“Our ancestors sold salt by wandering from place to place. They used to thatch roofs and transport stuff. They sang songs handed down orally and embossed traditional tattoos. They would stitch clothes with infinite designs. Now, we are growing up eating leafy and root vegetables, rice, corn, and sorghum instead of our traditional foods.”
Talking about a once-wandering community that is now rooted in one place because of modern geopolitics, author Ramesh Karthik Nayak, in conversation with Borderless Journal, says the Banjara culture he grew up with feels like a mirage in a desert—fast disappearing.
In today’s world of “digital nomads” and visa stamp collectors, the traditionally nomadic Banjara tribes remind us that the traveling life is ancient. With music, dance, art, folklore, textiles, and a three-thousand-year history, Banjaras remind us of the cultural importance of movement in a world where borders and walls are the norm.
A brown camel decked in colorful tassels
From the Sanskrit word vanaj, meaning trader, or from ban (forest) and jara (movers), the word banjara links to trade and movement, reflecting a nomadic life.
In his socio-cultural study of Banjara Lambanis, scholar and folklorist Dr. Dhanasing Naik discussed that historically, the Banjara tribes (also known as Lambadas, Lambanis, and other variations, depending on the language) were nomadic traders who would carry merchandise from one part of the world to another. With their origin somewhere in the northern part of India, these tribes were the chief transporters of goods in medieval India.
The traveling traders would use bullock carts to supply the whole subcontinent with grains, dates, coconuts, salt, dried fish, cowrie shells, and more. In his study, Dr. Naik noted that in medieval India, the Banjara Lambanis had established trade links stretching across Asia, Europe, and Africa.
To both the Roma and the Banjara communities, movement is a way of life and not just a disruption to it.
In India, the word banjara has become culturally synonymous with a nomadic lifestyle, even though in reality, the community’s freedom of movement has been called into question ever since colonization. With the drawing up of new boundaries under British rule in India in the nineteenth century, the Banjara community was inhibited from fulfilling their traditional tasks of moving merchandise. With the advent of trains, their bullock carts were no longer needed. This led to a large cultural shift, where the community traveled to various parts of the country and beyond and settled down, gaining new names and stories, but still holding on to a consolidated cultural and historical identity.
A woman wearing the colorful clothes and silver jewelry of the Banjara community
The Banjara’s far-reaching trade routes created cultural links that still echo today. There are many cultural and linguistic similarities between the Banjara Lambanis and the Roma peoples of Eastern Europe, and their ancestors may have once been part of the same community.
Various genetic studies have found that the ancestors of the Romani people originated in northern regions of the Indian subcontinent, particularly in present-day Punjab and Rajasthan. Literature suggests that a group of travelers from the Indian subcontinent wandered to Europe and settled there, the generations muddying the connection over time.
The connection between Banjaras and Roma is seen through shared linguistic quirks and a cultural core rooted in freedom and movement.
To both communities, movement was not a temporary disruption to life, but a way of sustaining it. Trade, music, craft, and family life were built around travel, creating a portable, resilient culture.
The members of the community become living archives who pass on their stories and histories through music and dance.
The Banjaras moved across India, transporting goods and livestock through long trading routes. In Romani communities across Eastern Europe, livelihoods were similarly built around seasonal work, horse trading, metalwork, music, and performance. With constant movement, both cultures learned to value adaptability over permanence.
Family structures reflected this mobility, with strong communal networks that stayed connected despite distance. Clothing, jewelry, and embroidery became markers of identities that could travel across regions and generations, spanning landscapes, languages, rulers, and borders.
Woman in a colorfully embroidered top standing outdoors
The katha storytelling tradition is a staple in the Banjara community, with epic songs about ancestral journeys and migration histories. Accompanied by percussion, bronze plates, and cymbals, as well as rhythmic clapping, the oral tradition becomes a shared community activity that celebrates and remembers the past. The members of the community become living archives who pass on stories and histories through music and dance.
