblies, some being recorded as comprising 190,000 beasts, and they also serviced the needs of armies, whose movements naturally followed the same trade and caravan routes.
The Duke of Wellington used them for that purpose in his campaign against the Maratha Confederacy around the late 1790s,[21] and Jahangir, a Mughal emperor who reigned in the early seventeenth century, described them as a fixed class of people, who possess a thousand oxen, or more or less, varying in numbers.
[23] In that area, the Deccan Plateau and the Central Provinces, the Banjaras had a monopoly on the movement of salt prior to the arrival of the East India Company.
Habib writes that "Superstitions of all kinds, including suspected witch killings and sacrifices, reinforced the Gypsy image of the class".
[31][c] They were sometimes associated by the British with the Thugee[33] and by the 1830s[34] had gained some notoriety for committing crimes such as roadside robbery, cattle lifting, and theft of grain or other property.
[35] Poor, mostly illiterate and unskilled, the Banjaras were also resistant to improvement through education, which the British felt left no recourse other than tight control through policing.
Lambani women specialise in lepo embroidery, which involves stitching pieces of mirror, decorative beads, and coins onto clothes.
[51] Although the introduction of modern modes of transport largely made the community redundant from their traditional occupation, forcing them into economic distress from which they sought relief by turning to agriculture and other unskilled labour, according to V. Sarveswara Naik, as recently as 1996, many still retained a nomadic lifestyle on a seasonal basis to supplement their income.
However, the men have largely given up their traditional attire of a white dhoti (skirt) and a red turban, along with the wearing of earrings, finger rings, and kanadoro (silver strings worn around the waist).
[52] Aside from retaining their practice of endogamy, Naik records of Banjara customs in 1990s Andhra Pradesh that they follow forms of marriage that include monogamy.
The exception to this is the relatively rare occasion when the man has some education, in which case it is becoming more common to see them making arrangements that involve a longer distance.
[39] It is the boys' fathers who initiate marriage proposals, usually when the child reaches the age of 18 and is considered capable of running an independent household.
Women and girls, including the prospective bride, have no say in the matter, but the father takes advice from the naik of his tanda and from close relatives.
The girls are usually prepared for this arranged marriage from the onset of puberty, and their parents will make a show of resistance when a proposal is made, before her father agrees to the advice given by his naik and village elders.
Sometimes, the arrangement is made earlier and may even be solemnised with a betrothal ceremony, called a sagai, but the girl will remain in the household until she attains puberty.
The extremely elaborate nature of their dresses, comprising glass pieces, beads, and seashells on a mainly red material, means that they are worn for months between careful launderings.
Aside from strictly domestic tasks, they are an economic boon, because they help with herding and grazing the family's cattle and with work in the crop fields.
The separating of the households leads to the husband receiving some property from his parents, such as land, livestock, and money, but as it is a patrilineal society, the wife has nothing.
Any matter that involves a woman is dealt with by the men, and it is a man who represents her interests, an example being the dealings for marriage proposals, which always require the consent of the gor panchayat.
They were designated as an Other Backward Class in Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan, and as a Scheduled Caste in Karnataka, Delhi, and Punjab.
