Vitasta to Eripatti: The River Names, Tribal Languages and Land Terms UPSC Loves to Test

Some UPSC questions are won by argument and some by vocabulary. The term-definition question belongs firmly to the second kind: it gives you an ancient word and asks what it means today, or gives you a community and asks where it belongs. The Rig Vedic river names, the tribal languages Halbi, Ho and Kui, the Chola revenue term Eripatti, and the wandering Banjaras have all appeared in this format, and they will appear again because the format is cheap to set and hard to guess. This article is a glossary with a memory system: every term defined completely, then locked in with tables.

The rivers of the Rig Veda and their modern names

The Rig Veda names the rivers of the land of the Sapta Sindhu, the land of the seven rivers, and its Nadisukta hymn (Rig Veda 10.75) lists them in order from east to west. Because the hymn is among the oldest geographic descriptions of India, UPSC treats the ancient names as standard vocabulary. The 2019 prelims asked candidates to match Vitasta, Asikni and Parushni with the Jhelum, Chenab and Ravi, and all three pairings were correct. The method is to learn the full set, not just the asked trio, because the exam rotates through the list.

The complete working map runs as follows. The Sindhu is the Indus, the western anchor of the Sapta Sindhu. The Vitasta is the Jhelum, on whose banks Alexander fought Porus at the battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BCE, the Greek name for the river being Hydaspes. The Asikni, whose name means the dark-coloured one, is the Chenab. The Parushni is the Ravi, on whose banks the Battle of the Ten Kings (Dasarajna) was fought, the victory of the Bharata chief Sudas that is the Rig Veda's great political event. The Vipasha is the Beas, the river at which Alexander's army mutinied and refused to march further east. The Shatudri, the river of a hundred channels, is the Sutlej. East of these lies the Sarasvati, the Rig Veda's mighty river, identified with the Ghaggar-Hakra system of Haryana and Rajasthan. The western tributaries have their own pairs: the Kubha is the Kabul river, the Gomati the Gomal, the Krumu the Kurram, and the Suvastu the Swat.

Tribal languages: Halbi, Ho and Kui

Halbi is a language of the tribal belt of Chhattisgarh, spoken in the Bastar region and adjoining areas of Odisha and Maharashtra. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan family but sits at a crossroads, carrying the influence of Odia, Marathi and Chhattisgarhi, and it is the mother tongue of several tribal communities of the region rather than of one single tribe. Its interest for the exam is classificatory: Halbi shows that tribal languages are not all of one family, and it is the Indo-Aryan member of the tested trio.

Ho is the language of the Ho tribe of the Kolhan region of Jharkhand, and it belongs to the Austroasiatic family, specifically the Munda branch that also includes Mundari and Santali. The Hos call their language Ho, meaning human being, and it is written today in the Warang Chiti script created for it, as well as in Devanagari and Roman scripts. Ho is the Austroasiatic member of the trio, and its Munda kinship links it to some of the oldest speech communities of the subcontinent.

Kui is the language of the Kondh (Kandha) tribe of Odisha, and it belongs to the Dravidian family, a reminder that Dravidian speech extends far beyond the four southern states into the tribal highlands of the east. Kui is spoken in the Kandhamal and adjoining districts, the same hills associated with the Kondh community's history. The 2018 prelims tested tribal languages in exactly this classificatory spirit, and the table below is the revision unit: Halbi-Chhattisgarh-Indo-Aryan, Ho-Jharkhand-Austroasiatic (Munda), Kui-Odisha-Dravidian.

Land and revenue vocabulary: Eripatti and its cousins

The 2016 prelims tested three South Indian terms together: Eripatti, taniyurs and ghatikas. The official answer held that Eripatti and the ghatikas were correctly described and the taniyurs were not. Eripatti is the term for land donated by individuals, the revenue from which was set apart for the maintenance of the village tank. The word breaks cleanly: Tamil eri means tank, and patti denotes the land assigned. The term matters because it reveals the economic base of the Tamil countryside: the village depended on its tank for irrigation, and the community created a dedicated revenue stream to keep the tank desilted and repaired.

