Banjara

The model for traditional Indian society
was a collection of endogamous subgroups known as jatis (“birth”). These
jatis were organized (and their social
status determined) by the group’s hereditary occupation. In traditional northern
Indian society, the Banjaras were a jati
whose hereditary occupation was driving pack animals, either as peddlers
selling retail goods to people in more
remote places or as transporters
conveying commodities from one seller
to another. They appear in poems by
some of the bhakti (devotional) poets,
particularly by Ravidas, as a symbol of
human heedlessness or as a person who
never stops moving to reflect on where
he has been.