This chapter contains in abridged form the substance of papers on
the origin of the gypsies and their language, read before the London
Philological Society; also of another paper read before the Oriental
Congress at Florence in 1878; and a resume of these published in
the London Saturday Review.
It has been repeated until the remark has become accepted as a sort
of truism, that the gypsies are a mysterious race, and that nothing is
known of their origin. And a few years ago this was true; but within
those years so much has been discovered that at present there is really
no more mystery attached to the beginning of these nomads than is
peculiar to many other peoples. What these discoveries or grounds of
belief are I shall proceed to give briefly, my limits not permitting
the detailed citation of authorities. First, then, there appears to be
every reason for believing with Captain Richard Burton that the Jats of
Northwestern India furnished so large a proportion of the emigrants or
exiles who, from the tenth century, went out of India westward, that
there is very little risk in assuming it as an hypothesis, at least,
that they formed the Hauptstamm of the gypsies of Europe. What
other elements entered into these, with whom we are all familiar, will
be considered presently. These gypsies came from India, where caste is
established and callings are hereditary even among out-castes. It is
not assuming too much to suppose that, as they evinced a marked
aptitude for certain pursuits and an inveterate attachment to certain
habits, their ancestors had in these respects resembled them for ages.
These pursuits and habits were that
They were tinkers, smiths, and farriers.
They dealt in horses, and were naturally familiar with them.
They were without religion.
They were unscrupulous thieves.
Their women were fortune-tellers, especially by chiromancy.
They ate without scruple animals which had died a natural death,
being especially fond of the pig, which, when it has thus been
“butchered by God,” is still regarded even by prosperous gypsies in
England as a delicacy.
They flayed animals, carried corpses, and showed such aptness for
these and similar detested callings that in several European countries
they long monopolized them.
They made and sold mats, baskets, and small articles of wood.
They have shown great skill as dancers, musicians, singers,
acrobats; and it is a rule almost without exception that there is
hardly a traveling company of such performers or a theatre, in Europe
or America, in which there is not at least one person with some Romany
blood.
Their hair remains black to advanced age, and they retain it longer
than do Europeans or ordinary Orientals.
They speak an Aryan tongue, which agrees in the main with that of
the Jats, but which contains words gathered from other Indian sources.
This is a consideration of the utmost importance, as by it alone can we
determine what was the agglomeration of tribes in India which formed
the Western gypsy.
Admitting these as the peculiar pursuits of the race, the next step
should be to consider what are the principal nomadic tribes of gypsies
in India and Persia, and how far their occupations agree with those of
the Romany of Europe. That the Jats probably supplied the main stock
has been admitted. This was a bold race of Northwestern India, which at
one time had such power as to obtain important victories over the
caliphs. They were broken and dispersed in the eleventh century by
Mahmoud, many thousands of them wandering to the West. They were
without religion, “of the horse, horsey,” and notorious thieves. In
this they agree with the European gypsy. But they are not habitual
eaters of mullo balor, or “dead pork;” they do not devour
everything like dogs. We cannot ascertain that the Jat is specially a
musician, a dancer, a mat and basket maker, a rope-dancer, a
bear-leader, or a peddler. We do not know whether they are peculiar in
India among the Indians for keeping their hair unchanged to old age, as
do pure-blood English gypsies. All of these things are, however,
markedly characteristic of certain different kinds of wanderers, or
gypsies, in India. From this we conclude, hypothetically, that the Jat
warriors were supplemented by other tribes,—chief among these may have
been the Dom,—and that the Jat element has at present disappeared, and
been supplanted by the lower type.
