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callot-bohemiens-en-marche1
Articles <http://kopachi.com/archives/articles/>, History
<http://kopachi.com/archives/articles/topics/history/>, Romani Origins
<http://kopachi.com/archives/articles/topics/romani-origins/>, Ronald
Lee <http://kopachi.com/archives/articles/authors/ronald-lee/>
A New Look at Our Romani Origins and Diaspora by Ronald Lee
December 25, 2014
<http://kopachi.com/articles/a-new-look-at-our-romani-origins-and-diaspora-by-ro
nald-lee/>
RL <http://kopachi.com/author/rl/>
Ronald Lee, 2009, all rights reserved
Until lions have historians,
Stories of the hunt
Shall always glorify the hunters.
African proverb
*The Mystery People and the Pseudo-Egyptians*
For almost five-hundred years after we Romani people appeared in Europe
in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, Europeans were asking where
we had come from. By then, we ourselves had forgotten our origins in
North-Central India although in 1422 some Romani newcomers did tell
Italians in Forli, Italy, who asked them where they had come from, that
their original homeland was in India. (/Muratori/, 1731, Vol X1X: 890)
This remained buried in the archives until recently (/Informaciako Lil/
7-9, 1992). Our Indian origin only started to become known in the latter
18th century among a select group of scholars such as pioneer Heinrich
Grellman.
It then slowly spread through what came to be known as Gypsy Studies
in the latter 19th and the 20th centuries when it became monopolized by
the British /Gypsy Lore Society (GLS)/, a fluctuating group of Victorian
paternalistic racists founded in 1888 and an offshoot of the

contemporary Orientalists. Their /Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society/, a

mixture of academic scholarship of the era and the literary meanderings
of wealthy eccentrics and dilettantes, soon became the main source of
information on the Romani people, albeit those mainly located in
Britain, then the tip of the Romani demographic iceberg at that period
in time, for the erudite. Thus, by the latter 19th century, the stage
was set for us to be misdefined and stereotyped by outsiders. This was
ably catered to by a series of armchair scribblers who penned a
never-ending series of romantic novels about the Gypsies they had never
met and which soon became the main source of information for the less
erudite until largely bumped from this role by movies such as /Golden
Earrings/ and /Hot Blood/ and later, by the prime-time idiot box. In the
latter 20th century after the death of venerable pundit Dora Yates in
1974 at the age of 95, the old, toothless and moribund GLS was gradually
metamorphosed by the rising academic Young Turks of Neolorist Gypsy
Studies into what is now called the Non-Romani Gypsy Industry by
Romani activists.
Despite the fact that our Indian origin has now proven beyond question,
even today (2009), in the age of the Internet, there is still a
widespread and totally erroneous belief that we originated in Egypt! I
recently saw a childrens book which shows the sphinx, pyramids,
pharaohs, camels and carved and decorated English Romani /vardo/
(caravan) with an English Romanichel sitting on the caravan steps and
dutifully whittling wooden clothes pegs in some secluded English dingle
la George Borrow and the romantic novelists, which stated
authoritatively that the The Gypsies came from Egypt. How did this
kind of mythology get started?
Because dark-skinned people from the Middle-East had been brought to
Europe by the Venetians and other entrepreneurs to perform as acrobats,
jugglers, musicians and dancers, before the arrival of the Romani
people, and because these earlier visitors were loosely called
Egyptians because they had come from the Egyptian Mamaluke Empire in
the Middle East, the Roma too were identified as Egyptians which in
English, was later shortened to Gypsian, and finally Gypsy. Other
Romani groups had come to central and eastern Europe from a region in
the Greek Peloponnesus called Little Egypt where they were referred to
as /Romiti/ in the 15th century along with others who had migrated from
Anatolia in what is now Turkey. Both of these regions were known as
/Kleine Aegypter/ in German which means Little Egypt or Egypt Minor.
There is also evidence that these early Roma in Europe used an economic
stratagem through which by claiming to be Egyptian penitents on a
pilgrimage of atonement, they could receive alms from almoners in the
churches, since it was common practice for the church to dispense alms
to pilgrims and penitents who were on a religious quest or journey. Some
of the incoming Romani groups had probably adopted this strategem in the
Byzantine Empire where there were wandering groups of genuine Egyptian
Christian (Coptic) refugees who had fled the Muslim invasions and
upheavals in Egypt itself. In Byzantium itself, Roma had earlier been
wrongly defined as /Athinganoi/ or /Atsingani,/ a Greek term which means
not to be touched and which actually referred to an earlier sect of
Persian mystics who had fled the Arab conquest of Persia in the 8th
century CE. This term was then adopted by many European languages in
various forms such as /Cigani/ to define the Romani people. Another term
in use in Greece and the Balkans was /Gyifti/Gupti/Kibti / which refers
to Copt or Egyptian.
Recent studies conducted by Indian scholars in India and by Romani and
non-Romani scholars in Europe have finally shattered the Egyptian myth

