Origins of the Romani people: Ian Hancock

[Guest guest]

Copyright

 

Transitions: Changes in Post-Communist Societies, 4(4):36-53 (1998)

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CONTROL OF IDENTITY

"The Gypsies' ancestors began leaving northwest India probably about

the seventh century AD. They are characterized as robbers,

murderers, hangmen and entertainers. These professions were

prescribed for them by the rules of the Hindu caste system. Thus

they belonged to the so-called `wandering criminal tribes' of India

and were obliged to lead a parasitic way of life. Among the

numerous outcast groups, they occupied the lowest rung on the social

scale(11)."

"But the Romani origins assumed in it are quite wrong, and the time

of the exodus out of India is off by four centuries. His acceptance

of this false history is everywhere reflected in the scorn which

characterizes his writings, and one must wonder whether his

scholarly approach would have been more charitable had he known the

true history of the Romani people."

 

Ian Hancock

 

 

 

 

 

Nine or ten of us were sitting in a semicircle on folding chairs,

beer bottles in hand, glad that it wasn't any one of us who had the

responsibility of keeping the thirty-pound pig turning over the

coals under the blazing Texas sun. That obligation belonged to the

young boys.

 

The conversation was about two movies with Gypsy characters which

had shown in 1996 in cinemas all across America: Thinner, by Stephen

King, and Walt Disney's cartoon version of The Hunchback of Notre

Dame. The responses were varied. One person was angry, and

suggested that legal action should be taken against the hurtful

stereotyping, and wanted to know whether they'd dare make such films

about any other minority population. Someone else said it wasn't

worth worrying about because the characters depicted were nothing at

all like real Gypsies. Someone else said he enjoyed both films

simply as entertainment and didn't make a connection with any

experience in his own life. Overall, the older men were less upset

by the films than the younger men were. Their point was that Romani

life was so far removed from that of the gadjé (non-Gypsies) that it

didn't matter what they thought. Several of the younger men

disagreed.

 

The discussion gradually turned to the question of where we had

originally come from, our status as a "legitimate" ethnic minority,

and whether we were really recognized as such by the U.S.

 

government. And we talked about Romanies(1) as a world population,

and about numbers. One estimate of forty million was proposed,

which pleased everybody, but when it came to what the total was for

America, the generally acknowledged figure of about one million was

challenged on the grounds that not everybody really qualified,

because a good many of those people called Gypsies were not actually

Romanies but Bayash, a cover-term for various non-Vlax(2) American

Romani populations including the Romanichals(3), the Bashalde(4) and

the Romungre(5), besides the actual Bayash themselves(6).

 

The talk at that slava(7) in the May of 1997 highlighed some

anomalies: first, that there was no single, acceptable designation

which served to include all populations who define themselves as

Romani except a foreign -- and for some people a pejorative --

one, "Gypsy," secondly, that while all Romanies were Gypsies, not

all Gypsies were Romanies, and thirdly that when it came to

estimating how many of us there were globally, those considerations

didn't matter if it made us appear to be a more numerous. For me, a

fourth presented itself: the great dissimilarity between the "small-

g-gypsy" of Hollywood, and actual Romani people, and what the

repercussions of this were in terms of perceptions of identity.

 

When it comes to the question of "what is a Gypsy," the Romani

understanding is as vague as that of the non-Romanies. And because

unity and cooperation outwardly, i.e. with the larger society,

cannot possibly become a reality until it has been achieved

inwardly, i.e. among ourselves, this fact must be resolved both

outwardly and inwardly before we can move ahead. Given that

populations defined as "Gypsies" exist in their millions throughout

central and eastern Europe especially, and given that everywhere

their relationship with the surrounding societies is one either of

conflict or else of malign neglect, the ingredients are already

there for a crisis of major proportions -- another porrajmos(8)—to

take place.

 

 

 

Reasons for the Existing Situation

 

 

 

 

When journalists writing a Gypsy-related story for their newspaper

or magazine telephone me for background information, I routinely fax

them a reading list, and ask them to call me again once they've made

use of it and have specific questions to ask. I make the point

repeatedly that they cannot hope to understand the contemporary

situation of Romanies unless they see it as the present-day end of a

continuum reaching back into history, and the reading list I send

them emphasizes this. For unless the unique problems of the

Romanies are understood in this context, no attempt to analyse or

understand those problems will ever be successful.

 

 

 

Antigypsyism and the Popular Image of the Gypsy

 

 

 

Elsewhere(9) I attempted to analyse the reasons for the prejudice

which exists today against Romanies, and listed seven: (1) the

association of Romanies with the Islamic takeover of parts of the

Christian world, (2) colour-prejudice, specifically the association

of darkness with sin, (3) the exclusionary nature of Romani culture,

which does not encourage intimacy with non-Romanies and which as a

result creates suspicion on the part of those excluded, (4) fortune

telling, which inspired fear but which had to be relied upon as a

means of livelihood in response to legislation curtailing Romani

movement and choice of occupation, (5) the unchallenged function of

the "gypsies" as a population upon which mainstream notions of

immorality and lawlessness can be projected and which thereby serve

to define that mainstream's own boundaries, (6) the fact that

Romanies have no territorial, military, political or economic

strength and are therefore easily targetable as scapegoats because

they cannot retaliate, and (7) the fact that the "gypsy" persona has

an--again unchallenged--ongoing function as representing a simpler,

freer time, a representation which becomes more and more attractive

in an increasingly complex and regimented world.

 

 

 

Various of these factors have combined over the centuries and in

different places to become part of the fabric of the Western world

view. People who never met a Gypsy in their lives are nevertheless

able to provide a fairly detailed picture of how they think Gypsies

look and how they live. Their mental image, partly negative and

partly romantic but mostly inaccurate, is the result of the response

to a Romani identity which has become institutionalized in the

Western tradition to the extent that it has become part of its

cultural heritage; and the racism directed at Romani populations is

intrinsically a part of that heritage, and so is not recognized for

what it is. Just as no one would seriously question the fear

children have of goblins, or argue for trolls' rights, the fear of

Gypsies likewise goes unremarked. Although trolls and goblins are

not real and Gypsies are, and although trolls and goblins are never

encountered but the six million or so Romanies throughout eastern

Europe are highly visible, still it is the Gypsy Image of storybook

and film, and not the real population, that people think

of.

 

This reidentification of Gypsies as "images" in the cultural fabric

underlies the rationalization by a Greek Orthodox priest after he

criticized the United States for its racial intolerance. When the

person talking to him(10) pointed out that Greece was similarly

bigoted towards its Romani minority, the priest replied that

prejudice towards Romanies in Greece didn't count; it was a

different thing entirely because they were only Gypsies. This kind

of shocking moral insensitivity on the part of a representative of

the Church may surprise us, but it is nothing new. The Eastern

Rite, the Catholic and the Protestant churches legislated against

Romanies for centuries; the priest was merely reiterating an

attitude rooted in tradition.

 

Once ideas become institutionalized, they may never be challenged,

and misinformation can easily become the established "conventional

wisdom." This is particularly true in the case of Romanies, about

whom the most bizarre things have been written and presented as

fact. These range from such wild statements as those claiming that

Gypsies originated on the Moon (or in Atlantis), that Gypsies have

an intrinsic horror of water and washing, or that Gypsies have no

native concept of obligation or danger or ownership, to such self-

serving ones as those which have maintained that Gypsies don't feel

pain, or that they enjoyed slavery, or that they have no interest in

organization, education or leadership. The most-often cited

Hungarian "expert" on our people for many years has been József

Vekerdi, whose article on "the Gypsy problem" in his country is

based wholly on this "conventional wisdom;" it begins

 

 

 

 

 

The Gypsies' ancestors began leaving northwest India probably about

the seventh century AD. They are characterized as robbers,

murderers, hangmen and entertainers. These professions were

prescribed for them by the rules of the Hindu caste system. Thus

they belonged to the so-called `wandering criminal tribes' of India

and were obliged to lead a parasitic way of life. Among the

numerous outcast groups, they occupied the lowest rung on the social

scale(11).

