Banjara people
indigenous (Scheduled) tribe from India
The Banjara (also Lambāda or Lamāna) are nomadic tribes found in India. Their native language is Lambadi.
Etymology
The Gor usually refer to themselves as Banjaras and outsiders as Kor, but this usage does not extend outside their own community. A related usage is Gor Mati or Gormati, meaning "own people". 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.
Historian 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. However, according to the author B. G. Halbar, the word banjara is derived from the Sanskrit vana chara.
The group is known by different names in different parts of the country, including Gor Banjara, Baladiya, Gor, Gour Rajput, Rajput Banjara, Ladaniya, Labana, Nayak, Gawaria, etc. Despite the community adopting a multitude of languages, banjara is used throughout India, although in Karnataka, the name is altered to banijagaru. A survey conducted in 1968 by the All India Banjara Seva Sangh, a caste-based association, recorded 27 synonyms and 17 subgroups.
The public source identifies “Banjara people” as indigenous (Scheduled) tribe from India. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Banjara, people and indigenous.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q252885. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Banjara people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.