and confirmed the origins of the Romani people in India. Contemporary

writings by Firdawsi. a Persian scribe at the court of Mahmud Ghazni and
other chroniclers of this era, prove beyond doubt that we originated in
India but were not one specific group of Indians, not all of one caste
and not even one people. In the 11th century CE there was a group of
petty kingdoms in /Gurjara / in the Northwest area of India in what was
then the Rajput Confederacy. These were feudal-type societies composed
of a caste of warrior-landowners (/Kshatriya/) and a supporting
population of non-warriors composed of /Vaysas/, workers and artisans
who did all the grunt work for the ruling warrior caste and the
Brahmins. Some were farmers growing crops and working with animals
Others were metal smiths, entertainers, craftspeople, silver smiths,
gold smiths or laundry men and women, in other words, all the people
needed to maintain a working society to support their idle rich.
Each family and clan of the sub-castes had a trade or profession
(/jati/) which was practiced by the men of the family and the clan as a
whole. This was part of the Hindu religion called the Laws of Manu where
everyone belonged to a particular caste and a jati within the caste
which performed a specific function or did a particular type of work.
This is how the Roma in Europe were subdivided in the past. Each family
and clan had a work skill which was passed on from one generation to the
next such as music, horse-trading, brick making, blacksmithing or
whatever. It seems likely that some groups in the original supporting
population belonged to a collection of people called /Domba/ in the
plural (singular /Dom/ man,) which then meant, The People or Human
Beings. Each of these small Rajput kingdoms was ruled by a /thakur,/ or
petty king and collectively, the kings served an elected king who was
the supreme ruler. /Thakur/ in its variant form of /thagar/ exists in
Romani in some dialects today meaning king or leader.
*Mahmud Ghazni and The Romani Diaspora*
In the early 11th Century CE, after overthrowing the ruling Arab
Caliphate in the late 10th century, a Turkish-Muslim dynasty arose in
what is now Afghanistan called the Ghaznavid Empire Once established,
these Ghaznavids began raiding into India under their leader Mahmud
Ghazni at the beginning of the 11th century CE and came into direct
conflict with the Rajput Confederacy. Until 1192, there was constant
warfare, looting, destruction of towns and cities and disruption of the
Rajput territories. These incursions began around the beginning of the
11th century CE under Mahmud Ghazni. His annual invasions (weather
permitting) into the kingdoms of north-central India, resulted in
looting and destruction of temples, capture of slaves and devastating of
the countryside. After their subjugation, he allowed these kingdoms to
exist as vassal states under treaties which also demanded they pay an
annual tribute to finance the expansion of his court and his armies for
his conquest of Persia. The tribute included elephants and their
/mahouts/ or handlers, precious metals and other commodities. As well as
bringing in Indian artisans, engineers and other technical people to
design and supervise the expansion of his capital Ghazna and his court
along with slaves to do the physical labour, he also recruited large
numbers of Indian troops from the Rajput kingdoms he had subjugated who
were called /ghulam/ or client/slave soldiers, These mercenaries,
willing or unwilling, were then formed into ethnic unite of the
Ghaznavid armies and some as Mahmuds personal bodyguard along with
their necessary camp followers who, like the fighting men, brought their
wives and children with them. Even the wives of the Rajput soldiers
served as night watchpersons who brought water to the troops and
performed other necessary supportive tasks in the military structure.