 

 

 

But the Romani origins assumed in it are quite wrong, and the time

of the exodus out of India is off by four centuries. His acceptance

of this false history is everywhere reflected in the scorn which

characterizes his writings, and one must wonder whether his

scholarly approach would have been more charitable had he known the

true history of the Romani people. Racism is everywhere, but when

it is expressed in the academic domain, to which policy-makers turn

for their information, it acquires tacit institutional acceptance.

 

Despite the usually quite evident physical differences

distinguishing the Romani minority from the surrounding population--

most obviously physiognomy, habitat and dress—and the less obvious

but hardly hidden factors of language and culture, it has generally

been the case that administrations have classified Romanies in terms

of social behaviour rather than by ethnic or racial

distinctiveness. This is again the result of attitudes becoming

ingrained before notions of "race" began to take shape in the 19th

century. The glaring exception to this was during the Nazi era,

when it was specifically racial considerations which provided the

rationale for attempted genocidal obliteration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hiding Identity

 

 

 

 

 

One man taking part in the conversation at the slava claimed that

the reason he was not upset by the two films was that he believed

nobody would associate their content with him because nobody (in the

non-Gypsy world) knew that he was a Gypsy. In fact he found it

amusing that the gadjé were so excessively ignorant of true Romani

identity, a state of affairs he was actually helping to maintain by

intentionally hiding his identity as a Rrom. I know of very few

Romanies who weren't warned as children to keep their ethnicity to

themselves outside of the community. I was reminded repeatedly at

home that telling gadjé what I was wouldn't help me and would almost

certainly have the opposite effect. I was told the same thing by my

dissertation supervisor, Dr. David Dalby at London University, and

by Professor Edgar Polomé who took me under his wing when I was a

new faculty member at the University of Texas many years ago. I

mention their names certainly not to be vindictive, for both were

very good to me and I gratefully acknowledge that, but I do so to

emphasize that I have heard this all my life, even from people who

had no idea how painful and confusing a message was being sent, and

who thought in all sincerity that they were offering good advice.

That hurt doesn't diminish with adulthood, but the anger it

engenders does begin to assert itself. On my mentors' parts, their

own negative stereotypes and their desire to help my career were the

motivating factors; but on the part of my own family, and of my

friend who said (in effect) that he didn't care about antigypsyism

because he could pretend to the outside world that he wasn't a

Gypsy, we must be dealing with an institutionalized response to a

racism so deeply rooted that it prevents people from acknowledging

their own ethnicity for fear of the consequences.

 

His response was atypical in one respect. In his case, he didn't

care about antigypsyism because he could hide his ethnicity. In

most cases, however, Romanies care very much about antigypsyism

while having to hide their identity. I have another friend, a

successful businessman, who asks for all Romnet(12) transmissions to

be forwarded to him but who is quite unwilling to be d on

Romnet himself or to participate, for fear that his identity as a

Rrom be revealed in some way. This man is a tireless collector of

anti-Gypsy press cuttings, and lives with a frustration which has no

outlet.

 

 

 

 

 

Ownership of Identity

 

 

 

For a very long time, Gypsy identity has been in the hands of the

non-Gypsy specialist, especially politicians and academics, whose

ideas about who and what we are have given sustenance to the Gypsy

Image. The words of a Native American activist, speaking about

academics in particular, apply equally well to the Gypsy

case:

 

 

 

They invented culture. They need culture so they can get PhD's and

gain power in universities. And people who have that kind of power

control culture, because they control the definitions, the symbols

and the masks they've constructed about culture(13).

 

 

 

Folklorists and anthropologists select those aspects of their

subjects which appeal to them, while ignoring others, for a number

of reasons, creating a new, more easily manageable identity--less

threatening, or else simply one more attractive or "exotic". The

extent to which this selectiveness can place the expert in the

position of bystander is well illustrated in a study by Lepselter

(14); in an analysis of the topics covered during a ten-year period

embracing the Holocaust (1937 to 1947) in The Journal of the Gypsy

Lore Society, the leading publication devoted to Romani Studies, she

found that the contributions dealt with, inter alia, "Welsh and New

York Gypsy life, Hungarian Gypsy fiddlers, linguistic work on the

Spanish Gypsy dialect and Polish Romani vocabulary." She goes on to

ask

 

 

 

Why would professional Gypsiologists [maintain . . . ] an

essentially apolitical journal at such a crucial moment in the lives

of their subjects?. . . Scholars of Romani culture did not, or could

not, vigorously protest the fate of those they studied and

befriended. They did not engage in political critique which might

have led to action(15).

 

 

 

A much more recent example of the real Gypsy experience taking

second place to what interests the gypsiologist is found in a

statement by Claus Schreiner, who would seem almost to welcome anti-

Romani racism if it meant that the Gypsy music he loved so much

would be enriched as a consequence:

 

 

 

.. . . lately a new wave of Anti-Gitanismo has reportedly again

raised its head in Andalusia. If so, it might prove beneficial for

gypsy-Andalusian flamenco, for pressure creates counterpressure

which could well lead to a revitalization of flamenco from within

(16).

 

 

 

It has always been the case that non-Gypsy specialists have

attempted to control and define Romani identity. When Gypsy

behaviour has asserted itself in ways contrary to the specialists'

expectations, it has been seen as a shortcoming on the part of the

Gypsy. Thus Paspati could say that "works published in Europe,

several of them even by authors who wrote down what the Gypsies

dictated to them, are often inaccurate because of the stupid

ignorance of the Gypsies"(17). Doris Duncan, writing about the

difficulties of analysing the Romani verbal system, attributed this

to the fact that the "major problem is that no Gypsy really knows

what a verb is"(18). Ivanow was equally frustrated by his Gypsy

informants, and also blamed his own linguistic shortcomings upon

them: "It is very hard indeed to obtain from the average Gypsy any

adequate linguistic material; their stupidity is sometimes beyond

all description"(19). A Czechoslovakian spokesman defended his

government's programme of taking Romani children from their families

and placing them in foster homes, by saying that it was "the

Gypsies' fault, for refusing to let their children be civilized"(20).

 

 

 

This situation has become so well entrenched because until recently

it has never been challenged. Because of a history which has

excluded Romanies from access to the educational skills necessary to

combat prejudice, and because of a culture which placed restrictions

on functioning too intimately in the mainstream, the Gypsy Image has

taken on a life of its own, and real Romani populations have been

administrated and studied through the filter of that image. There

is another, more disturbing political aspect to the created

identity, reflected in the increase in post-Communist Europe in the

presentation of the Gypsy as illiterate, inarticulate buffoon. Such

characters--played by non-Gypsies--appear in variety shows on

television in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and elsewhere and, like

the "black and white minstrels" of 19th century America, help

maintain a status quo in which Romanies are figures of fun, and

therefore non-threatening. Martin Croghan has written about this

technique in an article about the artificial "stage Irish" dialect

of the British music halls, which he shows to have been

intentionally created by those in power who have used it as an

indicator of ignorance and submission on the part of its speakers as

a political weapon to sustain the popular conception of the Irish as

a deviant population(21).

 

It has only been in the past few decades that Romanies have been in

a position to resist the manipulation of identity on the part of

government agencies. Up until then, in the face of such vigorous

non-response, such agencies, as well as journalists and writers of

fiction, have been able to continue with their legislating and

romanticizing and demonizing entirely unhindered. While Romanies

are now beginning to speak out against antigypsyism, we have a long

way to go before our voice is taken seriously. When the publishers

of a book of children's verse(22) was asked to remove a poem

called "The Gypsies are coming," with its accompanying illustration

of a hag-like Gypsy woman with hooked nose, earrings and scarf

carrying a sackful of stolen children over her shoulder, the only

concession was that subsequent editions changed the word "Gypsies"

to "Googies." The illustration remains. When a British comic(23)

was asked to remove a cartoon strip entitled "The thieving Gypsy

bastards" it replaced it with the sarcastic "The nice honest

Gypsies," keeping the offensive cartoon characters. Manufacturers

of the "Gypsy Witch" card game(24) refused to rename it on the

grounds that it was one of their best selling items; they weren't

worried about any possible legal action. The producers of the two

films mentioned earlier didn't even bother to respond to a single

request for fairness and accuracy from Romani organizations, at

least six of which wrote to them while they were still in

production.

