Roma Gypsies - The original travelers

Arts & Culture History
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***‘In Gypsy culture, a ‘millionaire’ is not a person with a million in his bank account, but someone who has spent a million, though he might now be a pauper.’

I read that these gypsies who are mostly found in Eastern Europe were actually from Lahore, Rajisthan, Multan region and todate they got common vocabulary of Punajbi.

Roma Gypsies: The original travellers - DAWN.COM

They say that the Gypsies migrated to Europe about a thousand to a thousand and five hundred years ago from the areas of Sindh and Rajasthan. There is a myth that tells about how the Sassanid Monarch, Bahram Gul, who ruled Persia during the 5th century, imported around 10,000 musicians and dancers from Hindustan, and established their colonies all over his country. According to popular theories, many of these ‘ancient Meerasis’ continued their migration to Byzantine and Europe and are the predecessors of the Gypsies.

Certainly the Gypsies of Europe today have music and dance in their veins. They have deeply influenced the music of Russia, the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The largest tribe of Gypsies are settled in Central Europe, and call themselves ‘Roma’. Their cousins in Northern Europe call themselves ‘Zintis’, which could be derived from ‘Sindhis’, since their ancestors migrated from around the Sindhu River.

The Gypsies who arrived in Spain later integrated with the Sephardic Jews and Moorish Arabs, and gave birth to Flamenco music. Indeed Flamenco dance today can be seen to closely resemble Indian classical dance.

The Romany language is a strange mixture of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian, Turkic and Slavic languages. Counting in Romany from ‘one to 10’ is the same as in Urdu, as well as several words, such as, ‘ankh’, ‘naak’, kaan’, ‘paani’… The features of the Roma people stand out in Europe. They look more Indian and Pakistani than anything else, though usually more rugged and defiant.

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Re: Roma Gypsies - The original travelers

interesting

Why the children of the Romany are made to suffer - Europe - World - The Independent

Their blonde hair and blue eyes marked them as unusual, extraordinary even. And when authorities were alerted to their presence in Romany communities police acted swiftly, and incorrectly. But as the Irish police ombudsman began an investigation into the removal of two children, the family of one of the girls described how they had been left traumatised, and accused the police of racism.

In the first case, a seven-year-old girl was taken from her home in Dublin after a neighbour reported that the couple from Romania, who have lived in Ireland for 12 years, were dark while the daughter was blonde – like the blonde girl Maria in Greece whose case became a cause? célèbre a few days before. Subsequently a two-year-old boy was taken from his Romany parents’ home in Athlone for the same reason. The children were returned to their homes this week, after tests proved that they shared the same DNA as the adults who claimed to be their parents.

**Romany is the neutral English term for the traditionally itinerant community, believed to be some 11 million strong, often known as Gypsies, who migrated from India to Europe via the Middle East in the 15th century.
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An 18-year-old sister of the girl removed from her home in Dublin was indignant about the way the family had been treated, saying the whole family was traumatised, and accused the police of racism. “They took her just because she had blue eyes and blonde hair,” she said. “Most Romanian people have blue eyes. We were all traumatised. I used to be blonde when I was little, and my mum was blonde when she was little.”

Meanwhile police in Bulgaria have questioned a Bulgarian couple suspected of being the biological parents of Maria, the small blonde girl spotted by Greek police when they raided a Romany camp near Farsala, in central Greece. The couple in Greece, Christos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, insist that the girl was given to them legitimately. They have been charged with child abduction.

**The Greek case once again focused attention on a community which over the centuries has frequently suffered persecution at the hands of the settled people they call “Gajé”. The problem has become far more acute since the collapse of communism.
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Under communism, in countries such as Hungary, Romanies were treated not as an ethnic minority with their own ways but as a social problem to be solved through forcible integration. They were forced to move into cheap public housing estates and to work in state-owned factories; generally they were found in the meanest housing and the lowliest jobs.