It is also mentioned that some of these Indian /kshatriya/ even became

generals in Mahmuds army. Many of these troops along with their camp
followers and hangers on like musicians, traders, salt and water
carriers, religious leaders, etc, were assigned to garrison duty in
Khurasan in eastern Persia. Units of ethnic troops who retained their
ethnic religions and languages were common in the polyglot, multi-ethnic
Ghaznavid armies which included not only Indians, but pagan Kumans or
Turkmen from the steppes, Arabs, Kurds and others. Often prisoners taken
in battle were recruited to replace men lost on the Ghaznavid side. Like
other empires from the Persian and Roman Empires to the British Empire,
the fighting men of the defeated and colonized peoples were incorporated
into the armies of the conquerors. Most soldiers in these far off days
served masters for plunder not out of duty or patriotism unless
defending their homes and families. Bands of mercenaries and nomadic
tribesmen would join up for a campaign and the survivors would then head
for home laden with plunder and slaves when victory was obtained or flee
without their loot if defeated. One Sanskrit-derived word for soldier in
some Romani dialects, /lur/ or /lurdo/ also means plunderer, and
is the past participle of the verb /lurel/ to rob/plunder. (Sanskrit
/lunthayati/ to rob/plunder through Hindi /lutna/ which also gives
English loot. from Hindi). Conditions in later armies had not improved
much by the time of the thirty-years-war in Europe in the 17th century
when Catholic and Protestant mercenaries plundered and murdered
anyone unable to get out of their way as they marched around western and
central Europe under the shared banner of Jesus leaving rapine, death,
devastation and circling vultures in their wakes.
In 1038 the Ghuzz Turks, later known as the Seljuks, crossed the
boundary river Oxus most likely pressured out of the steppes by other
barbarians more numerous and fiercer than themselves, and entered this
Ghaznavid region in Khurasan looking for green pastures for their herds
and a place to live in peace. This was an invasion of Ghaznavid
territory and a series of battles ensued culminating in the three-day
Battle of Dandanqan (1040) near the city of Merv where the Ghaznavids,
under Masud, the less militarily-gifted son of Mahmud, were decisively
defeated. What happened to the surviving Indian troops and their camp
followers after this is unclear except that large numbers of troops and
camp followers did survive and many took service under their captors.
There is also documented and other incontestable evidence that within a
short time after this battle, hordes of refugees fled west to escape the
Turks and there are references to Indians in the eastern kingdom of
Armenia not long after the Battle of Dandanqan. The existence of a
battery of Armenian loan words in all European-Romani dialects such as
/ambrol/ pear, /angushtri/ ring, and /bov/ stove, suggests that
these were picked up in Armenia before the Roma began moving out of this
area and into Greek-speaking Byzantine Anatolia and finally, much later,
into the Balkans, in a series of multiple migrations over a period of
200 to 300 or more years. It is also possible that the so-called /Lom/
Gypsies who inhabit Armenia today may be descended from the Romani
families who remained behind although their /Lomavren/ linguistic
register which now contains only root elements of Indo-Aryan words does
not prove or disprove this conclusively.
The eastern Kingdom of Armenia soon became subjected to raids by the
Seljuks Turks who finally conquered it at the Battle of Ani in 1064
forcing large numbers of Armenians and probably some of the Indians to
migrate West to Cilicia which was then under Byzantine Suzerainty. The
Turks then pushed into Anatolia which then belonged to the Eastern-Roman
Empire or Byzantium as it is more commonly known. The Byzantine army was