The two companion terms complete the picture of the Chola-period village. Taniyurs were large villages administered as single units under the Cholas, sometimes carved out of larger brahmadeya areas; the wrong description in the question called them villages donated to Brahmins, which is what brahmadeya properly means. Ghatikas were colleges generally attached to temples, centres of higher learning in Vedic and Sastra studies, the famous one at Kanchipuram drawing students from far and near. Around these three cluster the rest of the Chola land vocabulary. Brahmadeya is tax-free land granted to Brahmins. Devadana (also called tirunamattukkani) is land granted to a temple. Vellanvagai is the ordinary non-brahmadeya village of peasant proprietors. Shalabhoga is land assigned for the maintenance of a school. Kadamai is the land revenue itself, and vetti the forced labour taken as tax. Learn them as a family and no single term can surprise you.

The Banjaras: the caravan people

The Banjaras, also called Lambani or Lambada, are a historically nomadic trading community of India. For centuries they were the great caravan traders of the subcontinent: their tandas, the large mobile camps, moved salt, grain and other bulk goods across the country on pack bullocks, and armies from the Mughals to the Marathas depended on Banjara caravans for supply. Their mobility was their economy, and their distinctive dress, silver jewellery, mirror-work embroidery and the women's phetas and heavy skirts, made them one of India's most visually recognisable communities.

Colonial rule broke the caravan economy. The railways took the long-distance trade, and the British, unable to police a mobile population, notified the Banjaras under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, stigmatising an entire community as criminal by birth. Independent India repealed the Act and denotified these communities in 1952, but the stigma and the sedentarisation that followed reshaped Banjara life. Today Banjaras are spread across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, many settled as farmers, and the community's scheduled-tribe status varies by state, a question of administrative classification the exam occasionally probes. For the exam, the Banjaras are the nomadic traders of the salt and grain caravans, the community of the tandas, stigmatised in 1871 and denotified in 1952.

The master glossary

The Sapta Sindhu: the Rig Vedic homeland

The river names make full sense only inside the Sapta Sindhu, the land of the seven rivers, which the Rig Veda treats as the home of its people. The seven are usually counted as the Sindhu (Indus), Vitasta (Jhelum), Asikni (Chenab), Parushni (Ravi), Vipasha (Beas), Shatudri (Sutlej) and Sarasvati. This is essentially the Punjab in its largest sense, the doabs between the five rivers plus the Indus to the west and the Sarasvati to the east. The Rig Veda's most famous political event, the Battle of the Ten Kings on the Parushni, was a struggle for dominance within this river land, won by Sudas of the Bharata tribe, whose name the country still carries as Bharatavarsha.

The geography of the hymns is not decorative; it is historical evidence. The Nadisukta lists the rivers from east to west, the Sarasvati is praised as the greatest river (naditama), and the western tributaries, Kubha, Gomati, Krumu, Suvastu, mark the frontier toward Afghanistan and Central Asia. Later Vedic literature shifts the centre of gravity eastward to the Ganga-Yamuna doab and the Kuru-Panchala country, so the river names also let historians track the eastward expansion of Vedic culture. For the exam, the Sapta Sindhu is the frame: seven rivers - Punjab - Bharatas - Dasarajna on the Parushni - eastward shift in the later Vedic period.

Ancient city names and their modern equivalents

The exam tests ancient-modern pairings for cities as well as rivers, and the same memory system applies. Pataliputra is Patna (Bihar), the Mauryan and Gupta capital on the Ganga. Prayag is Prayagraj (Uttar Pradesh), the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna. Kashi is Varanasi, Ujjayini is Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh), the western capital of the Guptas and the city of the Mahakal Jyotirlinga. In the northwest, Takshashila is Taxila (Pakistan), the great ancient university town; Purushapura is Peshawar, the Kushana capital of Kanishka; and Saketa is Ayodhya, the Kosalan capital of the Ramayana. In the Deccan, Pratishthana is Paithan (Maharashtra), the Satavahana capital, the same Paithan of the Paithani saree, and Tagara is identified with Ter in Maharashtra.

The four language families of India

Halbi, Ho and Kui belong to three different families, which raises the natural question: what are India's language families? Linguists count four. The Indo-Aryan family, a branch of Indo-European, covers the great languages of the north and west: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, and also Halbi at the tribal margin. The Dravidian family covers the south, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and reaches into the tribal highlands through Kui, Gondi (the great tribal language of central India) and Kurukh (of the Oraon tribe). The Austroasiatic family is represented by the Munda languages, Santali, Mundari, Ho, among the oldest speech of the subcontinent. The Tibeto-Burman family covers the Himalayan and northeastern tribes: Bodo, Manipuri (Meitei), Naga languages, Lepcha, Bhutia.

