traditional lore, banias are invariably
painted as greedy and avaricious people
who care about nothing but money.
Although they were often stereotyped as
parasites, banias were a necessary part
of the traditional agricultural economy,
because they gave farmers goods on
credit to be repaid after the harvest.
They also lent farmers money to get
started again after a bad harvest. Both
groups thus depended on one another—
the farmers for capital, the banias for
continuing consumption and patron-
age. For a masterful reconstruction of
the ethos in the northern Indian mer-
chant family, in which Hindu piety was
an important element, see C. A. Bayly,
Rulers,Townsmen and Bazaars, 1983.
Banjara
The model for traditional Indian society
was a collection of endogamoussub-
groups known as jatis(“birth”). These
jatis were organized (and their social
status determined) by the group’s hered-
itary occupation. In traditional northern
Indian society, the Banjaras were a jati
whose hereditary occupation was dri-
ving 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.
Banking
In traditional Hindu culture, banking
was often an extension of a merchant
family’s economic life, particularly in
times and places in which centralized
banking did not exist. In most cases
these families transacted their business
using letters of credit known as hundis,
which enabled them to conduct busi-
ness over large distances without the
risk of transporting gold and silver bul-
lion. By the early 1800s, these hundis
functioned as virtual currency in much
of India, since in some cases they were
used in twenty or thirty transactions
before eventually being returned to the
issuing family for cashing. This system
made a merchant family’s creditworthi-
ness its most valuable asset. Once this
was lost, the family’s hundis were no
longer honored, and they were unable to
conduct business. Since the evaluation
of a family’s credit was often tied to
judgments about its character, mer-
chant families strove to cultivate the
image of seriousness, dependability,
and thrift. In this ethos the only accept-
able forum for lavish expenditures was
for religious endowments, since these
reinforced the family’s pious image and
thus enhanced their creditworthiness.
With part of their surplus capital, these
families would usually engage in
moneylendingas one way to increase
their wealth; the largest families
routinely lent money to royalty, which
provided them with even greater status.
For a masterful picture of the merchant
family ethos in northern India, see
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and
Bazaars, 1983.Barahmasa
(“twelve months”) Poetic genre in which
each of the poem’s verses, or stanzas, is
devoted to one month of the year, with
the months treated in chronological
order. This is a purely vernacular genre
for which there are no known instances
in Sanskrit. Barahmasa poems often
reveal a great deal about everyday life
and can be subdivided into several basic
categories: an enumerative type, which
describes appropriate activities for each
month such as farming or religious
practice; a narrative form, which
recounts a woman’s longing (viraha) for
her absent lover; and a type describing a
young wife’s trial of chastity as she with-
stands various temptations during an
extended separation from her husband.
For further information see Charlotte
Vaudeville, Barahmasa in Indian
Literature, 1986.Banjara