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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 Roma, 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 Punjabi 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 are from. In all the time I have spent in Harangos, I have never once heard a spontaneous conversation about the geographica1 or historical roots of their own people

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 heath 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 Rroma 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 acknowledgment 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 Rroma 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 Rroma 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 Romani or 'Gypsy' dialects and 'languages'. Close con- nections 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 have indigenous origins as members of the sedentary population (43).

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