The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution recognises 22 languages, and the classical-language list, Tamil (2004), Sanskrit (2005), Kannada and Telugu (2008), Malayalam (2013), Odia (2014), honours antiquity across families. For the exam, the tribal-language question of 2018 sits inside this larger map: the paper was testing whether candidates knew that tribal speech is not one thing. Halbi (Indo-Aryan), Ho (Austroasiatic-Munda), Kui (Dravidian) is the minimal set, and the fourth family, Tibeto-Burman, completes the frame.

The Chola village: sabha, ur and the tank committees

Eripatti's tank belongs to the most studied village system in Indian history: the Chola village of the 9th to 13th centuries, known from the great inscriptions of Uttaramerur in Tamil Nadu. The inscriptions describe two kinds of village assembly. The sabha was the assembly of the brahmadeya village, restricted to Brahmin landholders, with elaborate rules for membership, thirty years of age, property and Vedic learning, and disqualification for moral offences. The ur was the assembly of the ordinary vellanvagai village, open to the peasant proprietors. Both assemblies managed land, taxes, justice and temples through executive committees called variyams.

The most famous variyam is the eri-variyam, the tank committee, the body that actually spent the eripatti revenue on desilting and repairing the village tank. Other committees managed gardens, justice and temples. The Uttaramerur inscription even describes an electoral system of lot-casting from a pot (kudavolai) for choosing committee members, with disqualifications for corrupt or negligent ex-members. The Chola village is therefore the mains answer to local self-government in ancient India: not a romantic ideal but a documented system of assemblies, committees, qualifications and audits, with the tank committee as its most practical face.

Beyond the Banjaras: the Gadia Lohars

The Banjaras were not India's only nomadic community, and the exam occasionally pairs them with another: the Gadia Lohars, the travelling blacksmiths of Rajasthan. The Gadia Lohars live in carts (gadia) and move from village to village, repairing and making iron tools, and their tradition holds that they are Rajputs who took a vow never to settle or return to Chittor until the fortress was freed from its conquerors, wandering ever since. Like the Banjaras, they were caught by the colonial state's suspicion of mobility, and like the Banjaras they were denotified in 1952 and have since settled in growing numbers.

The Gadia Lohars complete the nomadism theme: Banjaras (trade) - Gadia Lohars (ironwork) - Criminal Tribes Act 1871 - denotification 1952. Both communities show the same historical arc: a mobile occupational economy under pre-colonial India, criminalisation under a colonial state that could not police movement, and painful sedentarisation after independence. When a question asks about denotified tribes, either community is a valid illustration, and naming both shows range.

The Sangam landscape: tinai and the Tamil country

The Tamil country has its own ancient vocabulary, and the Sangam literature gives the exam a second term-set. The Sangam poems divide the Tamil landscape into five tinai, eco-cultural zones, each with its own gods, people and poetic moods: kurinji (hills, Murugan), mullai (forests and pastures, Krishna), marudam (riverine farmland, Indra), neydal (coast, Varuna) and palai (arid wasteland, Korravai). The tinai system is an ecological poetics: the land you live in decides the god you worship and the songs you sing, and it is the standard answer to questions about Sangam geography.

The Sangam age's political map is the three crowned kings, the muventar: the Cheras of the west coast (emblem: bow), the Cholas of the Kaveri delta (emblem: tiger), and the Pandyas of Madurai (emblem: fish), with the chieftains called velirs beneath them. The great Sangam ports were Puhar (Kaveripattinam) of the Cholas and Muziris of the Cheras, the latter the pepper port of the Roman trade described in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. For the exam, the Sangam package is tinai (five landscapes) - muventar (three kings) - Puhar and Muziris (ports) - 300 BCE to 300 CE.