In Dr. Naik’s work, he explores the different types of songs that are passed through Banjara generations, including historic songs that talk about folktales during the Rajput rule between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, mythological songs that trace stories from the Hindu mythological epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as a plethora of everyday songs that are sung during festivals, childbirth, funerals, and so forth.
With the current crackdown on ethnic minorities and cultural diversity, we are creating microcosms where only monocultures thrive.
“Our people cannot survive without singing. Each and every moment is made into a song for self or for children or just to survive,” says author Ramesh Karthik Nayak.
Similarly, the Roma people also remember their histories orally, with a rich heritage of folktales and legends that were once shared solely through word of mouth. As Romani migrants settled across South America and the USA in the 1900s, the folk tales the community brought with them became storybooks and children’s tales. Francis Hindes Groome’s Gypsy Folk Tales from 1899 is a collection that gathers oral narratives from Romani groups across Europe, preserving tales blending local folklore with Romani motifs. Groome also annotated each story with linguistic and cultural notes, tracing parallels with Indian, Persian, and European folklore to highlight the Romani diaspora’s wide cultural connections.
Apart from an abundance of similar-sounding words in their lexicon and folk stories that have the same vibe, these cultures, spanning two continents, have a much stronger link when it comes to visual aesthetics. The Banjaras and the Roma share a love of head coverings, long, colorful skirts embellished with mirrors, mother-of-pearl, and cowrie shells, and heavy silver jewelry jingling with coins and bells across wrists, hair, ears, and noses.
The shared past of the Banjaras and the Romani feels less like history and more like something still in motion, the echo of a traveling song or mirrored embroidery in the sun.
Even though the Romani peoples and Banjara tribes have been separated for over a thousand years, their shared echoes reveal an enduring transcontinental identity carried across time, memory, and distance.
An Indian man with a bright red turban sitting on the ground
The shared past of the Banjaras and the Romani feels less like history and more like something still in motion, the echo of a traveling song or mirrored embroidery in the sun. It encompasses a rich record that cannot be faithfully condensed into a few pages.
This long history also goes beyond shared culture and shared experience of marginalization. Traveling communities, when forced to fit into a sedentary political system, must change and adapt in a way that can be contrary to their heritage. In the Indian subcontinent, many Banjara communities were once criminalized under colonial laws. They continue to face caste and class discrimination today, with children from Banjara communities being educated in dominant state languages rather than their mother tongue, creating alienation and educational barriers. Cultural history and the Banjara languages are being slowly forgotten.
Across Europe, Roma communities still struggle against decades of exclusion and oppression, as well as systems built to accommodate permanent settlements. In France, children from traveling families often face difficulties enrolling in schools because of changing addresses, while many Roma families are restricted to aires des gens du voyage, which are designated caravan sites that are frequently isolated and poorly maintained. In Italy, Romani communities have been subjected to ethnically segregated living conditions, excluded from social housing, and exposed to widespread forced evictions that left thousands homeless. Not having a permanent address has severely impacted the opportunities offered to itinerant communities.
There is an ongoing tension between political sedentarism and cultures that have been shaped through movement. However, one way to accept a distinctly different way of life is to understand their culture and history.
The colorful history of the Banjaras and the Roma vividly delineates the political borders that often cut cultural borders in half, tracing lines where none once existed. With chopped-up continents and the apparition of borders everywhere, it is almost impossible to live a traditional nomadic life anymore.
There are still a few Banjara tribes in Rajasthan who move through the arid landscape of the Thar desert, but most of the community has left their itinerant way of life in their past. The roving Banjara lifestyle came to an end with the drawing up of Indian borders around the 1940s, when the authorities saw the Banjara way of life as outdated and tribal, forcing them to “amalgamate” into society.
With the current crackdown on immigration and globalization’s effects of reducing cultural diversity, we are creating microcosms where only monocultures thrive. We need a world with fewer borders and more movement, where migration is allowed to shape identities across time and continents, making cultures richer, more layered, and the world itself more vibrant and alive.
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