 

 

 

In order for things to change, the Gypsy Image must be

deconstructed, and a more accurate one put in its place--in the

bureaucratic structures as well as in the textbooks. For all his

peculiar observations about humanity(25), H.G. Wells was right when

he said that "human history becomes more and more a race between

education and catastrophe."

 

 

 

Resolution

 

 

 

Education, both of Romanies and of gadjé, is clearly the key to

avoiding another catastrophe involving our people, and the means of

attaining some measure of understanding, if not respect, for

Romanies and Romani history and culture. But identifying the

solution goes only a short way to resolving it.

 

Before educational programmes can be put in place, the facts of

Romani history must be understood and the notion of identity made

acceptable to both Romani and non-Romani populations. Given the

great number of differing interpretations of these very basic

considerations, reaching a consensus will not be easily achieved.

And assuming that such a consensus were achieved, bringing about its

formal implementation will be attended by a whole new set of

problems, not least of which involving considerations of funding.

 

 

 

History

 

 

 

 

 

The facts of the two major events in European Romani history--the

five and a half centuries of slavery(26) and the Holocaust(27)--are

becoming better known and documented all the time. But the details

of early Romani history, who our ancestors were and where they came

from, are not so well known. For more than a century and a half,

the same stories have been repeated tirelessly and uncritically in

each new publication, in particular that the first Gypsies were a

group of ten thousand musicians given as a gift by the Maharajah of

India to his son-in-law the Shah of Persia in AD 439. In time, this

story goes, the people moved away, some remaining in the Middle

East, some going into Armenia, and some continuing on into Europe,

arriving there in the 13th or 14th century. As early as 1844 the

name Rrom was associated with the Indian word Dom, and this was

thought to provide a further clue to Gypsy identity, because the Dom

are a population of menials and entertainers in contemporary India,

and the similarity in social status was easily assumed. Kenrick,

however, has shown this to have been a misinterpretation of the word

(28).

 

In recent years, a small group of scholars(29) has been

investigating Romani history from a more scientific perspective,

and the first new findings in the field since the 1920s are being

made. Their technique has been to take the various historical and

geographical possibilities and to match them with evidence found in

the Romani language itself. The picture which is emerging indicates

that the ancestors of the Romanies were a composite population from

the very beginning, who were deliberately assembled into a military

force to resist the spread of Islam into India.

 

 

 

This is how we arrive at these conclusions. Two of the Romani words

for "non-Gypsy" are gadjo, which comes from an earlier form gajjha,

meaning "civilian, non-military," and das, which in India

means "prisoner of war, captive, slave." Words in the Romani

vocabulary such

as "sword,spear,battlecry,horse,fight,gaiters,"

(xanrro, bust, chingar, khuro, kuriben, patava) are Indian, and were

not acquired later from other languages. Words for metalworking and

agriculture, on the other hand, are all foreign adoptions. Romani

has linguistic features in its grammar, vocabulary and sounds which

point to an exodus at the beginning of the early Middle Indian

period, not during the Old Indian period, and so a movement out of

India before ca. AD 1000 could not have taken place. This means

that the story about the fifth-century musicians must apply to quite

a different Indian migration, not the migration of the ancestors of

the Romanies. We can also determine the route by looking at the

sources of the Romani vocabulary. While it is basically Indic,

there has been a substantial acquisition of Dardic words, especially

from a language called Phalura, as well as a small number apparently

from Burushaski, a non-Indic, non-Dardic language spoken only in a

small area of the Hindu Kush. Because Dardic and Burushaski words

exist in Romani, the migration out of India could only have been

through the areas in which they were spoken.

 

We then have to examine the map to see what possible routes led from

here through the mountains to the West. The passes far enough north

to match the linguistic factors are at Baroghil and Shandur; from

here, routes lead down to the Silk Road which runs westwards south

of the Caspian Sea. There are two words in Romani for "silk,"

phanrr and keñ, again both of them native Indian terms. The fact

that there is practically no influence on Romani from the Turkic

languages or from Arabic also helps us to determine the route taken,

which was along the western shore of the Caspian, because of the

Iranian languages represented, and across the southern Caucasus,

because of the Armenian, Georgian and Ossete words in Romani, and

through the Byzantine Empire--probably along the northern Turkish

coast--where Greek items began to be acquired, into Europe. We can

also pinpoint the time of departure from India, because while there

were seventeen Muslim raids between AD 1001 and AD 1027, only two of

them took place in the area which matches the linguistic evidence:

in 1013 and again in 1015 at Lohkot, in Kashmir. The existence of a

Mongol word (mangin "treasure") in Romani places the migration

through the eastern Byzantine Empire at no earlier than AD 1250,

which is when the Golden Horde first became a presence there(30).

 

 

 

Identity

 

 

 

 

 

Lepselter concluded from her analysis of mid-20th-century

gypsilorism that the Gypsies are both "the `heart' of Europe and

radically `other' to it"(31). The debate this anomaly naturally

provokes has centred around the "real" identity of the Romani

people, both in terms of genetic descent and in terms of our status

as "Europeans." The most succinct statement describing this two-

sided identity is found in a recent Project on Ethnic Relations

report:

 

 

 

Another serious problem is raised by the concept of the Romani

diaspora itself. It goes beyond the borderlines of Europe, since

Romani communities are found in the Middle East, Central Asia, both

Americas, and Australia. Thus, why do the Roma have to be

recognized as a "European" or even a "truly European" minority (as

in the Brussels Declaration of 1966)? Some Romani intellectuals and

leaders recall the Roma's Indian origin and heritage as a basis for

their political status and identity, while others eagerly affirm

their European roots and heritage and consider their Indian past as

irrelevant to the current Romani causes and claims(32).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Indian Origin

 

 

 

Although the Indian origin of the Romani people is beyond dispute,

not only on the basis of linguistic but also of cultural and

serological evidence, this remains largely the concern of the

academic. While early Romani populations on their arrival in Europe

were able to say that they had come from India, this fact has become

lost in time, and is still generally not known to the vast majority

of Romanies, many of whom have internalized instead the notion of an

origin in Egypt. And those who learn about the Indian connection

and put it to the test by comparing their Romani with the Hindi,

Sindhi or Panjabi of the ubiquitous Indian convenience-store

managers in the United States find this interesting, but little

else. From Hungary, Michael Stewart reported the same response:

 

 

 

.. . . the fact is most nonintellectual Rom do not seem to care where

their ancestors came from. In all the time I have spent in

Harangos, I have never once heard a spontaneous conversation about

the geographical or historical roots of their own people(33).

 

 

 

A recent observation by a Vlax Rrom is more explicit:

 

 

 

 

 

Just suppose the entire Gypsy population of the world had returned

to an already overpopulated India. India can hardly handle the

education and health issues of its own population. Plus the fact of

the matter is we Gypsies consider even Indians gujze (non-Gypsies).

Even the Gypsies of India themselves who are called Banjarra call

all other Indians gujze [gadjé].

 

Though Gypsies come from India there is a distinct difference

between Hindus and Gypsies. For example, there is the Kama Sutra,

which is the book of lovemaking and which is considered by Hindus to

be holy. While Gypsies all over the world consider the art of

lovemaking as taboo, [and] sexuality is kept secret. So even if you

were to place all Gypsies in India, it would be no different from

placing them in Germany. They would still be considered outsiders

by the Indians and the Gypsies would feel no differently(34).