Inscriptional vocabulary: what the stones say

Inscriptions are the exam's favourite primary sources, and each great inscription has a vocabulary of its own. Ashoka's edicts, written in Prakrit in Brahmi script (and in Kharosthi and Greek-Aramaic in the northwest), introduce the term dhamma and the administrative words rajuka (rural officer), pradesika and yukta. The Allahabad pillar prashasti of Harishena, court poet of Samudragupta (4th century CE), is the eulogy (prashasti) as a genre: it lists the kings Samudragupta defeated, dividing them into the rulers of Aryavarta (the north, uprooted) and Dakshinapatha (the south, liberated and reinstated), and it is the single most important source for the Gupta empire's extent.

The Aihole prashasti of Ravikirti (634 CE) does the same work for the Chalukyas, recording Pulakeshin II's victory over Harsha and name-dropping Kalidasa and Bharavi. The Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman (c. 150 CE) is the first long inscription in Sanskrit, recording the repair of the Sudarshana lake, and it marks the moment Sanskrit displaced Prakrit in royal epigraphy. The exam's inscriptional logic is author-text-king: Ashoka (edicts, dhamma) - Harishena (Allahabad, Samudragupta) - Ravikirti (Aihole, Pulakeshin II) - Rudradaman (Junagadh, Sudarshana lake).

The coins speak: numismatic terms

Coins carry their own vocabulary. The earliest Indian coins are the punch-marked coins, silver and copper pieces stamped with symbols, the karshapana of the Mahajanapada and Mauryan periods. The Indo-Greeks introduced portrait coins and the first coins with the king's name in legend, a practice the Kushanas continued with their gold dinara coins, the word borrowed from the Roman denarius. The Guptas issued the great gold dinara series: Samudragupta's ashvamedha type, Chandragupta II's archer type, Kumaragupta's horseman type, each a political statement in metal.

The Satavahanas issued coins in lead and potin as well as silver, with ship motifs proclaiming their maritime trade. Harsha's coins are rare; the Chola gold kasu and the Vijayanagara gold varaha (also called pagoda by Europeans) carried southern commerce. For the exam, the numismatic chain is punch-marked (karshapana) - Indo-Greek portraits - Kushana dinara - Gupta gold types - Chola kasu - Vijayanagara varaha. A coin question is always testing whose economy and whose iconography the metal proclaims.

Tribal communities of the exam: Gonds, Santhals, Bhils

Beyond the three tested languages, three tribal communities recur in the paper. The Gonds, among India's largest tribal groups, spread across Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Odisha, built the Gond kingdoms of Garha-Mandla, Deogarh and Chanda in the medieval period, and speak Gondi, a Dravidian language. The Santhals, concentrated in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, speak Santali (Austroasiatic-Munda, now in the Eighth Schedule) and rose in the great Santhal rebellion of 1855 under Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu, the uprising that forced the creation of the Santhal Pargana.

The Bhils, of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra, are among the oldest named tribes of Indian literature, celebrated as archers; the Bhil revolts of the early 19th century under leaders like Govind Guru belong to the pre-1857 resistance. The revision table is Gonds (central India, Gondi, Gond kingdoms) - Santhals (east, Santali, 1855 rebellion, Santhal Pargana) - Bhils (west-central, archers, Govind Guru). Each community gives the exam a language, a region and a revolt, the three handles by which tribal questions are set.

The edicts of Ashoka: the language of the stones

The term-set of this article began with rivers; it continues with the edicts of Ashoka, the oldest deciphered royal inscriptions of India. The edicts are written in Prakrit in the Brahmi script across most of India, in Kharosthi in the northwest, and in Greek and Aramaic at Kandahar, a trilingual geography that maps the Mauryan empire's reach. James Prinsep of the Asiatic Society deciphered Brahmi in 1837, unlocking the entire corpus. The edicts fall into groups: the fourteen Major Rock Edicts, the Minor Rock Edicts, the seven Pillar Edicts, and the special Kalinga edicts, and their great theme is dhamma, Ashoka's moral code of non-violence, tolerance, respect for elders and servants, and religious harmony.

The administrative vocabulary of the edicts is itself a term-set. The rajuka was the rural officer charged with the people's welfare, the pradesika the district head, the yukta the subordinate official; the dhamma-mahamatras were the special officers appointed to preach dhamma. The thirteenth rock edict, which describes the Kalinga war and Ashoka's remorse, is the most quoted inscription in Indian history. For the exam, the Ashokan package is Brahmi/Kharosthi/Greek - Prinsep 1837 - Major Rock Edicts (14) - Pillar Edicts (7) - dhamma - Kalinga (13th edict) - rajukas and dhamma-mahamatras. Every term in it has been asked.

