Banjara

The Banjaras, also called Lambadas, are traditionally nomadic traders and pastoralists scattered across India, whose caravans in 1337 already moved through the Deccan and Vidarbha. Their clans, possibly of mixed origin in north-central India, appear in Delhi chronicles, and the name Banjara came into use around the fourteenth century.

Organized into caravans called tandas under elected headmen, they moved grain, salt, cotton and forest produce by ox and camel, monopolizing the Berar and Deccan salt trade before the East India Company; their trains supplied armies, including forces against the Maratha confederacy in the 1790s.

Their tongue is Lambadi, a Western Indo-Aryan language without a script, most also speaking their host peoples' languages. As company rule ended their salt monopoly and the long wars ended, many lost their carrying trade, and by the 1830s some settled as farmers while others gained a reputation for banditry on the Deccan roads.