 

 

 

 

 

For very particular reasons, I have been among the most vocal in

insisting that Romanies are a composite people who originated in

Asia. I take the position of the sociolinguist, who sees language

as the vehicle of culture, and we speak a language and maintain a

culture whose core of direct retention is directly traceable to

India. I believe that the acknowledgement of this position is

essential, because the alternative is to create a fictitious history

and to have, again, our identity in the hands of non-Romani policy-

makers and scholars. They are defensible scientifically because

they are supported by current academic research, and they are

defensible practically because Madame Indira Gandhi openly

acknowledged Romanies as an Indian population outside of India and

it was the Indian government which was instrumental in helping our

people achieve representation in the United Nations, and in creating

our First World Romani Congress, and which is now supporting our

claims for return of the gold and other possessions taken from

Romani Holocaust victims and currently on deposit in Swiss banks.

Without the backing of such a national government, the Romani voice

would have been carried away by the wind, and these things would

probably not even have happened. Those who minimize the Indian

connection are not linguists or historians, although they frequently

feel entirely qualified to make linguistic and historiographical

pronouncements(35). Sandland(36) says that "notwithstanding the best

attempts of the so-called Gypsyologists or gypsy lorists, however,

the Indian connection has only been posited linguistically and it

remains, to say the least, vague"--ignoring the serological and

cultural evidence, and basing his position solely on a second-hand

acquaintance with the Traveller population in Britain. While such

scholars dismiss the arguments, they offer no evidence to support

their dismissal. The most elementary cultural/linguistic evidence,

such as the fact that the Romani word for "cross" (trushul)

originally meant "Shiva's trident," is left unaddressed. It is hard

to reconcile facts such as these with the "indigenous origin"

argument that Romani language and culture were passed like a relay-

runner's baton from population to population along trade routes,

rather than being brought with one migrating people.

 

 

 

The European Origin

 

 

 

The idea that Romanies are really local people who have

intentionally darkened their skin and who speak a deliberately-

concocted secret jargon is not a new one; it goes back at least to

Renaissance times. In 1973, Werner Cohn maintained that "Gypsies

are thoroughly European . . . a majority of their ancestors probably

came from old European stock"(37). Judith Okely(38) and Wim Willems

(39) are among the most recently vocal champions of this view, both

of them maintaining that Gypsies are "a motley rabble of diverse

origin," an indigenous western population, which has had its

identity "invented" for it over time by writers and policy-makers.

In a more recent publication, Okely has challenged the Indian origin

directly:

 

 

 

By the nineteenth century, etymologists and scholars had begun to

document Romany or `Gypsy' dialects and `languages'. Close

connections were made to a pre AD 1000 Sanskrit. These findings

were then combined with diffusionist theories of culture. . . all

similarities among such groups were explained by migration from

India, the Aryan cradle. It suited the Indianists to privilege a

linear migratory explanation for some linguistic elements, but not

for the European vocabularies and languages found among Gypsies(40).

 

 

 

A point made in an earlier paper by the same writer, was that it

was "no coincidence that their visibility emerged with the collapse

of feudalism, when a multiplicity of persons were thrown into the

marketplace"(41). It should be emphasized that neither Willems nor

Okely denies an ethnic identity (or series of identities) for

Gypsies; the argument is simply that Romani origins are ultimately

mixed and mainly European, and that the "Rrom" is a product of

nineteenth-century European orientalism and ideas of human group

classification. The linguist Paul Wexler, citing Okely in support

of his own theory, maintains that

 

 

 

Most of the members of each Romani community are of indigenous

origin . . . Romani is not of Indic origin and did not acquire its

Asian component by direct contact with, or by inheritance from,

Indic languages(42).

 

 

 

Also much persuaded by Judith Okely's arguments is Ralph Sandland,

who also perceives some kind of victory in minimizing or disproving

an Indian connection:

 

 

 

The Gypsiologists have not been able to identify the precise

locality within India from which the gypsies (sic) began their

travels, nor whether there was one or more migration . . . Okely has

argued more persuasively [that] the evidence is strong that the

appearance of gypsies (sic) is linked to the breakdown of the feudal

social structure and the consequent displacement of dispossessed

peasants, and that contemporary gypsies (sic) in Britain are as

likely or unlikely to to have indigenous origins as members of the

sedentary population(43)

 

 

 

Compromise

 

 

 

 

 

The question of their Romani identity may keep some individuals

anguishing privately, and for all Romanies it is an ever-present

awareness because the outside world provides a constant reminder

that the barriers are in place; but for the great majority, it is an

awareness which is overridden by the more pragmatic concerns of

work, shelter, safety and providing for the family. For the average

Rrom, whether we are European or Asian or neither or both is not a

matter of much consequence; just being different brings trouble

enough. For the leaders, however, it must be. The future of the

Romani population is in the hands of those Romani intellectuals who

interact with the representatives of national governments, and with

human rights and educational agencies, and in whose power it is to

influence the decision makers. But these individuals too face a

double task, for it can be as difficult for them to reach the vast

majority of ordinary Romanies as it is to reach the establishment.

 

For all that the growing academic trend represented by Okely,

Willems, Wexler, Sandland and to some extent Mayall is attempting to

dismiss the genetic distinctiveness of the Romani populations, it

has been precisely because of it that Hitler's intent to eradicate

us as a people was put into effect. The recently-released news that

Sweden had been selecting individuals for compulsory sterilization

on the grounds of "undesirable racial characteristics . . .

recognizable Gypsy features"(44), and the existence of similar

programs in Switzerland, Denmark, Slovakia and elsewhere also

testify to the dangers of being of Romani descent in the real world,

despite what these academics want to believe.

 

 

 

Approaches

 

 

 

There are three approaches to the formalizing of a consensus on

Romani identity: treating us either as Europeans, or else as Asians,

or as both. Each is attended by arguments, for and against. The

case for being considered European, for some at least, rests upon

the fact that over the centuries our genetic makeup has acquired a

generous infusion of European "blood," for some Romani populations

clearly far outweighing the original gene pool. Secondly, we might

be considered European because of our widespread geographical

dispersion as a truly transnational people. But as Mirga and

Gheorghe have pointed out(45), we are a global, not just a European,

population. Are the Romanies in Peru also "true Europeans"?

 

 

 

One's identity has to be evaluated in terms not only of what one

perceives oneself to be, but also by whether members of the

population that one sees oneself as identifying with also share that

perception. And it depends, furthermore, upon the attitudes of the

out-group, which is the third dimension; in other words, one might

be attempting to become part of a population which has no intention

of letting one in. On page 26 are the results of a 1993 poll which

asked both the Romani and non-Romani residents in Kremnica,

Slovakia, whether Romanies "should live together with Slovaks and

have the same living conditions as Slovaks have." One hundred

percent of the Romanies said "yes." Ninety one percent of the

Slovaks said "no." In the late 1970s, Guyana--an English-Creole-

speaking South American country with an almost entirely African and

Asian population--mounted a national campaign to reidentify itself

as a Latin American nation. It did this because of its location,

and for reasons of regional trade. The rest of Latin America,

however, did not see Guyana as being in any way a part of their

cultural and linguistic world, and the attempt withered and died.

 

I spent a couple of hours in a local bookshop going through several

works with such titles as An Encyclopedia of Western Culture, A

History of Europe, A Compendium of European History, A History of

the Western World, &c., but no Romanies graced their pages. For

whoever wrote them, we were not considered to be part of European

history or culture. Interestingly, H.G. Wells' The Outline of

History (1920) was the only work of this kind I found, which devoted

any space at all to our existence. We can't be Europeans unless

Europeans want us to be as well, and the very clear message is that

they don't, as the title of a recent special Romani issue of

Transitions reflects ("Still Knocking on Europe's Closed Doors").