Vedic institutions: sabha, samiti and vidatha

The Rig Vedic rivers flowed past political institutions with their own vocabulary. The sabha was the assembly of the clan's elite, the council of elders that advised the chief; the samiti was the larger assembly of the whole tribe (jana), which elected and could depose the rajan. The vidatha was the earliest tribal assembly, part council and part ritual gathering, where booty was distributed and decisions taken. Women, the hymns suggest, participated in the sabha and vidatha, a datum the exam uses for questions on the status of women in the early Vedic period.

The rajan himself was not yet a king in the later sense: he was a tribal chief, dependent on the assemblies, supported by the purohita (priest) and the senani (war leader), and his authority was constantly renegotiated in the sacrifices and the cattle raids (gavishti, literally the search for cows) that were the economy's engine. The later Vedic period replaced this fluid order with hereditary kingship, the great sacrifices (rajasuya, vajapeya, ashvamedha) that made the king, and the territorial janapadas that replaced the wandering janas. The institutional chain is vidatha - sabha - samiti - rajan - purohita/senani - janapada, the standard answer to how the Vedic polity evolved.

Prakrit, Pali, Sanskrit: the languages of the sources

The terms in this article come to us in three ancient languages, and the exam expects candidates to know which source speaks which. Pali is the language of the Theravada Buddhist canon, the Tripitaka, preserved in Sri Lanka; the Jataka stories and the Dhammapada are Pali texts. Prakrit is the family of Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars: Ashoka's edicts are in Prakrit, the Ardhamagadhi Prakrit is the language of the Jain canon, and Maharashtri Prakrit is the language of the great Sattasai (Gaha Sattasai) of Hala. Sanskrit, the refined language of the grammarian Panini's Ashtadhyayi (4th century BCE), became the language of royal inscription from Rudradaman's Junagadh inscription (c. 150 CE) onward and of the classical literature of Kalidasa, Bana and Bharavi.

The language shift is itself history: from the Prakrit of the people (Ashoka, the early Buddhists and Jains) to the Sanskrit of the court (Guptas, Chalukyas), the movement of the sacred and the official toward Sanskrit marks the cultural change of the early centuries CE. For the exam, the language-source table is Pali (Buddhist canon) - Ardhamagadhi Prakrit (Jain canon) - Ashokan Prakrit (edicts) - Sanskrit (Panini, Kalidasa, post-150 CE inscriptions). A question that asks in which language the Jain canon is written is testing exactly this table.

The Harappan script: the term that means mystery

One term in the ancient vocabulary means the absence of a definition: the Harappan script. The seals and tablets of Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and Dholavira carry some 400 distinct signs in short inscriptions, the longest barely twenty-six signs, and the script remains undeciphered. The great debate, whether the language behind it was Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, or something else entirely, is the most famous unsolved problem in Indian history, and the exam treats it with appropriate caution: questions ask what is known, the number of signs, the brevity of the texts, the unicorn as the commonest seal motif, the material (steatite), not what the seals say.

The script's undeciphered status is itself the lesson about historical terms: some words name things we understand, like eripatti, and some name the limits of understanding. The Harappan package for the exam is 400 signs - undeciphered - steatite seals - unicorn motif - Dholavira's signboard (the famous inscribed wooden board). It is the honest counterpart to the confidently mapped river names with which this article began: the rivers we can name, the seals we cannot yet read.

Eras and dating: Vikram, Shaka, Hijri and Kollam

Historical terms include the eras by which Indians dated their inscriptions, and the exam treats them as vocabulary. The Vikram Samvat, beginning 57 BCE, is traditionally associated with King Vikramaditya of Ujjain and his victory over the Shakas; it remains the civil calendar of much of north and west India. The Shaka Samvat, beginning 78 CE, is associated with the Kushana king Kanishka's accession and is India's official national calendar (adopted 1957), beginning with Chaitra. The Hijri era, beginning 622 CE (the Prophet's migration to Medina), dates the Sultanate and Mughal chronicles. The Kollam era of Kerala begins 825 CE. The Buddhist Mahavira nirvana era and the Kalachuri era (248 CE) of the Deccan complete the set the inscriptions use.

