Hancock's book attempts to correct European disdain of Gypsy history. Two other recent books with the same objective are W. R. Rishi's Roma: The Punjabi Emigrants in Europe (Punjabi University Press, 1996) and Isabel Fonseca's Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey (Random House, 1996). Also remarkable are the films of Tony Gatlif, of French Gypsy descent, especially his documentary Latcho Drom: A Musical History of the Gypsies from India to Spain, which won the Cannes award in 1994.

When Isabel Fonseca, an American journalist, set out to write her book in 1991, she "had in mind that the Gypsies were 'the New Jews of Eastern Europe.'" She lived with Gypsy families for four years while researching in the libraries of many European countries. Her conclusion: "Gypsies alongside with the Jews are ancient scapegoats."

Traditionally, Gypsies did not keep written records and not all groups sustained an oral history. The research on their origin began in the late 1700s with a systematic philological analysis of their language, Romani, which was then firmly established as a Sanskritic language. Words like dand, (tooth), mun, (mouth), akha (eyes) are identical with those in Punjabi spoken in northwest India. If confirmation were needed, it is readily provided by the Gypsy music's use of the Indian ragas such as Bhairavi, Mulkausa, and Kalyani as well as the bol (the rhythmic syllables -- tak, dhin, dha -- imitating drum beats).

Like many European writers, Fonseca erroneously states that the Gypsies are from the Dom group of tribes, still extant in India, making their living as wandering musicians, metalworkers, and basket-makers. She further errs in assuming that the Gypsy designation for themselves as Roma is derived from Dom, the outcaste tribe in India. In fact, Roma is a variation of ramante, a Punjabi word meaning moving, wandering. This etymology is cogently discussed in W. R. Rishi's book, tracing the origin of the Roma to the 500,000 soldiers and their camp followers taken as prisoners of war by Muhamad Ghaznvi in 1001 from the Punjab to Afghanistan and ordered to convert to Islam under the sword. Many of them resisted by escaping westward to the Christian lands of Armenia and Greece. To this day, the Roma use the disparaging word Gajo, derived from Ghazi -- the honorific Koran bestows on Muslims who have killed infidels (Rishi, p 15). The scholarly consensus, confirmed by new genetic evidence, is that the Roma are from the warrior castes of the Punjab.

Although the Roma arrived in Europe as asylum seekers in the thirteenth century, fleeing from the menace of forcible Islamic conversions by the Turks, they were, ironically, accused of being advance spies for the Turks, and persecuted again. They were also mistaken as Egyptians, whence the folklore origin of the term Gypsy. In my opinion, the likely etymology is Punjab-say -- from Punjab, which was what the earliest immigrants to Persia must have replied when asked, "Where have you come from?" By the time, they reached Byzantium, the new locals heard Punjab-say as Jabsay, Gypsy. The locals took Gypsy to mean from Egypt, a country they had heard of.

The history of the Roma in Europe, gleaned, for the most part, from court- and church-records and from rare academic publications, is horrifying - it is Europe's heart of darkness. In Moldova and Wallachia, for five centuries, they were bought and sold as slaves. Hancock (p 26) cites J. A. Vaillant who wrote about the estimated 600,000 slaves at the time of their emancipation (1864): "Those who shed tears of compassion for the Negroes of Africa, of whom the American Republic makes its slaves, should give a kind thought to this history of the Gypsies of India, of whom the European monarchies make their 'Negroes.' These men, wanderers from Asia, will never again be itinerant; these slaves shall be free."

One of the examples Fonseca (p 88) cites is the 1783 dissertation published by Heinrich Grellman of Goettingen University. In his book, Grellman describes an event of the previous year in Hont county, Hungary: "The case involved more than 150 Gypsies, forty-one of whom were tortured into confessions of cannibalism. Fifteen men were hanged, six broken on the wheel, two quartered, and eighteen women beheaded -- before an investigation ordered by the Hapsburg monarch Joseph II revealed that all of the supposed victims were still alive." The missing villagers had simply gone off on a holiday without informing their neighbors.

