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Resolution

Education, both of Rroma 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 Rroma 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 l3th or l4th 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 Rroma 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 Rroma. 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 kez again, both of them native Indian terms. The fact that there is practically no influence on Romani from the Truck 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).

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