The Banya
This article is an extract from PANJAB CASTES SIR DENZIL CHARLES JELF IBBETSON, K.C. S.I. Being a reprint of the chapter on Lahore: Printed by the Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1916. Indpaedia is an archive. It neither agrees nor disagrees |
The Banya
Caste No. 14)
The word Banya is derived from the Sanskrit baniya or trade ; and the Banya, as the name implies, lives solely for and by commerce. He holds a considerable area of land in the east of the Province ; but it is very rarely indeed that he follows any other than mercantile pursuits. The commercial enterprises and intelligence of the class is great, and the dealings of some of the great Banya houses of Dehli, Bikaner, and Marwar are of the most extensive nature. But the Banya of the village, who represents the great mass of the caste, is a poor creature, notwithstanding the title of Mahajan or great folk, which is confined by usage to the caste to which he belongs. He spends his life in his shop, and the results are apparent in his inferior physique and utter want of manliness. He is looked down upon by the peasantry as a cowardly monev grubber ; but at the same time his social standing is from one point of view curiously higher than theirs, for he is, what they are not, a strict Hindu, he is generally admitted to be of pure Vaisya descent, he wears the Qjaneo or sacred thread, his periods of purification are longer than theirs, he does not practise widow-marriage, and he will not eat or drink at their hands ; and religious ceremonial and the degrees of caste proper are so interwoven Avith the social fabric that the result ing position of the Banya in the grades of rustic society is of a curiously mixed nature. The Banya is hardly used by the proverbial wisdom of the countryside SHe who has a Banya for a friend is not in want of an enemy; and, First beat a Banya, then a thief. And indeed the Banya has too strong a hold over the husbandman for there to be much love lost between them. Yet the money-lenders of the villages at least have been branded with a far worse name than they deserve. They perform functions of the most cardinal importance in the village oBConomy, and it is su.rprising how much reasonableness and honesty there is in their dealings with the people so long as they can keep their business transactions out of a court of justice.
The Banya class forms the main commercial element of the population of North-thern and North-Western India up to the nu'ridiau of Laliore, and of Kajputana. Indeed the origin and strongliold of at any rate those sections of the caste which are most numerously reprcsented in the Panjab is North Western Rajputuna, and it is curious that while spreading so far to the east of Bikaner, they should have obtained so little hold to the west of that country. In the Panjub they are practically found in any great numbers only in the Dehli and llissar divisions, .Vmbula, and in the Central States of the Eastern Plains, and Firozjmr ; though curiously enough there appearg to be a considerable colony of them in Gurdaspur and Sialkot. But thg word Banya is generically used for shop-keeper all over the Panjab, not excepting even the frontier where Kirar is the more usual term ; and it is just possible that in some cases other mereantile eastes have been included in the figures. This however cannot have happened to any considerable extent or the figures for the sub-divisions of each caste would at once show what had happened. Of the Banyas of the Panjab about 92 per cent, are Hindus. Only 0-84 per cent, are Sikhs, most of whom are to he found in Patiala, Nabha and Rawalpindi. The Jains constitute 7 per cent, of the whole, and are confined to the Deldi division, Hissar, and Rohtak, or the tract bordering upon Rajputana, the great stronghold of Western Jainism. It is curious that the proportion of Jain Banyas should not be larger in Sirsa. Only some 500 souls are returned as Musalmans, and these may perhaps be Banyas by occupation rather than by caste.
It is sometimes said that Banya is no true caste at all, but merely an occupational term equivalent to shop-keeper,and that the great divisions of the Banyas, the Aggarwals, Oswals, and the like, really occupy the position of castes ; and this is in a sense true. The great sections do not intermarry and very possibly represent stocks of different origin ; and if caste is used in the same sense as tribe, these sections are doubtless separate castes. But if the word is used in its purely Brahminical sense, I do not think the Aggarwal and Oswal Banyas are separate castes any more than are the Gaur and Sarsut Brahmans. The two cases seem to me analagous. In all the non-agricultural castes who are found distributed widely among the population, anything corresponding with compact tribal divisions, such as we find among Rajputs, Pathans, or Jats, is impossible. They do not move into and occupy a large tract of country ; they rather spread from centres of origin, diffusing them selves among and accompanying the agricultural tribes in their movements. But the great divisions of the Banya caste occupy identical social and religious positions, and recognise each other, whether rightly or wrongly, as of common origin distinct from that of the Khatris and other castes whose avocations are the same as their own ; and, save in the sense in which such caste names as Chamar and Chuhra are only occupational terms, I think that the term Banya must be taken to describe| a true caste of supposed common blood, and not a collection of tribes of distinct descent united only bv identity of occupation (see further section .351 supra).