 

 

 

I have lived in the United States long enough to see that despite

the best intentions of representatives of the African American

population to bring the Black minority into the mainstream,

prejudice is still an everyday fact of life and African Americans

remain the "other." The same is true of the Aboriginal experience

in Australia.

 

Although the collapse of Communism and the spread of Western ideas

has introduced racist rhetoric from the West, and while it is

beginning to find expression in eastern Europe, where journalists

are increasingly using the terms "black" and "white" to distinguish

Romani and non-Romani populations, this distinction has always been

a part of the Romani world view. Another term for "non-Gypsy" is

goró, which in India means "light-skinned," while a Romani self-

ascriptive label found in northern and western Europe is Kaló, which

means "black." One Romani term for eastern Europe, where the

highest concentration of Romani lives, is Kali Oropa, i.e. Black

Europe, while western Europe is Parni ("white") Oropa. Traditional

Romanichals in America, British Gypsies who are largely

indistinguishable from the general Anglo population, nevertheless

talk about "white people" in contrast to themselves. These are

boundary-maintaining labels which persist in culture while no longer

having any manifestation physically(46).

 

The arguments for an Indian origin have already been made. In these

times when Europe is divided into nation states, and national

minorities in other countries have governments to speak in their

defence, then being identified with an actual homeland brings

legitimacy and a measure of security. Furthermore, it is the Indian

factors, linguistic, genetic and cultural that different Romani

populations share; it is the more recently acquired non-Indian

factors which divide us. If I want to speak in Romani to a speaker

of a dialect different from my own, it is the European words we must

each avoid, not the Indian ones.

 

 

 

But are Romanies in fact "still" Indians? From the very beginning,

the population has been a composite one, and acknowledging this fact

constitutes a third approach. In any case, the label is a

geographical, not an ethnic one, since evidence points to Dravidian,

Scythian and even East African (Siddhi) input into the early mix of

militia and camp followers. Words do not travel independently of

people; they have no lives of their own, and we must accept that,

during the prolonged stay in Persia, long enough for over a hundred

Persian words to come into Romani, social intercourse insured that

the gene pool was further added to; likewise in the Byzantine

Empire, when over two hundred Greek words were absorbed into

Romani. In Europe the migration, by this time a conglomerate ethnic

population whose diverse speech had crystallized into one language,

encountered other mobile populations and in some cases joined and

intermarried with them. Sometimes the Romani cultural and

linguistic presence was sufficient that the newly-encountered

populations were absorbed and became Romanies in subsequent

generations; sometimes the Romani contribution was not sufficient to

maintain itself, and other, non-Romani populations such as the

Jenisch emerged. During the centuries of slavery in Moldavia and

Wallachia, and elsewhere in Europe under conditions of oppression,

Romani women have given birth to unwanted babies by non-Romani

fathers. Cohn(47) estimates the mean percentage of European "blood"

in the European Romani genetic makeup to be 60%(48). Sandland(49),

basing his argument on Fraser(50), says that

 

 

 

even assuming that Gypsies were a `pure race' on entering Europe,

four marriages for every hundred would have led to a latter-day

population which is 70 per cent non-Gypsy in ancestry; even one in

every hundred would have realized a Gypsy population less than 50

per cent `pure.'

 

 

 

 

 

The rate of out-marriage obviously differs from place to place,

evident in even a cursory comparison of phenotypical features

between the Romani populations in, say, Macedonia from those in,

say, Finland. Sandland's reference to a `pure' race is outmoded and

potentially dangerous, and in any case smacks of a double standard;

the English people are composed of Saxon, Celt, Norman and Viking,

but have nevertheless an extremely strong sense of single and even

superior identity, one which prompted historian Thomas Macaulay to

call the English "the greatest and most highly civilized people that

ever the world saw,"(51), and an editorial in Fraser's Magazine to

declare that "the English people are naturally industrious, they

prefer a life of honest labour to one of idleness. They are a

persevering as well as energetic race. . ."(52). Race is clearly in

the mind. But it is no less real in those minds because of that.

 

The fact of having multiple origins is not unique. It is the very

capacity to absorb and acculturate disparate populations which is

particularly characteristic of the Romanies. The truly remarkable

thing is that it has been possible, despite this kind of

incorporation of outsiders and despite the lack of a national

territory, to maintain a linguistic and cultural cohesiveness which

stretches back for a thousand years. As weak as it may be, it

remains strong enough to identify all Romani groups as being exactly

that--Romani groups.

 

Many of the problems which Romanies are having with non-Romanies are

rooted in the vague and muddled notions of who and what Romanies

are, and what the Romani experience in Europe has been, and what

Romanies have contributed to European culture. Our safety and well-

being do not rest upon proving that we are either Asian or European

in origin; those are issues of human rights and the acceptance of

the fact that wherever we are from, we are a people with a

distinctive language and culture, in that respect no different from

the Germans or the Italians or the Slovaks, and equally deserving of

acknowledgement and respect. One step towards ensuring a safe and

productive future for Romani populations in Europe is to develop

educational programmes for the schools, both Gypsy and non-Gypsy,

where Romani history and culture can be taught and the findings of

current historical and linguistic scholarship made better known.

Legitimization will lead to respect, and in this way the foundation

will be laid for a clearer understanding of Romani identity, and a

more credible image of our people.

 

 

 

The Indian connection has only been posited

linguistically and it remains, to say the least, vague (Sandland,

1996:386).

 

 

 

The Roma are genetically closer to Asians than to

surrounding Europeans. This conclusion can hardly be described as

exciting news; it has taken genetics 70 years and several thousand

blood samples to confirm what has been known to linguists for the

last 200 years (Kalaydjieva, Gresham & Calafell, 1999:13).

 

 

 

"A gennelman come 'ere one day and said as we is all from India,"

one old Gypsy woman told me. "So I says to 'im, "Well, maybe we is,

Surr, but it don't make a mighty difference, now, do it, Surr?"

(Reid, 1964:170).

 

 

 

 

 

In recent years, a body of scholarship has emerged which has sought

to minimize, or even contradict, the Indian origins of the Romani

people(53). While it does not deny them ascription as "real" ethnic

groups, or that for the same reason such groups might deserve

protection from abuses of their human and civil rights, the

consuming argument is that any alleged Indian connection is vague or

even non-existent, that "Gypsies" have in fact crystallized out of

the indigenous European populations, and that their widely-assumed

identity is a fabrication which originated with Heinrich Grellmann

two centuries ago.

 

This is the polemic which challenges what

Lucassen et al. define (in order to challenge) as "the almost

unshakeable conviction that in the end all Gypsies have the same

origin and that up to the present day they can be considered as one

people, scattered throughout the world, not unlike the Jewish

diaspora" (1998:5). Willems has more explicitly summarized this,

also with the purpose of dismissing it, saying that "on grounds of

linguistic correspondences between Romani (the `Gypsy language') and

Hindi (the language of north-eastern [sic] India)," this view holds

that Gypsies

 

 

 

came originally from India, departing from that homeland somewhere

after the ninth century for reasons about which there is still

ongoing speculation. Like the Jews, they subsequently spread over

the globe, arriving in west and central Europe at the turn of the

fifteenth century. There, comparatively unharried, they lived for

decades as nomads, later to be confronted with continuous

stigmatization by government officials as the result of the

inevitable burden to the sedentary population that they came to

represent (Willems, 1997:4).(54)

 

 

 

The Willems-Lucassen position had already been

taken earlier by Werner Cohn (1973:65), who maintained

that "Gypsies are thoroughly European . . . a majority of their

ancestors probably came from old European stock"— although it is

hardly a new idea that "Gypsies" (more often "gypsies") are a

behaviorally-defined segment of European society and one drawn from

it; allusions to this date from the early 1500s.

