Romani Origins & Diaspora

THE ROMA: ORIGINS AND DIASPORA

by Ronald Lee

For almost five-hundred years after we appeared in Europe in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, Europeans were asking where we had come from. By then, the Roma people had almost forgotten their origins in North-Central India although some Roma did tell Italians who asked them in the Italian City States in the 15th century. This has been buried in the archives until recently.

Recent studies conducted by Indian scholars in India and by Romani scholars have finally confirmed the origins of the Romani people. 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 ad 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 workers and artisans who did all the work for the ruling warrior caste. Some were farmers working with animals or bred and trained horses for the warrior caste who fought on horseback as cavalry. others were metal smiths, some entertainers, others craftspeople, silver smiths, gold smiths or laundry men and women, in other words, all the people needed to maintain a working society of people.

Each family and clan of the sub-castes had a trade or profession which was practised by the family and clan as a whole. This was part of the Hindu religion called the Laws of Manu where everyone belonged to a particular caste which did a particular type of work. This is how the Roma were in Europe in the past, each family and clan had a work skill which was passed on from one generation to the next, music, horse-trading, brick making, coppersmithing or whatever. Many groups in this supporting population belonged to a collection of castes called Domba in the plural ( Dom (man) and Domni (woman) in the singular ) 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 or Thagar exists in Romani in some dialects today meaning "leader."

In the early 11th Century ad, a Muslim kingdom arose in what is now Afghanistan called the Ghaznavid Empire. These Ghaznavids began raiding into India under their leader Mahmud Ghazni 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 Confederacy. During this time, some Rajput groups were forced to migrate or move elsewhere to escape the destruction, massacres and slavery. Some moved South, some West but one or more groups decided to move North into the Upper-Indus Valley through Kashmir. They found refuge in the extreme North of India where the local people spoke Dardic languages. Here, the refugees lived for a couple of generations or more and picked up some words and grammatical elements of Dardic which was added to their Sanskritic language from North-Central India.

The Muslims from Afghanistan then moved up into the area where the ancestors of the Roma had established themselves and began raiding and plundering again. With no avenue of escape left, the harassed ancestors of the Roma then passed through the Shandur or Baroghil Pass into Asia and followed the Silk Road, used by caravans of traders, to ancient Persia. They remained in Persia for a few generations, then made their way into the Empire of Trebizond on the Black Sea where the local people spoke Armenian. The Roma then added Armenian words to the Persian words they had learned in Persia.

The invasion of the Seljuk Turks then forced the Roma to leave Trebizond and they escaped into the Byzantine Empire around the city of Constantinople ( now Istanbul). Here we learned many Greek words. By this time, the original caste system of India had disappeared and the mixed group of tribes, castes and peoples who had left India had become one people speaking a common language which had by now become proto Romani. Since the Domba group composed the largest number of people and because they were the ones most suited to be able to survive by their skills outside of India, they became predominate and we now called ourselves Roma. The original D sound of Sanskrit had changed to an R during the migration from India as the original Indo-Aryan sounds were modified by surrounding non-Romani languages we had to speak to communicate with the local people. Originally, our language had three D sounds but one of these was changed to an R after we left India.

From Byzantium, the Roma began to enter the Balkans by the 13th century and some groups slowly moved through the Slavic-speaking regions picking up words of old Serbian and other Slavic languages until they reached Rumania where we added a few Rumanian words to the Romani language. Other groups of Roma remained in the Balkans. This part of our history cannot be disputed because all Romani dialects spoken today from Wales in Britain to Siberia contain these same loan words from Dardic, Persian. Armenian, Byzantine Greek, Old Slavic and Rumanian. Had the exodus from India been through Afghanistan, as European scholars still maintain, Romani would have loan words from Pushtu and the other languages spoken there and could not have picked up the Dardic words and grammatical elements from the Upper Indus Valley. Also, Afghanistan was the centre of the Ghaznavid Empire, the people who had driven the ancestors of the Roma from India. Would Roma fleeing the Nazi Holocaust in World War II have tried to escape by fleeing back into Nazi Germany?.

After reaching Rumania, groups of Roma drifted off in different directions in small groups, each with its leader, and made their way into all countries of Europe in the 15th century. By 1500 we were everywhere from the British Isles and Spain, as far east as Poland, as far North as Norway and still as far South as Greece. Many Roma remained in Wallachia and Moldavia where they were soon gradually enslaved and were held in bondage until the Emancipation of 1865. Historians refer to this exodus, migration and dispersal of the Roma as origins and Diaspora. We originated in North-Central India, migrated via the Upper-Indus Valley, Persia, the Caucuses, Armenia, Byzantium, Greece, the Kingdom of Serbia and what is now Rumania to Eastern Europe and then split off into smallish groups and made our way into all the countries of Europe.

Up to this point, we had travelled more or less together as one people and spoke a common Romani language. Once we dispersed into all the countries of Europe, we lost our unity as one people and our common language slowly deteriorated into a large number of dialects because we lived in different countries of Europe, were surrounded by non-Roma who spoke many languages which we borrowed from and because Roma living in Russia never met Roma from Greece, Bohemia or Britain and vice versa. 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. Originally, when we entered Europe, we were one people called Roma with an origin in 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 sister language of a group of Sanskrit-based languages such as Rajasthani, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Multani and others. All of these languages developed in parallel. Linguistic evidence shows that Romani developed in parallel to them until the 11th century ad. Then, the sister languages continued to develop in parallel to one another in India while Romani did not. It was influenced by languages outside of India. Thus, there is no doubt that our ancestors left India in the 11th century AD. Had groups of Roma left India 500 years earlier or later their Indian element of their Romani dialects would not be in parallel to other Romani dialects nor with the sister languages still spoken in India as they were grammatically in the 11th century AD.

European scholars tried to define us by what we were in Europe. They assumed we had always been a caste of nomads even in India. This does not hold true. All words in Romani dialects today that have to do with a settled community with roots are words brought from India, for example gav (village), puv (land), ker (house), guruv (bull, ox), gurumni (cow), kaini (chicken), etc.

On the other hand, words one would assume Indian nomads to have needed and preserved including the wild animals and birds are words borrowed from languages outside of India such as camp, tent, trail, spring, tiger, elephant

Furthermore, we have military words in Romani such as xanro (sword), tover ( now axe or cutting tool but related to 'tulwar"), busht (spear), kuro ( horse), and patav (leggings, leg bindings, or "puttees"). Rajput cavalry wrapped their legs in strips of cloth to prevent them from chaffing against the rope stirrups they used . Why would nomads needs words such as this and why preserve them unless the Rajputs had led their followers out of India and maintained their military prowess long enough to get them to the Middle East.

Romani history must be written by Roma and it is to be hoped that the young generation of Roma today in many countries who are becoming educated will collectively pursue their origins and history until the non-Roma mythology is demolished and the true story of the Roma is established.

We have been erroneously defined by outsiders - now we must correctly define ourselves.