The exam's era logic is conversion and association: Vikram 57 BCE (Ujjain, Shakas) - Shaka 78 CE (Kanishka, national calendar) - Hijri 622 CE (Islamic) - Kollam 825 CE (Kerala). Questions ask which era Kanishka founded, which is the national calendar, and what 78 CE signifies. The eras are also dating tools: an inscription dated Shaka 500 is 578 CE, and the candidate who can add 78 does the epigraphist's arithmetic. Learn the four numbers, 57, 78, 622, 825, and the era section of the paper is memorised.

The Periplus and the Roman trade: terms from the sea

The Sangam ports traded with Rome, and the trade left its own vocabulary. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant's handbook of the 1st century CE, names the Indian ports of the pepper trade: Muziris and Nelcynda on the Malabar coast, Barygaza (Bharuch) at the Narmada mouth, the great entrepot of the Western Satraps. Roman aurei and denarii hoards found across Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh prove the trade's scale, and the Arikamedu excavations near Puducherry, where Wheeler dug in 1945, uncovered the Roman trading station itself, with Arretine pottery and amphorae fragments.

The trade terms complete the ancient-economy vocabulary: Periplus (the merchant's guide), Muziris (the Chera pepper port), Barygaza (the Gujarat entrepot), Arikamedu (the Roman station), aureus/denarius (the Roman coins of the hoards). For the exam, the Roman-trade package is Periplus 1st century CE - Muziris pepper - Barygaza - Arikamedu (Wheeler 1945) - coin hoards. It links the Sangam landscape of this article to the Mediterranean world, and it is the maritime counterpart to the Banjaras' overland caravans.

Key Terms

• Vitasta: Vitasta is the Rig Vedic name of the Jhelum river, called Hydaspes by the Greeks, on whose banks Alexander defeated Porus in 326 BCE.
• Asikni: Asikni is the Rig Vedic name of the Chenab river; the name means the dark-coloured one.
• Parushni: Parushni is the Rig Vedic name of the Ravi river, on whose banks the Battle of the Ten Kings was fought and won by Sudas of the Bharatas.
• Vipasha: Vipasha is the Rig Vedic name of the Beas river, the eastern limit of Alexander's advance, where his army mutinied.
• Shatudri: Shatudri is the Rig Vedic name of the Sutlej river, described as the river of a hundred channels.
• Nadisukta: The Nadisukta is Rig Veda hymn 10.75, which lists the rivers of the Sapta Sindhu in order and is the source of the ancient river names.
• Sapta Sindhu: Sapta Sindhu is the Rig Vedic land of the seven rivers, the Punjab and its western extensions, the core geography of the early Vedic people.
• Halbi: Halbi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by tribal communities of Chhattisgarh's Bastar region, shaped by contact with Odia, Marathi and Chhattisgarhi.
• Ho: Ho is an Austroasiatic language of the Munda branch, spoken by the Ho tribe of Jharkhand's Kolhan region.
• Kui: Kui is a Dravidian language spoken by the Kondh (Kandha) tribe of Odisha's highlands.
• Munda: Munda is the branch of the Austroasiatic language family that includes Ho, Mundari and Santali, among the oldest speech communities of India.
• Eripatti: Eripatti is land donated by individuals in the Tamil country whose revenue was set apart for the maintenance of the village tank; eri is Tamil for tank.
• Taniyur: A taniyur is a large village of the Chola period administered as a single unit, sometimes created out of larger brahmadeya areas.
• Ghatika: A ghatika is a college attached to a temple and a centre of higher learning in early medieval South India, the most famous standing at Kanchipuram.
• Brahmadeya: Brahmadeya is tax-free land or a village granted to Brahmins, the classic religious land grant of early medieval India.
• Devadana: Devadana, also called tirunamattukkani, is land gifted to a temple in the Chola revenue vocabulary.
• Banjara: The Banjaras, also called Lambani or Lambada, are the historically nomadic caravan-trading community whose tandas moved salt and grain across India; they were stigmatised under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and denotified in 1952.
• Tanda: A tanda is the large mobile caravan camp of the Banjaras, at once a trading expedition and a moving settlement.
• Criminal Tribes Act: The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 is the colonial law that notified entire communities, including the Banjaras, as criminal by birth; it was repealed after independence and the communities were denotified in 1952.