defeated at the Battle of Manzikirt in 1071 and the Seljuks established

the Sultanate of Roum, also known as Iconium, in Anatolia. By 1192. the
Sultanate of Roum had absorbed most of the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia
except for Nicaea in Anatolia and Constantinople and the Balkan Empire
across the Bosporus. The Indians, who had earlier entered this region,
found themselves in this Greek-speaking region dominated by Seljuk Turks
who used Persian as their administrative language. As soldiers in the
Ghaznavid army, the Indians, who spoke a mixture of Indo-Aryan related
dialects, adopted a Military lingua franca based on these native
languages mixed with many Persian loan words which was the military
kon used by the Ghaznavids to communicate with their Indian subjects
and troops. This was in effect nobodys native language, but a camp
language used for communication by troops who spoke differing or
different native languages. This military kon continued to exist long
after the Indian troops left India in the 11th century and it evolved
through the later 16th century Moghul conquerors of India into Urdu, the
military kons used by the Moghuls and later, Urdu-Hindustani adopted
by the later British Raj for their polyglot Indian sepoys and colonial
administrators. Urdu is now the language of Pakistan.
*The Indians become Roma*
Up to this point, the refugee /ghulams/ (indentured soldiers) and their
camp followers had seen themselves as dislocated Indians, refugees even,
but in the Sultanate of Roum, they began to see themselves as a people
in their own right as the older members of the group died off and the
younger generations born outside of India, lost their Indian identity
and instead, took on an identity of Roma, meaning the adults or the
people from the word /Rom/ which means an adult/married man in Romani.
In all probability they were subdivided into many clans and occupational
definitions or /jatis/, such as animal traders, metal smiths, basket
makers, musicians, etc, adding new ones as new economic strategies
appeared and dropping older ones as older work strategies disappeared,
an identity marker which has continued until today in many regions.
Contrary to what many scholars have written, horse-trading was not a
profession Romani traders could have followed in India because the
working animals there were the elephant, and ox, also described as a
bullock. Some of our Indian ancestors might have traded oxen or
bullocks. Riding horses were imported from Arabia by the Rajputs through
middle men in Afghanistan. The Indic-derived word for horse in Romani is
/khuro/. (Hindi /ghora/) and horses as beasts of burden as well as
wagons pulled by horses were first encountered by the migrating Romani
people in Armenia where the Armenian word grai horse and the Ossetian
word urdon wagon, along with the objects represented by these words
were adopted into our evolving Romani language and economy. In the 20th
century the older trades such as horse trading became less and less
viable forcing the Romani men to adapt and become dealers in automobiles
and trucks, others to scrap collecting or some other viable work
strategy giving rise to even more new trades such as automobile body
work and the retreading of automobile tires. The women of course had
always been fortune-tellers, midwives, herbalists, hawkers and some were
entertainers along with their families in the musician groups.
In the Sultanate of Roum, the language of the group became the military
kon, the only native language they had in common which their parents
had spoken under the Ghaznavids plus a gradually adopted battery of
Byzantine Greek added to the existing Persian and Armenian borrowings
which then became our native language or /Romani shib/. In this new
environment which was inhabited by farming communities and pastoral
Turkish and Kurdish nomads with a few large towns and villages here and

there, the emerging the Romani people found a niche for themselves as
commercial nomads, traders, artisans and musicians, in other words
middle-men, traders, service providers and entertainers. The military
element was obviously no longer paramount and the descendants of the
/Kshtriya/, who probably existed only in family or clan groups, most
likely look service with local Seljuk warlords to go on raids for
plunder against the enemies of Islam as mercenary /ghazis/ (warriors of
Islam) or as bodyguards. Some no doubt fought against the Crusaders as
/bashi-bazouks/ (irregular troops) and would have had their own camp
followers. The camp followers in general increased in numbers and became
traders, artisans, animal dealers, musicians and entertainers and
whatever other profession would enable them to survive and in order to
find less competition as certain trades became saturated. As the
original families increased in numbers over the years, small groups
began to gradually migrate westwards into Nicaea and across the Bosporus
to Constantinople drawn by tales of the wealth to be found in The
Golden City. As the power of the Seljuk Turks waned, the Sultanate of
Roum broke into numerous small entities or Beyliks, each ruled by a
different warlord and out of this power vacuum arose a new power, the
Ottoman Turks, who began expanding into the Byzantine Empire in the
Balkans. As their armies entered the Balkans, they brought Romani
/bashi-bazouks/ and artisans with them, thus establishing a Romani
presence in this area. Evidence also points to Romani /sazende/ or
musicians serving with the invading Ottoman armies. Romani musicians not
only played martial music with wind instruments and drums for the army
but also performed as entertainers playing the Turkish /saz/ (a type of
long-necked lute from which the Greek bouzouki is derived), the /kemana/
(type of fiddle) and tambourines as well as the eternal /zurna/, a very
loud double-reed shawm accompanied by a large drum or /dauli/.
*The Romani Diaspora in Europe*
From Byzantine Nicaea, Roma had also begun to enter the Balkans by the
14th century and some groups slowly moved through the Slavic-speaking
regions picking up words of old Serbian and other Slavic languages until
they reached Wallachia and Moldavia where we added a few Rumanian words
to the evolving Romani dialects of the migrating companies. Other groups
of Romanies remained in the Balkans south of the Rumanian
Principalities. This part of our history cannot be disputed because from
here on it is recorded, if not always accurately, plus the fact that all
Romani dialects spoken or recorded from Wales in Britain to Siberia
contain these same loan words from Persian. Armenian, Byzantine Greek,
Old Slavic and Rumanian. One indication of the date of this Balkan
passage is the appearance of Slavic/Rumanian /pushka/psca/ ;
gun/firearm in various surviving or recorded Romani dialects of the
first wave (c1400-1500 CE) in Scotland, the Netherlands, Spain, Hungary,
Poland and Slovakia. This indicates early firearms were in use as we
passed through these regions and adopted the word and probably the item
it represented as well. After reaching Rumania, small groups of Romanies
drifted off in different directions, each with its leader whom European
chronicles refer to as counts and dukes and made their way into all
countries of Europe. By the 16th century. we were everywhere from the
British Isles and Spain, as far east as Poland and western Russia, as
far North as Norway and as far South as Greece. Many Roma remained in
Wallachia and Moldavia where they were soon gradually enslaved because
of their economic value as artisans and labourers and were held in
brutal bondage like the African slaves in the Spanish, Portuguese,
French and English colonies of the Americas until the /Slobuzhniya/ or
Emancipation in 1864.