**But when communism collapsed, this vaunted solution to the “Gypsy problem” was revealed as one of communism’s many delusions. The factories closed down. And having lost their traditional occupations such as metal salvage and horse trading, and without any useful modern trades to take their place, the Romanies were reduced to gaming the welfare system on a grand scale and small-time criminality.
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The resentment of the Gajé communities – resentment which had only been hibernating – once again emerged as a malign political force, leading to the emergence of anti-Romany vigilante groups, and stoking the popularity of extreme right-wing parties such as Hungary’s Jobbik. Those on the far right had not forgotten that Hitler’s solution to “the Gypsy problem” was the same as his answer to “the Jewish problem”. Hundreds of thousands of Romanies were killed in the Nazi death camps.

The opening of Europe’s borders with the introduction of Schengen has merely transplanted the problem from eastern to western Europe. The Maria saga, of little consequence in itself, is an indication of how inflammatory the growing Romany presence has become in the countries to which they have flocked.
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It was President Sarkozy, of Hungarian (but not Romany) origin himself, who brought down the fury of the human rights lobby in 2009 when he ordered the summary expulsion of thousands of Romanies from France. **He was responding with a populist gesture to demands from his right-wing constituency, to avoid being outflanked by the National Front. And under President Holland, too, the Romanies and their errant ways are becoming an ever graver political, and police, problem.

On 11 October in Nancy, eastern France, 26 Romanies were convicted of forcing children to steal sums amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros. Only one of them was acquitted. The details of their crimes stunned France, reinforcing old prejudices.

Three family clans from Croatia were accused of grooming children as young as 11 to steal. Once they had proven their skill by filleting tourists and other affluent Gajé they were sold, the asking price depending on their ability as thieves. Those who were most adept fetched tens of thousands of euros. The gang committed 100 robberies in France, Belgium and Germany in 2011.

The usual reflex of compassion for the “impoverished” Romanies was undermined by the testimony of investigators who visited the clan’s imposing marble villas in Croatia, and itemised the expensive brand goods in their caravans in northern France.

The classic liberal response to the Romany challenge is the cry of “integration”. But of course that was tried under communism, admittedly with an iron fist, and with paltry long-term results. Nonetheless, the situation of the community in Hungary is strikingly different from Italy, for example, where they have been present for almost equally long, albeit in smaller numbers.

When this writer researched the Romany issue in Hungary two years ago, he found numerous fully integrated Romanies in government service and four Romanies sitting in parliament. The only Romany MEP is a Hungarian woman called Livia Jaroka.

Yet the fierce antagonism provoked in western Europe by the criminal gangs makes it more difficult for integrationist initiatives to gain political traction. In Spain the effort to get all Romanies into secondary education and decent housing has produced results. Elsewhere, especially in France, it seems easier to yield to the demand that they be expelled en masse.

The Romanies’ defence lawyer in Nancy, Alain Behr, told the court: “This community crosses time and space with its traditions… They have preserved their tradition, which is one of survival.” They operate, he said, in “the style of the Middle Ages”. Yet his defendants’ predatory ways makes appreciation of the Romanies’ special charms much harder

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A History of the Romani People | National Geographic Channel

According to scholar Ian Hancock, there are about 12 million people worldwide who belong to the ethnic group known as the Romani, more commonly known to outsiders as Gypsies. Most Romani—about eight to 10 million of them–live in Europe, where they are that continent’s biggest minority; in some countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, they amount to as much as 12 percent of the total population. In addition, there are Romani scattered across Asia, Africa, North and South America and Australia as well.

But while the Romani are numerous, their precise origins have long been mysterious. When the Romani showed up in medieval Europe 700 years ago, their dark skin led some Europeans of the time to assume they were Turks or Egyptians; in Russia and Romania, they were referred to as “pharoah’s people.” By one legend, they are descendants of 12,000 musicians who were given as a gift to Bahram Gur, the ruler of Persia, in the Fifth Century AD. As the story goes, after just a year, Bahram Gur grew tired of his entertainers and sent them away, on a journey that eventually led to the far corners of the Earth. Other, even more fantastic explanations have portrayed the Romani as descendants of survivors of the lost city of Atlantis. Some even have imagined them as the heirs of a prehistoric race of nomadic horsemen that spawned other peoples such as the Bedouin, the Basques and the Native Americans.