The Doms are a race of gypsies found from Central India to the far
northern frontier, where a portion of their early ancestry appears as
the Domarr, and are supposed to be pre-Aryan. In “The People of India,”
edited by J. Forbes Watson and J. W. Kaye (India Museum, 1868), we are
told that the appearance and modes of life of the Doms indicate a
marked difference from those of the people who surround them (in
Behar). The Hindus admit their claim to antiquity. Their designation in
the Shastras is Sopuckh, meaning dog-eater. They are wanderers; they
make baskets and mats, and are inveterate drinkers of spirits, spending
all their earnings on it. They have almost a monopoly as to burning
corpses and handling all dead bodies. They eat all animals which have
died a natural death, and are particularly fond of pork of this
description. “Notwithstanding profligate habits, many of them attain
the age of eighty or ninety; and it is not till sixty or sixty-five
that their hair begins to get white.” The Domarr are a mountain race,
nomads, shepherds, and robbers. Travelers speak of them as “gypsies.” A
specimen which we have of their language would, with the exception of
one word, which is probably an error of the transcriber, be
intelligible to any English gypsy, and be called pure Romany. Finally,
the ordinary Dom calls himself a Dom, his wife a Domni, and the being a
Dom, or the collective gypsydom, Domnipana. D in Hindustani is
found as r in English gypsy speech,—e.g., doi, a
wooden spoon, is known in Europe as roi. Now in common Romany we
have, even in London,—
Rom . . . A gypsy.
Romni . . . A gypsy wife.
Romnipen . . . Gypsydom.
Of this word rom I shall have more to say. It may be observed
that there are in the Indian Dom certain distinctly-marked and
degrading features, characteristic of the European gypsy, which are out
of keeping with the habits of warriors, and of a daring Aryan race
which withstood the caliphs. Grubbing in filth as if by instinct,
handling corpses, making baskets, eating carrion, being given to
drunkenness, does not agree with anything we can learn of the Jats. Yet
the European gypsies are all this, and at the same time “horsey” like
the Jats. Is it not extremely probable that during the “out-wandering”
the Dom communicated his name and habits to his fellow-emigrants?
The marked musical talent characteristic of the Slavonian and other
European gypsies appears to link them with the Luri of Persia. These
are distinctly gypsies; that is to say, they are wanderers, thieves,
fortune-tellers, and minstrels. The Shah-Nameh of Firdusi tells us that
about the year 420 A.D. Shankal, the Maharajah of India, sent to Behram
Gour, a ruler of the Sassanian dynasty in Persia, ten thousand
minstrels, male and female, called Luri. Though lands were
allotted to them, with corn and cattle, they became from the beginning
irreclaimable vagabonds. Of their descendants, as they now exist, Sir
Henry Pottinger says:—
“They bear a marked affinity to the gypsies of Europe. {335}
They
speak a dialect peculiar to themselves, have a king to each
troupe,
and are notorious for kidnapping and pilfering. Their principal
pastimes are drinking, dancing, and music. . . . They are
invariably
attended by half a dozen of bears and monkeys that are broke in
to
perform all manner of grotesque tricks. In each company there
are
always two or three members who profess . . . modes of
divining,
which procure them a ready admission into every society.”
This account, especially with the mention of trained bears and
monkeys, identifies them with the Ricinari, or bear-leading gypsies of
Syria (also called Nuri), Turkey, and Roumania. A party of these lately
came to England. We have seen these Syrian Ricinari in Egypt. They are
unquestionably gypsies, and it is probable that many of them
accompanied the early migration of Jats and Doms.
The Nats or Nuts are Indian wanderers, who, as Dr. J. Forbes Watson
declares, in “The People of India,” “correspond to the European gypsy
tribes,” and were in their origin probably identical with the Luri.
They are musicians, dancers, conjurers, acrobats, fortune-tellers,
blacksmiths, robbers, and dwellers in tents. They eat everything,
except garlic. There are also in India the Banjari, who are spoken of
by travelers as “gypsies.” They are traveling merchants or peddlers.
Among all these wanderers there is a current slang of the roads, as in
England. This slang extends even into Persia. Each tribe has its own,
but the name for the generally spoken lingua franca is Rom.
It has never been pointed out, however, by any writer, that there is
in Northern and Central India a distinct tribe, which is regarded, even
by the Nats and Doms and Jats themselves, as peculiarly and distinctly
gypsy. There are, however, such wanderers, and the manner in which I
became aware of their existence was, to say the least, remarkable. I
was going one day along the Marylebone Road when I met a very dark man,
poorly clad, whom I took for a gypsy; and no wonder, as his eyes had
the very expression of the purest blood of the oldest families. To him
I said,—
“Rakessa tu Romanes?” (Can you talk gypsy?)