Historians refer to this exodus, migration and dispersal of the Romani

people as our origins and Diaspora. We originated in North-Central
India, migrated via Afghanistan (Ghza) as /ghulam/ troops and their
camp followers in the early 11th century CE, passed through Persia,
Armenia, Byzantium, the Sultanate of Roum, Greece, the Kingdom of Serbia
and what is now Rumania to central Europe. We then split off into
smallish groups and made our way into all the countries of Europe. In
central-eastern Europe and the Balkans the Romani people adopted an
identity of Roma and by emigration in the Americas and elsewhere. Those
of the first wave did not, as far as we know, use this term. With them,
/Rom/ means husband or married adult male, but does not imply
ethnicity. Roma means simply the mature. married adults. Some Romanies
in western Europe defined themselves as /Kale/ (Spain, Wales and
Finland), /Romanichel/ (France and England) and later, /Sinti/ (probably
from German /reisende/ traveler.) in Germany/Austria and later by
migration, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe while those in France also
defined themselves as /Manush/. Still other groups of the First Wave
chose other self-definitions but all of us, regardless of what we call
ourselves, are lumped together as gypsies occasionally, more
generously as Gypsies with a capital G. What this is supposed to mean,
other than a contraction of Egyptian, has never been clearly defined
except that to /Gazhe/ or outsiders, it means Others who are not Us.
Even the Gypsy Lore Society which assumed the role of defining,
classifying and clinically dissecting us, cannot come up with a better
definition than peripatetic which seems very pathetic in an era when
90 percent of all people entitled to define themselves as Romani are
sedentary and move only because of systematic discrimination,
persecution, or ethnic cleansing. It is more likely that young
non-Romani graduate students coming out of modern universities are more
peripatetic than Romanies as they move around the academic circuit
searching for that elusive tenure. Furthermore, since, as people, we
have lived in Europe and shared, as victims, not only in its racism,
persecution and the Holocaust but also, when allowed to, contributed to
its developments and arts, We are thus equally entitled to claim
European identity since Romanies have been living in the Balkans and in
most European countries quite some time before any European began
settling permanently in the Americas. In 1492, when Columbus was
preparing for his fatal voyage of discovery, fatal for Native Peoples of
the Americas, that is, Romani blacksmiths were casting cannon balls for
the Spanish army besieging the city of Grenada, the last Moorish
stronghold in Spain!
Up to our arrival in Rumania, we had travelled more or less together as
one people or at least in an overlapping leapfrog migration and spoke a
more-or-less common Romani language. Once we dispersed into all the
countries of Europe, we lost our unity as one people and our once common
language slowly deteriorated into a large number of dialects because we
lived in different countries of Europe, were surrounded by non-Romanies
who spoke many languages which we borrowed from as new items and
concepts were encountered and because Roma living in Russia never met
Roma from Greece or /Romanichels/ in Britain and vice-versa close
contact and universal identity was lost. Lacking a written language and
an educated elite, Romani developed into a group of strictly oral
vernaculars. Thus, the different groups of Roma that exist today,
speaking different dialects, living in different countries, are the
result of our history after we arrived in Europe. When we entered
Europe, we were one people called /Roma/ or /Romti/ with a shared
Indian origin and a shared Romani identity in Anatolia. Today we have a
shared history of rejection and persecution in Europe and a shared
inclusion in Hitlers Final Solution as lives unworthy of life. As the

