Dhangar
Shepherd caste in India / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the pastoral community in Maharashtra and Goa. For the similarly-named tribe and language found in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Chhattisgarh - Dhangad (tribe) and Dhangar (Kurukh language dialect), see Dhangar (disambiguation). For the town in Sagar district, India, see Dhangar, Madhya Pradesh.
The Dhangars are caste of people found in the Indian states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa, Madhya Pradesh . They are referred to as dhangar in southern Maharashtra, Goa and northern Karnataka, Golla in Andhra Pradesh and Kuruba in Karnataka[1][2] and Gavli Dhangars in northern Maharashtra (Khandesh region).[3][4][5][6] Some Gavlis live in forested hill tracts of India's Western Ghats.[3] Gavli, also known as Dange or Mhaske, and ahir are a sub-caste of Dhangar. However, there are many distinct Gavli castes in Maharashtra and Dhangar Gavli[broken anchor] is one of them.[7][8][9]