Sunday, May 11, 2003		Books

Romanis, beyond nationhood
Surjit Hans

We are the Romani People
by Ian Hancock. University of Hertfordshire Press (in collaboration with the Gypsy Research Centre of the University Rene Descartes, Paris).
Pages 186. 'A39.99.

IAN is an English Romani who qualified directly for a PhD degree under the short-lived affirmative programme of the Wilson government. He is now a lecturer in Texas University.

Gypsy is an offensive word to the Romanis. Henceforth, I shall speak of Romani life and history.

Romanis are supposed originally to have been the mercenaries and camp followers of Mahmud Gazni. The Seljuk Turks replaced the Pathans. Instead of turning back, the future Romanis pushed into modern Turkey. Seljuk Turks started marauding the Byzantine, the Eastern Roman Empire of the Greek Orthodox Church. Starting from 1027 they finally overran Byzantine in 1453. This led to Romani diaspora in Europe.

As they went along, the Romanis picked up the language of the country they stayed in. The Romani language shares fifty words each with Urdu and Persian. It has 250 Greek words, a result of two-and-a-half-century stay in Byzantine.

The Greek vocabulary of Romani ironmongery means that they learnt the trade in Byzantine. For the next 500 years Romanis were slaves in modern Romania. The Revolution of 1848 freed them for three months.

The Romani history is an epitome of suffering. Nazis killed about six million Jews. It is not widely known that in the very gas chambers from five to 15 lakh Romanis perished. The exact figure of death would never be known. There was no Romani representation in the Nuremburg Trials of the Nazis. Germany has paid reparations to the Jewish survivors, but not to the Romanis to date. For anyone to have a Jewish grandparent condemned the person to the gas chamber. In the case of Romanis the line of extinction extended to the great grandparents. Had the Jewish standard of death been applied to the Romanis, about 20,000 of them would have been spared.

Like the Sikhs, the Romanis are an international community. About a quarter to one-third of them live outside their main stronghold in Eastern Europe. From about 16 million Sikhs, a million live outside Punjab. Both are vexed with the question of identity. In recent years Romanis have produced their own intelligentsia. Rejecting both assimilation and separation they are seized with a more creative response of how to keep one’s identity in an alien power structure—a question immediately pertinent for one million Sikhs abroad.

Paradoxically, the backward Romanis can be an inspiration to the most advanced secularists. The Romanis have no church, no priests, no scripture, no redemption to bother. Yet they believe in ji (a Punjabi word, Sanskrit jiv), meaning spiritual strength.

Romani scholarship has made immense progress in historical methodology. Lexico-statistical analysis of Romani language has mapped out Romani route from India to Europe. The genome study has established that the Slovak Romanis are nearest to the Punjabis and Rajasthanis.

A language has a grammar. Romani is unique in having two grammars, one for words of Indian origin and one for words from European languages. Abstract nouns are made by suffixing pan (Punjabi/Hindi) and mos (Greek).

The Romani intelligentsia are working on the idea of non-territorial nation. It was vaguely there in pre-modern political thought. But its exposition in the present day world would be a landmark of thought.