European Roma say; /Ande l bova sa samas yekh/ In the crematoria, we

were all one. Today (2009) we share a mutual exclusion in a Europe
rapidly becoming more and more fascist, in the so-called Decade of Roma
Inclusion.
*When did we leave India*
How do we know when we left India? European scholars often maintain we
left at different times as much as 500 years or more apart. This does
not stand up to the evidence. The Romani language is a kon derived
from a group of Sanskrit-based languages such as Punjabi, Hindi,
Bengali, Dardic, Multani and others. Most of these languages developed
in parallel. Linguistic analysis shows that the input languages to the
Military kon belonged to this category, languages which gradually
reduced their genders from three to two, abolishing the older neuter
gender completely and reclassifying almost all the former neuter word as
masculine. Romani too has two genders and shows the same masculine
gender words as related Indian languages. Even one formerly
neuter-gender word became feminine in both Romani and Indian two-gender
languages. This is Romani /yag/ fire. What this must mean is that our
ancestors left India speaking languages that had two genders, a
linguistic evolution which was not completed until well into the 10th
century CE. (Hancock, 1999) European Roma cannot therefore be descended
from the legendary /Luri/ musicians who were supposedly sent to Persia
around 500 years before 1001 CE and the beginning of Mahmud Ghaznis
raids into Northern India or any other earlier Indian migration such as
that of the Jatts in the 9th century CE under the Arab Caliphates which
preceded the Ghaznavid rulers in Afghanistan, if they had, they would
have the old three-genders which in fact, Domari, an Indian-Arabic
register spoken in the Middle East and descended from a much earlier
Indian migration, shows evidence of this missing third gender (Hancock
1999). Only one existing Indian group, some /Banjara/ clans, especially
the /Labani/ or salt carriers, claim to be connected with the
migration of the ancestors of the Roma from India because of their
ancestral legends which claim some of their clans wandered out of India
to serve Mahmud Ghazni and never returned.. This would obviously make
sense. As salt and water carriers and animal herders, some /Banjara /
could easily have been included among the camp followers of the Indian
/ghulam/ troops. since they performed these functions for armies within
India before and long after the ancestors of the Roma had departed.
Romanies in Spain are said to have performed this service, carrying
supplies to the Spanish army during at various times in the 16th
century. (Leblon, various references).
*The origins of paternalistic racism and creation of the Gypsy stereotype*
Ever since our arrival in Europe, European scholars have tried to define
us by what we were in Europe during their lifetimes, especially starting
with Heinrich M. Grellman in the 19th century who described Roma in
words indicative or some loathsome species of vermin destined for
extinction in a civilized European regime. (/Die Zigeuner. Ein
historischer Versuch ber die Lebensart und verfassung/, Dessau and
Leipzig.1807) His Nazi disciples certainly tried their best to do just
this under Hitlers civilized European regime! Grellman and other
European scholars (sic) assumed that we had always been what they
considered to be a low caste of nomads, even in India. This gave rise to
the arrogant European belief that all our ancestors had been Domba,
based on our word /Rom/, which these self-appointed erudite experts
who had never visited India chose to define as a very low caste of
beggars, thieves, prostitutes and grave diggers. (It actually means

