Large Old Framed Wall Hanging Indian Banjara Cloth. Textiles embroidered with mirrors.
Overall: 59 3/8 X 59 3/8 in.
Sight: 52 3/4 X 52 3/4 in.
#3971 .
The Banjara are nomadic tribes found in India. 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.” It is believed that the community became known as banjara around the 14th Century AD, but previously had some association with the Laman, whose history stretches back to the first millennium BC. The origin of the word “banjara” lies in the Sanskrit word variously rendered as vanij, vanik, and banik, as does the name of the Bania mercantile caste, which historically was India’s pre-eminent trading community. 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, and so forth. Although there is evidence that during the Mughal Empire they became nomadic to avoid persecution, the systemic bias of 19th Century British ethnographers has made it difficult to ascertain all of their disparate cultural and ethnic components. Banjaras were historically pastoralists, traders, breeders, and transporters of goods in the inland regions of India, for which they used boats, carts, camels, oxen, donkeys, and sometimes the relatively scarce horse, hence controlling a large section of trade and economy. In the Deccan Plateau and the Central Provinces the Banjaras had a monopoly on the movement of salt prior to the arrival of the East India Company. Their peripatetic nature significantly affected their societal behaviors, often accepting both outsiders as well as those who chose to leave the traveling lifestyle with ease, and this generated tremendous diversity within the Banjara society in terms of language, customs, beliefs and practices. They developed a casual and open attitude towards religion, family, and the superiority of women in many fields, quite unorthodox in the 15th and 16th Centuries, and many of the practices which were prohibited in the mainstream orthodox Hindu society were freely practiced in the Banjara community. Superstitions and prejudices brought by foreign European invaders (often equating the Banjara to the pejorative term “gypsies”) diminished their status in the 18th and 19th Centuries, especially after the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Poor, mostly illiterate and unskilled, the Banjaras were also resistant to improvement through education, which the British felt left no recourse other than tight control through policing. Their unwarranted reputation for misdeeds persisted into the early 20th Century, until the repeal of the Act after the Independence of India caused them to be classified as one of the Denotified Tribes. Banjara art includes performance arts, such as dance and music, as well as folk and plastic arts, such as rangoli, textile embroidery, tattooing, and painting which are especially prized. Lambani women specialize in lepo embroidery, which involves stitching pieces of mirror, decorative beads, and coins onto clothes. Sandur Lambani embroidery is a type of textile embroidery unique to the tribe in Sanduru, Bellary district, Karnataka, and is so prized that it has obtained a Geographical Indications tag from the Indian government.