 

The notion became academic, however, with the

writings of "scholar gypsy" Judith Okely (1977ff.)(55). Examining

the groups in Britain whom she refers to as the Traveller-Gypsies,

she maintained that it was "no coincidence that their visibility

emerged with the collapse of feudalism, when a multiplicity of

persons were thrown into the marketplace" (1984:56). Dismissing the

Indianist position, and at the same time elaborating upon

Okely's "dispossessed peasantry" hypothesis, Sandland says that

 

 

 

Notwithstanding the best attempts of the so-called Gypsyologists or

gypsy lorists, however, the Indian connection has only been posited

linguistically and it remains, to say the least, vague . . . The

Gypsiologists have not been able to identify the precise locality

within India from which the gypsies began their travels, nor whether

there was one or more migration . . . Okely has argued more

persuasively [that] the evidence is strong that the appearance of

gypsies is linked to the breakdown of the feudal social structure

and the consequent displacement of dispossessed peasants, and that

contemporary gypsies in Britain are as likely or unlikely to have

indigenous origins as members of the sedentary population (1996:386-

387).

 

 

 

Judith Okely had in fact already challenged the Indian origin

directly some years earlier:

 

 

 

By the nineteenth century, etymologists and scholars had begun to

document Romany or `Gypsy' dialects and `languages'. Close

connections were made to a pre AD 1000 Sanskrit. These findings

were then combined with diffusionist theories of culture . . .

all similarities among such groups were explained by migration from

India, the Aryan cradle. It suited the Indianists to privilege a

linear migratory explanation for some linguistic elements, but not

for the European vocabularies and languages found among Gypsies

(1977:224-225).

 

 

 

There are some questionable assumptions in this

passage; there is no connection between the specific language one

speaks and one's genetic history—this is 19th century racist thought

(56). And if she is referring to `race' this is equally misguided,

since `Aryan' is not a racial classification, regardless of what

Europeans have made of the term. And if by "linear migratory

explanation" she means line of direct descent, then of course any

Indian items would conform to this definition, while lexical

adoptions from languages spoken outside of India obviously would

not. Rather than "privileging" the Indian words in Romani, it is

precisely from an examination of the non-Indic content of the

language that contemporary research on Romani dialectology is being

moved forward (see e.g. Bakker, 1999). The pioneers of Romani

Studies—Pott, Miklosich, Sampson and others—in fact devoted very

considerable attention to the "European vocabularies" in Romani. One

must wonder whether their work had ever been examined before such a

statement was made.

 

The linguist Paul Wexler, citing Okely in support of his own theory

of the origins of the Romani language, has stated more explicitly

than anyone else so far, that

 

 

 

Most of the members of each Romani community are of indigenous

origin . . . Romani is not of Indic origin and did not acquire

its Asian component by direct contact with, or by inheritance from,

Indic languages (1997:2,16).

 

 

 

His position is that whatever Asian component there is in the Romani

lexicon was passed like a relay-runner's baton from population to

population along the trade routes, rather than being brought with

one migrating people, and that Romani grammar was appropriated from

various sources along the way. Though not a linguist, Okely

questions whether the lexicon of Romani really is traceable to

Sanskrit:

 

 

 

The Sanskrit linguistic link may also have been overconstructed.

For example I would welcome an alternative examination of Sampson's

dictionary The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales (1926). Ambiguities

as to a word's etymology seem to have been ignored always in favour

of a Sanskrit connection. The Indian connection has been used as

what Malinowski called a `mythical charter' to give cultural

respectability and long overdue rights to Gypsies throughout Europe

(1980:7-8).

 

 

 

Willems, Okely, Mayall (1988), Reynolds (2002),

Nord (1998 and 2001) and others in their camp see the Gypsy Lore

Society as being largely responsible for exoticising and Indianizing

the Romanies; but while the rationale for the creation of that

organization, and its approach to the objects of its study have come

under increasing criticism in recent years, it is unfair to

attribute to it totally the hard-core Indocentrism with which it

came to be associated over time. On the very first page of the very

first issue of The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, which appeared

in July 1888, three different hypotheses were acknowledged,

including the non-Indianist position that Gypsies have been a part

of European society for more than two thousand years. Though it

declared on the same page that "the final solution of the Gypsy

problem . . . has already been solved," the editor contradicts

himself by then adding that "the true answer still remains a matter

of doubt, if indeed the true answer has ever yet been given." The

opposing arguments evident there—whether Gypsies originated in India

or not—are complicated by the fact that even among those who do

recognize such a connection, interpretations are divided. The most

widely-repeated Indianist account (also included in that JGLS

editorial) is that the first Romanies were a group of several

thousand musicians presented by the King of Sindh to the Shah of

Persia in the fifth century AD; practically every book which deals

with Romani origins includes it(57). It provides (a) an explanation

for why Romanies left India in the first place, (b) the presence of

other, presumably related "Gypsy" groups in the Middle East, and ©

the traditional means of livelihood among Gypsies in the West.

 

The most recent paper in which this position is upheld is Matras

(1999:1), where he says that

 

 

 

Indic diaspora languages [are] spoken by what appear to be

descendants of itinerant castes of artisans and entertainers who are

spread throughout Central Asia, the Near East and Europe. They

include . . . Romani.

 

 

 

These traditional views, whether pro-Indianist or not,

need re-examination. It is glib, and perhaps even arrogant, for

Sandland (loc. cit.) to call the Indian connection "vague," and to

state that "`Gypsy,' in other words, is merely a job description"

(op. cit., p. 384), or for Judith Okely to assume that "t suited

the Indianists to privilege a linear migratory explanation for some

linguistic elements, but not for the European vocabularies and

languages found among Gypsies" (1977:225). And while Okely would

like to see alternative, non-Indian etymologies for the hundreds and

hundreds of Indic-derived words in Sampson's Romani dictionary, she

offers no suggestion as to what those etymologies could possibly

be. Similarly, while she describes the same cultural behaviour

among English Romanichals that is shared by other Romani populations

outside of Britain, and which furthermore has demonstrable parallels

in India, she neither comments on that fact nor explains why Romani

culture in England should be so different from that of the

coexistent non-Romani population, and certainly from that which one

might associate with dispossessed English peasants, or how a word

that is Indian in both its etymological origin and cultural

reference (mochadi, from Sanskrit mrakati "to smear") came into

their speech:

They have separate bowls for washing the body and for washing

utensils. Gorgios [non-Romanies] are thought dirty for using sinks

for mixed purposes and having [toilets] in caravans. These

practices are explained by notions of an inner self, like the inside

body which must be kept separate from the outside body. Waste from

the outer body must not contaminate the inside, hence the importance

of protecting crockery which touches the mouth, the entry to the

inner body. The inside of the trailer must also be kept clean, like

the inner body. Neither death nor childbirth—polluting events—

should take place inside a trailer, but preferably in a gorgio

hospital. Animals are judged clean or unclean by how they wash and

eat. A cat is filthy because it licks its fur and swallows it; no

cat should enter a trailer. A horse is perfectly clean, partly

because it doesn't lick itself. The gypsy word mochadi means

ritually unclean, not merely grubby, and is used to describe dirty

habits, for instance, washing a cup in a bowl used for washing the

hands (1979:31).

The most elementary cultural/linguistic evidence, such as the fact

that the Romani word for "cross" (trušul) was originally a Hindu

term meaning "Shiva's trident," or that, as in Hindi, Panjabi,

Sindhi, etc., though unlike in any European language, the word

for `big' and `very' are the same, and there are two different words

for `old' depending upon whether the referent is human or not, is

left unaddressed. It is hard to reconcile facts such as these with

the "indigenous origin" argument, or to explain how, if only words

were passed from group to group, such area-specific cultural

components could come with the package too.

