Ahirs

Ahir/Aheer
Religions	Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism
Languages	Hindi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Ahirwati, Haryanvi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kutch, Sindhi, Punjabi
Populated states	India, Pakistan,Nepal, Bangladesh
Subdivisions	Yaduvanshi, Nandvanshi and Gwalvanshi Ahir

Ahir or Aheer is an Indian ethnic group, some members of which identify as being of the Yadav community because they consider the two terms to be synonymous. The Ahirs are variously described as a caste, a clan, a community, a race and a tribe. They ruled over different parts of India and Nepal.

The traditional occupation of Ahirs is cow-herding and agriculture. They are found throughout India but are particularly concentrated in the northern areas. They are known by numerous other names, including Gaoli,Ghosi in the north and Gaddi if converted to Islam. Some in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh are known as Dauwa.

Gaṅga Ram Garg considers the Ahir to be a tribe descended from the ancient Abhira community, whose precise location in India is the subject of various theories based mostly on interpretations of old texts such as the Mahabharata and the writings of Ptolemy. He believes the word Ahir to be the Prakrit form of the Sanskrit word, Abhira, and he notes that the present term in the Bengali and Marathi languages is Abhir.

Garg distinguishes a Brahmin community who use the Abhira name and are found in the present-day states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. That usage, he says, is because that division of Brahmins were priests to the Abhira tribe.

Theories regarding the origins of the ancient Abhira — the putative ancestors of the Ahirs — are varied for the same reasons as are the theories regarding their location; that is, there is a reliance on interpretation of linguistic and factual analysis of old texts that are known to be unreliable and ambiguous.S. D. S. Yadava describes how this situation impacts on theories of origin for the modern Ahir community because

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