Banyan merchants

Banyan merchants were Indian traders, chiefly from the Bania mercantile castes of Rajasthan and Gujarat, who built a long-running commercial network across the Indian Ocean, recognizable by their distinctive clothing, diet and trading methods wherever they settled. Their presence is documented as early as the first century CE in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which places Indian traders in Indo-Roman commerce reaching Egypt, the island of Socotra, and ports along the Horn of Africa and the Arabian coast including Dahlak, Suakin and Massawa, as well as Muscat, Zanzibar and the wider Gulf of Aden, with further links into Syria, Persia and Europe. The seventeenth century Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi, writing between 1611 and 1684, even noted linguistic ties between Banyan trading communities and the Rumelian Roma people of Gumulcine, a sign of how far their networks and influence had spread. Under British colonial rule the term broadened to describe South Asian expatriate merchant communities working across the Persian Gulf, who moved well beyond simple trading into shopkeeping, brokerage, moneylending, banking, accountancy, translation, secretarial work and even intelligence gathering for colonial administrations.