ABSTRACT
India evokes the picture of a land of peasant villages. Most of its historians have emphasized the sedentary characteristics of Indian civilization and, encouraged by a bias in the source material, gave little attention to the role of pastoral nomads. The study of pastoral nomads in the Indian subcontinent is, therefore, still in its infancy. This article can do little more than point at a few basic conclusions that historical research on pastoral nomads has thus far produced.1 It consists of two parts. The first deals with the indigenous nomads of the Indian subcontinent. The second with the impact of the Turko-Mongol nomads which, over the centuries, entered it from the outside.