Despite the insistence that the Indianists

presume an undiluted, unbroken continuum with 5th (or 9th or 10th or

15th) century India, an examination of the principal representative

sources does not in fact reveal this argument. Racially-motivated

notions of the "true Gypsy" emerged in the 1800s in tandem with

Darwinism certainly, but nowhere is the claim explicitly made that

the original gene pool has remained pristine for fifteen hundred

years. The closest allusion to this is the frequent reference to

degree of "Gypsy blood," considered to manifest itself in darkness

of eye, skin and hair. Labelling individuals as "pure" Gypsies

or "half" Gypsies was (and is) racist and meaningless, though the

Nazis turned such categorization into an art. It should be

remembered too, that the literature of the period also referred to

the "Scottish race" and the "English race," heedless of the Celtic,

Saxon, Norman and other elements which have gone into the makeup of

those populations. There no doubt exist nationalistic Welsh and

Irish who have no Celtic ancestry at all. Applying Sandland's

criterion and his term, they too ought to qualify as simulacra,

which the dictionary defines as "something that has a vague,

tentative or shadowy resemblance to something else." But clearly a

double standard is operating here.

The adherence to traditional means of livelihood,

and "deep" use of the Romani language was also part of the notion of

purity, and it is here that the heart of the conflict lies. The

composition of our overall identities as individuals and as members

of ethnic populations is both internal (inherited) and external

(acquired). It may indeed be entirely acquired, as is the case for

some Gypsies or some Irish or some English. Whether we might have

brown eyes or not is inherited, but whether we know how to bake a

hedgehog is not; it's learnt—still these two components have been

confused. The only constant is the genetic one, in the sense that

we have no power to modify it in ourselves. Yet if this inherited

component is not acknowledged in the context of the acquired one, it

can mean nothing. The Nazis dispatched scores of individuals on the

grounds of their Romani ancestry, of which those same individuals

had been totally unaware(58). I'd be most surprised if native-

Romani-speaking activists, colleagues of mine such as Rudko

Kawczynski or Ondrej Giňa or Orhan Galjuš knew how to gut and bake a

hedgehog or make artificial flowers in the traditional "Gypsy" way,

but none of them doubts for a moment his Romani identity. The

constructed Gypsy must not be allowed to obfuscate the identities of

actual Romanies.

Conclusion

The evidence for the single migration of a composite, military

entourage out of India during the first quarter of the 11th century

is strong. The onus is upon those who are not persuaded by the

evidence to provide convincing arguments to disprove it. If the

impetus to leave was not military, the presence of a military

lexicon of Indian origin in Romani needs to be explained. If the

first migrants were a single group of entertainers, why is the

relevant semantic area not represented in the language, and why does

the overall lexicon represent mixed linguistic sources? If there

were several migrations over a period of time, how did they manage

to find each other and reassemble before entering Europe?

For some reason, the possibility that the

ancestors of the Romani people were not "robbers, murderers [and]

hangmen" as Vekerdi (1988:13) would have it, or even the

metalworkers or musicians of conventional Gypsy exohistory, but

instead were individuals of some historical stature with a

demonstrable origin, seems threatening to some specialists. In a

statement appearing in the American News Service Online on January

12th, 1998, Sheila Salo of the Gypsy Lore Society stated that "there

may be political motivations for advancing that theory," an attitude

echoing that of Isabel Fonseca in her influential book Bury Me

Standing:

Gypsy writers and activists . . . argue for a classier genealogy; we

hear, for example, that the Gypsies descend from the Kshattriyas,

the warrior caste, just below the Brahmins. There is something

ambiguous about origins, after all: you can be whoever you want to

be (1996:100).

Surely such cynicism masks a certain unease on the part of those

who seek to define and limit Romani identity. It is difficult to

believe that this kind of scholarship is serious, and its purpose

may indeed have been simply to generate controversy and debate; but

its existence is dangerous at a time when the number of

administrators and policy makers who would exploit this scholarship

in their decision-making is growing. The work of the supporters of

this notion is already being quoted in anti-Romani literature, even

at the governmental level; Judith Okely demonstrates considerable

naïveté when she complains "I am appalled that apparently sentences

in my book The Traveller-Gypsies (1983) have been used against the

Gypsies in a legal wrangle." (1990:4).

When specialists in other disciplines allude to

genetics or linguistics to make their case, their arguments are

weakest. The observation has been made more than once that those

who do so may feel, perhaps subconsciously, that less academic

rigour is required when researching Gypsies than when studying other

peoples, thereby revealing prejudicial attitudes of their own.

Non-Romani organizations have been created to study and define

Romani populations, even to cultivate our thinkers and leaders. The

Open Society Institute's Roma Memorial University has a "scholarship

program to support the creation of a broad-based Roma elite."

Non-Romanies, exercising an intellectual authority over our people,

decide on the standardization of our language (most recently at a

meeting in Budapest in Summer, 2003), and non-Romanies have

represented themselves as our political spokesmen. Non-Romanies in

their droves have decided that arranged early-teen marriage among

Romanian Romanies is reprehensible (though no similar outrage has

been directed at India, where it is also common and where the Romani

custom originated; see BBC 2003).

Conferences on Romani issues have been organized without any Romani

participation whatsoever(59)—reminiscent of meetings of the U.S.

Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 1900s where Native American

issues were discussed in the absence of any Indian participation or

representation; a Black Studies conference with no African American

presence would be unthinkable; a Jewish policy symposium with no

Jewish voice would be an outrage. Academics and politicians who

have never met a Gypsy in their lives make their opinions about

Romani policy known in the national press. At the same time some of

those who have seem to feel threatened by Romanies who are educated

or who are branded as `activists,' as though this were automatically

a bad thing, thereby wasting the resource potential of such

marginalize individuals when so few degreed Romanies exist.

Surely if groups or individuals who identify themselves as

Romanies seek to assert their ethnicity, and to ally themselves with

others similarly motivated, then this is entirely their own

business, and the non-Romani anthropologists, sociologists,

folklorists and others who have taken upon themselves the role of

ethnic police are interfering and presumptuous at best, and are

perpetuating paternalistic attitudes. I call for a new respect and

a new cooperation between Romanies and gadje, and an end to the 19th

century cultural colonialism that lives on in only slightly modified

guise.

NOTES

Notes

1. Rrom (plural Rroma) is the term officially adopted by the

International Romani Union to refer to all people of Romani descent,

regardless of self-ascription. Where a Romani population has a

different name for itself, the policy is to use that name, thus one

Romani population in northern Europe refers to itself as Sinti,

those in Spain, Finland and Wales as Kalé and so on. Confusion

arises because Vlax-speaking Romanies use the term only with

reference to themselves, having other names for other Gypsy

populations. The spelling used here, with double-rr, reflects the

usage in the New Standard Orthography etablished by the Language

Commission of the International Romani Union. I prefer to use "Romani

(es)" as a cover-term for all Romani groups, since all dialects use

this word in the same way, unlike the disparate use of R®om by

Romanies themselves and its often ungrammatical use by non-Romani

journalists.

2. Vlax (Vlach) Romanies are those descended from the populations

held in slavery on the Wallachian and Moldavian estates between the

mid-14th and mid-19th centuries, tens of thousands of whom have

subsequently left Romania for other parts of the world. The

principal Vlax groups include the Kalderasha, the Churara, the

Lovara and the Machvaya. Most Vlax Romanies in North and South

America are Kalderasha.

3. The Romanichals are the Romani population in and from England.

They are referred to as Gipsurja or Dñipsurja by Vlax Romanies.

American Romanichals refer in turn to the Vlax Romanies

disparagingly as "Turks" or "Ragheads."

4. The Bashalde are a Romani population originally from Hungary and

Slovakia.

5. Romungre here refers to the new (post-1989) wave of non-Vlax,

non-Romani-speaking Romanies from Hungary.

6. The Bayash (or Beyash or Boyash) are descendants of Vlax

Romanies who, during the period of Balkan slavery, worked in the

houses of the landowners and were forbidden to speak Romani,

consequently losing that language. The ethnic language of the

Bayash in America is Romanian, though it is everywhere giving way to

English. Vlax Roma use the label to refer to various Gypsy

populations who don't speak Romani.