people or human beings according to Prof. Donald Kendrick). One

dictionary definition still gives the following entry for /Dom/:
a very low caste, representing some old aboriginal race, spread all
over India. They perform such offices as carrying dead bodies,
removing carrion, and so on.
(Hancock, Ian, 1995, A Handbook of Vlax Romani p.19)
Indian /Dom/ were historically a wandering cast of musicians and
entertainers of many ethnic and religious origins and certainly not a
race(sic). They are said to predate the arrival of the Indo-Europeans
in India but later Dom groups have included Hindu, Pagan and Muslim
members. Furthermore, /Dom/ are described as following many trades such
as blacksmith, musician, peddler, farmer, etc. While it is difficult to
pin down the actual meaning of /Dom/ as used in India, at least from
Western sources, /Dom/ or /Domba/ do have their own ancestral language
which still spoken today by about 200,000 people and this is not
Sanskrit-based like Romani. The original /Dom/ are said to have had
their own religion often described as pagan. It is not improbable that
some /Dom/ may have been part of the conglomerate collection of camp
followers in the /ghulam/ units serving the Ghaznavids, and as such,
their descendants would have adopted the military kon in Ghaza. It
also seems likely that in India, /Dom/ came to mean more of a
loosely-defined social definition in the caste system, or maybe outside
of it, rather than an iron-bound origin, ethnicity, profession and or
lifestyle. My attempts to discover the true meaning of /Dom/ on the
Internet and elsewhere have resulted in total confusion and a myriad of
contradictions. As to whether /Rom/ is ultimately derived from /Dom/,
until we can arrive at a definition of /Dom/ that is in any way
significant, this must be left up to future research to resolve. Some
authorities now tend to believe /Rom/ may stem from /Romiti/, the name
for the peoples living in the Sultanate of Roum or Rum. But we are still
left with /Rom/ meaning a husband and adult married male, a meaning that
/Dom/ does not have and appears never to have had in India. Some
linguists have pointed out that Sanskrit had a certain d sound that
they allege became an r sound in Romani which many Roma now write as
rr. Ironically, other than the word /Rrom/ and its derivatives and
/rroiyi/ spoon., a list of words that I compiled that use this rr
turn out to be almost all words derived from European languages such as
/rradika/ radish, /rrka/ crab, /rrakya/ whisky and /rrubzla/
rhubarb, not from Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived Indian vernaculars.
Attempts by some non-Romani researchers to prove that the ancestors of
the Romani people belonged to the so-called Gypsy tribes of India, such
as the /Sansis/ and the /Sikligars/ of the Punjab, have equally failed
to find any convincing evidence because there were no Gypsy tribes in
India until the 19th century when the British Rulers of India invented
them. Historically there have always been numerous commercial and
pastoral nomadic groups in India but the Gypsies of India are a
creation of the British Raj who lumped together the various nomadic
Indian groups into a classification of Gypsy Criminal Tribes because
of their alleged and actual petty thieving of agricultural products.
This new category of Indians was based not on the familiarity of the
British with anything native to India, but simply because of the
existence of the Gypsies in Britain and their alleged propensity for
petty theft of agricultural products and poaching on the lands of these
British gentry who were now busy plundering the wealth and resources of
India under the guise of Empire Builders. This is succinctly expressed
in the Romani adage; /O Rrom chorel e khaini, o Gazho chorel e ferma/

The Romani man steals the chicken, the Non-Romani man steals the farm.
After the independence of India, the so-called criminal; Gypsy tribes
were denotified (decriminalized) and re-classified simply as nomads to
be promptly persecuted as such under the new regime and forced to settle
among the poverty, disease and garbage in the sprawling slum quarters of
the growing cities of the New India.
*Roma Reality vs. The Gypsy Myth *
Traditional Roma today follow a very strict code of behaviour loosely
called the /mahrime/ code by anthropologists and Gypsylorists and
/Rromanya/Rromanipe/ by the Roma. In a nutshell, while Europeans in
general have two categories, clean and dirty, and things which are dirty
can become clean by washing, Romanies, on the other hand, have three
categories, /wuzho/ clean, /melalo/ dirty and /mahrime/
defiled/polluted/taboo. Traditional Romanies tend to see themselves as
a pure caste and all outsiders as potential sources of pollution. To a
thinking person, this would seem indicative an original high cast while
any connection with prostitution results in severe social censure and
banishment from the group among the most traditional Roma and Sinti.
Less traditional Romani groups also often have strict codes of social
behaviour and of what is clean and what is defiling, like the /mokerdi/
rules of the English Romanichels, the /palechedo/ of the Sinti and the
/magyaripe/ of the /Polska Roma/ along with the fear of outside
pollution from non-Romanies, though not perhaps as rigid as that of the
/Kalderash/, /Churara/, /Lovara/, /Machwaya/ etc. Again, the term used
to define the outsider is /Gadjo/Gadzho/, etc, depending on the dialect.
Linguistic research connects its origin with Sanskrit /garhya/
domestic and by deduction, a person of low cast through Prakrit
/gajha/ and not as some dilettantes have insisted. from the Ghazni in
Mahmud Ghazni. Among the nomadic Sansis and Sikligars of the Punjab,
/gajjha/ means simply farmer. Since traditional modern Roma see
themselves as purer or of a higher caste than the non-Roma and who feel
they can be polluted by too close contact with /Gadje/, it would appear
that /Gadjo/ signifies a person of lower caste, which certainly belies
the theory that Rom is derived from /Dom/. Grellman and his peers seem
to have overlooked this purity and defilement aspect of the Romani
culture in an era when in Romani eyes, defiled non-Romani peasants kept
domestic fowl and animals in their hovels and even the wealthier people,
probably including /Herr Grellman/ himself, often gave their dinner
plates to their pet dog to polish off the remains of their dinner! The
plate could then be washed clean and re-used to serve tomorrows
dinner! Among the Roma, such a plate would be destroyed as being
/mahrime/ and thus capable of defilement.
Again, all words in Romani dialects today that have to do with a settled
community with land and agriculture are words brought from India, for
example /gav/ village, /phuv/ land, /kher/ house, /wudar/ door,
/guruv/ bull/ox, /gurumni/ cow, /khaini/ chicken, /giv/
grain/wheat, etc. On the other hand, words one would assume Indian
nomads to have needed and preserved including the wild animals and birds
(except for /chiriklo/ generic bird) are words borrowed from languages
outside of India such as camp, tent, trail, spring, tiger, elephant,
eagle, vulture, etc. Furthermore, we have military terms in Romani such
as /xanro/ straight sword, /tover/ (now axe or cleaver but related to
Hindi /tulwar/, a curved sword), /busht/ spear , /khuro/ horse, and
/patav/ leggings, leg bindings, or puttees. Rajput cavalry wrapped
their legs in puttees (/patave/) or strips of cloth to prevent them from
chaffing against the rope stirrups they used. Why would nomads without
horses need words such as these and why would they preserve them once

