A day on which no meat is served is called a banyan day, a term first used by British sailors in the mid eighteenth century to refer to those days of the week when, to conserve food supplies, they were fed only bread and gruel. Banyan days take their name from an Indian class called the Banians, whose religion teaches them to esteem all life and therefore to abstain from eating meat. For centuries, under India’s system of castes, Banians could work only as merchants, and in fact the ultimate source of their name—vaniyo—is the Gujarati word for merchant caste, Gujarati being a language spoken in western India. Because many Banians moved to Arabic ports to conduct their trade, vaniyo was adopted by their Arabic counterparts, who modified the Gujarati word to banian. Banian was then adopted by Portuguese traders, who introduced the name of the caste to English at the end of the sixteenth century.