The Sikligars are a community of metalworkers who, by their own tradition, made and repaired weapons for Guru Gobind Singh Ji and took amrit. Their name is from saiqal, polishing.
The Vanjara or Banjara Sikhs are descended from the carrying communities who moved goods for the Guru's establishment and later for the misls. Lakhi Shah Vanjara, who burned his own house over the body of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji at Delhi in 1675, was one.
Both communities moved south with the Guru's journey to Nanded and afterward, and their descendants are scattered across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
They are Sikh, keep the kesh, and are among the poorest communities in India, often without land, without documents and living on the edges of towns doing metalwork or scrap.
They speak local languages and their Punjabi has largely gone.
There are estimated to be several lakh of them and they receive almost nothing from the institutions of a religion that is comparatively wealthy.
The trade is what the name says. A Sikligar family in a town in Maharashtra makes knives, grinds tools, repairs vessels and works scrap, with the forge set up on a pavement or at the side of a road. It is the same work the community did for the Khalsa establishment, done for a different market and at the bottom of it.
Their gurdwaras are small and self built and their maryada is their own, carried for three centuries without a written text and without contact with Amritsar. When Punjabi Sikh bodies have gone to them, they have mostly gone to correct the practice rather than to ask what it had preserved.
They are Sikhs by faith and are classified in various states under Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories. Almost no Punjabi institution has any contact with them.