outside of India unless they had left India in a military capacity along
with camp followers to repair and service their military equipment?
Admittedly, nobody knows how many Indian words became lost in the
thousand-year Diaspora to be replaced with non-Indian borrowings but
nevertheless, those which remain present many clues as to our history.
For instance, as mentioned, Armenian /grai/ draft horse shows that we
encountered horses as working animals in Armenia while /petalo/
horseshoe from Byzantine Greek tells us we encountered paved roads and
iron horseshoes in Byzantium.
Now, after almost three centuries of being erroneously defined by
non-Romani scholars and gypsylorists who saddled us with their versions
of our alleged history, Romani and non-Romani scholars are finally on
the right track and we hope that this line of research will be followed
by others and will finally find its way into the history books and
elsewhere. Many pieces are missing but the main story, the skeleton, has
been defined. The rest will follow through future resesrch and the
former mythology and interesting theories of scholars and dilettantes
will be relegated to the realm of fairy tales. We have for too long been
erroneously defined by outsiders now we must correctly define ourselves!

*SOURCES*
Crooke, W. /The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and
Oudh/, in four volumes. Calcutta, 1896: Office of the Superintendent of
Governmental Printing, India.
Fraser, Angus. /The Gypsies/. Oxford, UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwall, 1996.
Hancock, Ian, /The Pariah Syndrome; An account of Gypsy Slavery and
Persecution/. 1987, Anne Arbor: Karoma Publishers, Inc.
Hancock, Ian. The Emergence of Romani As A Kon Outside of India.
London1999: Excerpt from /Essays In Honour of Donald Kenrick on the
Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday/, Ed. Thomas Acton.
Hancock, Ian. /We Are The Romani People: Ame Sam E Rromane Dzene/.
Hatfield 2002: Hertfordshire U.P.
Leblon, Bernard. /Gypsies and Flamenco/, Hatfield, 1995, University of
Hertfordshire press.
Lee, Ronald. Romani Origin and Diaspora: From Ghaznavids to Nazis,
section 3, /The Romani Diaspora in Canada/, Class Course book, New
College, University of Toronto, Canadian Scholars Press Inc, Toronto, 2007
Marsh, Adrian. No Promised Land History, Historiography & the Origins
of the Gypsies. 2008, Istanbul & London. Thesis: submitted for
consideration for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the school of
Humanities, University of Greenwich, London, 2008
Marushiakova, Elena and Popov, Veselin. /Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire/.
Hatfield 2001, U.H.P
Nicolle, David. /Medieval Warfare Source Book: Christian Europe and its
Neighbours/. London 1996: Brockhampton Press,.
Rishi, Weer R. /Multilingual Romani Dictionary/, Chandigarh 1974: Roma

Publications, Indian Institute of Romani Studies, University of Chandigarh.

Singh, Sher. /The Sansis of the Punjab (A Gypsy and De-notified Tribe of
Rajput Origin)/. Delhi, 1965, Munshiram Manoharlal
Singh, Sher. /The Sikligars of Punjab (A Gypsy Tribe)/, Delhi &
Jollundur City, 1966. Sterling Publishers (P) Ltd.
Tod, James, edited with an introduction and notes by Crooke, William.
/Annals And Antiquities of Rajasthan or the Central and Western Rajput
States of India/. London 1920, Oxford UP
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