During World War II, the Nazis exterminated 1.5 million Roma. "In January 1940, the first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust took place when 250 Romani children from Brno were murdered in Buchenwald, where they were used as guinea-pigs to test the efficacy of the Zyklon-B gas crystals that were later used in the gas chambers" (Hancock, p 42). At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis' lawyers argued that the killing of the Gypsies was justified since they had been punished as criminals, not as a race. There was no one to speak for the Gypsies, and the international tribunal accepted this as exonerating defense! Ah, humanity.

In recent decades, a Gypsy intelligentsia has begun to emerge. Ian Hancock was instrumental in bringing about, in April 1994, the first-ever Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., on the human-rights abuses of the Gypsies. Earlier, after prolonged efforts, Hancock had succeeded in the Gypsy inclusion on the council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the inclusion adamantly opposed by Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize--winner! Fonseca, herself an American Jew, noted that "it was only after the 1986 resignation of President Elie Wiesel" that one Gypsy was allowed onto the museum's 65-member council, the council comprised more than thirty Jews as well as Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians among others (p 276) . Hancock notes that the appointment was first made by President Reagan in 1987, but in 2002 "taken away by the Bush administration. Once again, Romanies have been denied recognition of history in the Holocaust" (p 50).

Another leading Roma intellectual is Saip Jusuf, who authored one of the first Romani grammars, and is a principal leader in Skopje, Macedonia, which has the largest Gypsy settlement anywhere. Jusuf helped organize the first world Romany Congress in 1971 in London. The conference was financed in part by the Government of India, and at its urging the U.N. agreed to recognize the Roma as a distinct ethnic group, and later accorded voting rights to the International Romani Union.

In an interview with Fonseca, Jusuf, having reconverted from Islam to his ancestral Hinduism, joyously displayed his new icon collection of Ganesha, Parvati, and Durga. His friend, the poet Ramche Mustupha showed his passport. Under "citizenship" he recorded Yugoslav; under "nationality" Hindu. These lost children of India, having found their ancestral land, are very proud of its nine-thousand-year old civilization -- the oldest continuous civilization in the world - "Baro Thanh" -Romani and Punjabi for "the great country" (Rishi, p 3). Fonseca observed that "many of the young women, fed up with the baggy-bottomed Turkish trousers they were supposed to wear, have begun to wear saris."

Unlike other beleaguered and marginalized minorities, the Rom are not seeking a homeland of their own, a Romanistan, in or outside India. The Roma are resisting, as they always have, to maintain the freedom for a life-style of their choosing. "To allow this to the Gypsies," President Vaclav Havel, in Prague, said, "is the litmus test of a civil society." However, Havel's was a lonely voice. All over Central and East Europe "Death to the Gypsies" graffiti can be observed. Since the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslavakia, numerous Gypsies have been murdered.

Fonseca (p 222) cites several specific cases of terrorism against the Gypsies during the 1990's. In February 1995, in Oberwart, Austria, a town seventy-five miles south of Vienna, four Gypsy men were murdered. A pipe bomb had been concealed behind a sign that said, in Gothic tombstone lettering, 'Gypsies go back to India.' When the Gypsy men tried to take the sign down, the bomb exploded in their faces. The first response of the Austrian police was to search the victims' own settlement for weapons; the papers reported: 'Gypsies killed by own bomb.'

The resurging repression of the Gypsies is Europe's continuing crime against humanity. At the Nazi trials in Nuremberg, there was no one to speak on behalf of the Gypsies. Now, the Gypsies have at least these eloquent books exposing Europe's recrudescing genocidal threats.

C. J. Singh is a Punjab-born Stanford Ph.D. in psychology, currently pursuing an MFA degree in fiction-writing at Mills College. He can be contacted at drcj@berkeley.edu.

http://www.romarights.net/content/human-rights-gypsies