As Hancock details in his 2002 book “We Are the Romani People,” however, linguistic detective work, historical events and in recent years a growing body of genetic evidence point to India as the Romani people’s ancestral homeland. The grammar and vocabulary of the Romani language both bear similarities to languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent around 1,000 AD, which suggests that Romani ancestors once lived there but left roughly around the time that a Muslim army (known as the Ghaznavids) invaded India in an effort to spread the Islamic faith. Romani ancestors may have been taken away as slaves or unwilling conscripts to the Muslim forces, or they may have fled as refugees.

**Either way, according to Romani historian David Crowe, by the 1100s, eastern European historical documents bore references to a new group of immigrants, who worked as skilled metal craftsman, musicians, and soldiers. Some eastern Europeans initially saw the Romani as useful new residents. Within a couple of centuries, however, the Romani people were in a far more dire situation, most especially in the Balkans. Laws were passed barring Romani from marrying spouses from other groups, and many Romani were seized and forced into slavery, a practice that persisted for five hundred years into the mid-1800s.
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Those Romani fortunate enough at least to remain free became persecuted outcasts, excluded from European society and forced to remain on the move. According to historian James Minahan, author of “One Europe, Many Nations: A Historical Dictionary of European National Groups,” Romani were subject to many of the same sort of restrictions and penalties exacted against the Jews, another hated group. And like the Jews, the Romani were accused falsely of a litany of heinous crimes, ranging from involvement in the crucifixion of Jesus to child-stealing and cannibalism. Despite obvious links between the Romani language and India, some even argued that that the Romani were not really a separate ethnic group, but merely an amalgam of criminals and lowlifes from mainstream European society who darkened their faces with clay or berry juice to appear different. In some ways, the ultimate culmination of that anti-Romani hatred came during World War II, when the Nazis decided to exterminate the Romani people altogether. When the war ended in 1945, an estimated two million Romani had perished, including 500,000 who had been sent to the Nazi death camps.

While the Romani people proved resilient enough to survive even the horrors inflicted by Hitler, in postwar Europe they still faced exclusion, prejudice and poverty. In an article on the World Bank’s website, former World Bank president Sir James David Wolfensohn and philanthropist George Soros note that European Romani often are forced to subsist in ramshackle settlements, and are denied employment and hospital treatment because of their ethnicity. Romani children even have been forced to attend schools for disabled children, even when they have no mental or physical disabilities. The average European Romani lifespan is 10 to 15 years below that of other Europeans.

But there is room for optimism about the Romani people’s future. The United Nations, the European Commission, and other international organizations have begun pressuring countries to end their exclusionary policies and to give the Romani people an opportunity to participate more fully in society. In addition, European Romani have formed organizations such as the Roma National Congress to represent their interests and press for change.

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Re: Roma Gypsies - The original travelers

gypsies have always been linked with crimes like kidnapping

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Re: Roma Gypsies - The original travelers

They get involved in crimes because they have been oppressed and been social outcast by Europeans due to their skin color.
It is said that they did not choose nomadic life style, rather they were forced to leave any place they stayed.

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Re: Roma Gypsies - The original travelers

seems correct

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan

LAHORE: The term ‘Gypsies of Lahore’ has come to describe people of different regions of the Punjab who finally settled in Lahore. It was here in the city’s posh localities that they chose to set up their camps and huts and make a permanent home for themselves. They are different from nomadic gypsy tribes who are constantly on the move, never choosing to settle in any one place.

The gypsies have been living in Defence, Faisal Town, Garden Town, Allama Iqbal Town, Johar Town, Model Town and Gulberg for more than 20 years. They believe in a caste system and most claim they are Rajputs, Mughals or Sheikhs.
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“We do not travel to other parts of the country. We only leave when the government launches an operation and forces us to leave our homes,” said Noora, a gypsy living in the city.**