7. A Slava is a saint's day feast, such as St. Anne's or St.

George's.

8. The word porrajmos means, literally, the "devouring," i.e. of

Romani lives. There have been several porrajmata during the

European experience, such as that in 1721, when King Charles the

Sixth of Germany ordered the extermination of Romanies everywhere,

or in 1740, when all Romanies throughout Bohemia were to be hung by

decree. The Baro Porrajmos or "Great Devouring" was the Holocaust

when, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute's

former senior historian Dr. Sybil Milton, as many as one and a half

million Romani victims had been murdered by 1945.

9. Colijn & Littell ,1997:19-49.

10. Diane Tong, in personal communication.

11. Vekerdi, 1988:13-26.

12. Romnet was an internet e-mail list of between 150 and 200

individuals from all parts of the world, and a forum for the

exchange of ideas and information. For further details see

http://www.rroma.com

13. Nagle, 1996.

14. Lepselter, 1996.

15. Op. cit., pp. 40 and 51.

16. Claus Schreiner (1990), in the introduction.

17. Paspati, 1870: 28-29.

18. Duncan, 1969: 42-43.

19. Ivanow, 1914: 444.

20. Rosenblum, 1984: 1-C. The title of this article, "The Gypsy

problem grows: East Europeans can't control Gypsies," is revealing.

21. Martin Croghan, 1986: 259-269.

22. Shel Silverstein, 1984.

23. Viz Comics, The John Brown Publishing Co., Ltd., London. The

comic strip ran in 1990.

24. The U.S. Playing Card Co., Cincinnati, Ohio.

25. Wells was in fact a proponent of the idea that "lives unworthy

of life" should be eradicated, which was a policy fundamental to

Nazi race theory.

26. See Hancock, 1987.

27. Hancock, 1996: 39-64.

28. Donald Kenrick, 1995: 37. The contemporary interpretation of

dom is different from its meaning a millennium ago, when it simply

meant "person."

29. This group, functioning within the framework of the

International Conference on Romani Linguistics, will present its

findings in subsequent volumes of the papers there presented,

published by John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.

30. A more detailed discussion of this historical-linguistic

investigation is found in the introductory chapter of Ian Hancock, A

Handbook of Vlax Romani, Slavica Publishers, Columbus, 1995.

31. Op. Cit., page 47.

32. Andrzej Mirga and Nicolae Gheorghe, The Roma in the Twenty-

First Century: A Policy Paper. Project on Ethnic Relations

Monograph, Princeton, May, 1977, p. 22.

33. Michael Stewart, Time of the Gypsies. Westview Press, boulder,

1997, p. 28.

34. Gregory Kwiek, Gypsies: The Unknown Nation. Unpublished

manuscript, New York, 1997. Pp. 92-93.

35. This has been a major criticism of Isabel Fonseca's Bury Me

Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey, Random House, New York,

1995.

36. Ralph Sandland, "The real, the simulacrum, and the construction

of `gypsy' in law," Journal of Law and Society, 23(3):383-405

(1996), p. 386.

37. Werner Cohn, The Gypsies. Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1973, p. 65.

38. Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies. The University Press,

Cambridge, 1983. Not acknowledged by the European-origin faction is

the awareness in earlier times by some Romanies and some Europeans

of the connection with India. The Muratori quote is well known; to

it we may add the Hebrew-language Chronicle of the World of 1602,

which reported that

"King Philip of Spain banished all kushim (blacks) who lived

in his kingdom so they would travel to their land,

India, the place where they were born, their

ancient land. There were more than 200,000 of them.

And he did it against their will. And most of

them died of hunger along the way and many of them

were killed by robbers." (Romano Džaniben 1

(2:)6-7, 2000).

39. Wim Willems, Op Zoek Naar de Ware Zigeuner: Zigeuners als

Studieobject Tijdens de Verlichting, de Romantiek en het Nazisme

[= "In search of the true Gypsy: Gypsies as Objects of Study from

the Enlightenment and the Romantic Period to the Nazis"]. Van Arkel

Uitgeverij, Utrecht, 1995.

40. "Some political consequences of theories of Gypsy ethnicity,"

in A. James, A. Hockley & A. Dawson, eds., After Writing Culture:

Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. Routledge,

London, 1977. Pp. 224-243.

41. "Ethnic identity and place of origin: The Traveller-Gypsies in

Britain," in H. Vermeulen & J. Boissevain, eds., Ethnic Challenge:

The Politics of Ethnicity in Europe. Herodot, Göttingen, 1984.

42. "Could there be a Rotwelsch origin for the Romani lexicon?,"

paper submitted to the Third International Conference on Romani

Linguistics, Prague, Winter 1997, and to appear in the Proceedings.

Pp. 2,16.

43. Sandland, op. cit., pp. 386-7.

44. Jim Heintz, "Sweden regrets its eugenic past," The Guardian,

August 26th, 1997, p. 3.

45. Loc. cit.

46. See also Marek Kohn, "Are `Gypsies' black?," The Jewish

Quarterly, Summer, 1996, pp. 21-23.

47. Loc. cit.

48. This can be compared with an estimated non-African

representation of 30% in the African American gene pool.

49. Op. cit., p. 399.

50. Angus Fraser, The Gypsies. Blackwell: Oxford, 1992, p. 24.

51. Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies. André

Deutch: London, 1966, p. 49.

52. Richard Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence

of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy. Institute for the Study of Human

Issues: Philadelphia, 1976, p. 40.

53. Romani people refers here only to those populations which speak

Romani or that descend from populations which spoke Romani at some

time in the past. Note that the term Gypsy is used to refer to many

groups who do not meet this criterion besides those of actual Romani

descent; the looseness of its application clearly fuels the

arguments of Lucassen, Willems, Okely, Reynolds, Mitchell and others

discussed here. It is noteworthy that the recently-published

Encarta World English Dictionary lists Gypsy as "an offensive term

for a member of the Romani people" (1999:800).

54. It is interesting—particularly in the context of their own

arguments—that both Lucassen and Willems compare the Romani diaspora

with that of the Jewish people, whose ethnic homogeneity they appear

to assume without question.

55. Okely calls herself this in (1990:1). The term of course is

Matthew Arnold's, and Okely is not a Gypsy of any kind.

56. The traditional nineteenth-century Eurocentric interpretation of

the social history of India and its Indo-Aryan languages is in

serious need of revision: see among a growing literature on the

subject Misra, 1992, Taligeri, 1993, Frawley, 1994, Thapar, 1995 and

Feuerstein, Kak & Frawley, 1995. Like the first Afrocentrist

literature—an equally necessary challenge to western exohistory—some

earlier Indocentric statements err on the side of brashness, e.g.

Jain (1994:121) confidently states that Indian scholarship "has

taken on proponents of Aryan invasion/migration theory, demolished

their case and established that northern India is the original home

of the Indo-European family of languages," while Danino & Nahar

(2000:27) more cautiously call it "almost a proven `fact'." It seems

to have escaped the current scholarship that a century and a half

ago Curzon was already arguing that the Indo-European languages

(whose divisions he refers to as `Indo-Celtic', `Indo-

Hellenic', `Indo-Slavonic', &c.), "have all sprung, at different

chronological periods, from the Sanskrit" (1856:177).

57. This account is discussed at length in Hancock (1998).

58. Obviously if some of those acquired genetic characteristics are

clearly evident, so that one is what is nowadays called a "visible

minority," the larger society may still treat the individual as

belonging to a particular group, despite what that individual

regards as his own place in that society. The reverse of this

is "passing," where lacking phenotypical characteristics allows one

to present an alternative identity. The psychological consequences

of this for Romanies in particular have not been examined; such a

study would surely be of considerable interest and value.

59. Most recently (at time of writing) the Roma session at the Ninth

Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of

Nationalities held at Columbia University in April, 2004.

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