“I know what you mean,” he answered in English. “You ask me if I can
talk gypsy. I know what those people are. But I'm a Mahometan Hindu
from Calcutta. I get my living by making curry powder. Here is my
card.” Saying this he handed me a piece of paper, with his name written
on it: John Nano.
“When I say to you, 'Rakessa tu Romanes?' what does it mean?”
“It means, 'Can you talk Rom?' But rakessa is not a Hindu
word. It's Panjabi.”
I met John Nano several times afterwards and visited him in his
lodgings, and had him carefully examined and cross-questioned and
pumped by Professor Palmer of Cambridge, who is proficient in Eastern
tongues. He conversed with John in Hindustani, and the result of our
examination was that John declared he had in his youth lived a very
loose life, and belonged to a tribe of wanderers who were to all the
other wanderers on the roads in India what regular gypsies are to the
English Gorgio hawkers and tramps. These people were, he declared, “the
real gypsies of India, and just like the gypsies here. People in
India called them Trablus, which means Syrians, but they were
full-blood Hindus, and not Syrians.” And here I may observe that this
word Trablus which is thus applied to Syria, is derived from Tripoli.
John was very sure that his gypsies were Indian. They had a peculiar
language, consisting of words which were not generally intelligible.
“Could he remember any of these words?” Yes. One of them was manro, which meant bread. Now manro is all over Europe the gypsy word
for bread. John Nano, who spoke several tongues, said that he did not
know it in any Indian dialect except in that of his gypsies. These
gypsies called themselves and their language Rom. Rom meant in
India a real gypsy. And Rom was the general slang of the road, and it
came from the Roms or Trablus. Once he had written all his
autobiography in a book. This is generally done by intelligent
Mahometans. This manuscript had unfortunately been burned by his
English wife, who told us that she had done so “because she was tired
of seeing a book lying about which she could not read.”
Reader, think of losing such a life! The autobiography of an Indian
gypsy,—an abyss of adventure and darksome mysteries, illuminated, it
may be, with vivid flashes of Dacoitee, while in the distance rumbled
the thunder of Thuggism! Lost, lost, irreparably lost forever! And in
this book John had embodied a vocabulary of the real Indian Romany
dialect. Nothing was wanting to complete our woe. John thought at first
that he had lent it to a friend who had never returned it. But his wife
remembered burning it. Of one thing John was positive: Rom was as
distinctively gypsy talk in India as in England, and the Trablus are
the true Romanys of India.
What here suggests itself is, how these Indian gypsies came to be
called Syrian. The gypsies which roam over Syria are evidently
of Indian origin; their language and physiognomy both declare it
plainly. I offer as an hypothesis that bands of gypsies who have roamed
from India to Syria have, after returning, been called Trablus, or
Syrians, just as I have known Germans, after returning from the
father-land to America, to be called Americans. One thing, however, is
at least certain. The Rom are the very gypsies of gypsies in India.
They are thieves, fortune-tellers, and vagrants. But whether they have
or had any connection with the migration to the West we cannot
establish. Their language and their name would seem to indicate it; but
then it must be borne in mind that the word rom, like dom, is one of wide dissemination, dum being a Syrian gypsy word for
the race. And the very great majority of even English gypsy words are
Hindi, with an admixture of Persian, and do not belong to a slang of
any kind. As in India, churi is a knife, nak the nose,
balia hairs, and so on, with others which would be among the first
to be furnished with slang equivalents. And yet these very gypsies are
Rom, and the wife is a Romni, and they use words which are
not Hindu in common with European gypsies. It is therefore not
improbable that in these Trablus, so called through popular ignorance,
as they are called Tartars in Egypt and Germany, we have a portion at
least of the real stock. It is to be desired that some resident in
India would investigate the Trablus. It will probably be found that
they are Hindus who have roamed from India to Syria and back again,
here and there, until they are regarded as foreigners in both
countries.
Next to the word rom itself, the most interesting in Romany
is zingan, or tchenkan, which is used in twenty or thirty
different forms by the people of every country, except England, to
indicate the gypsy. An incredible amount of far-fetched erudition has
been wasted in pursuing this philological ignis fatuus. That
there are leather-working and saddle-working gypsies in Persia who call
themselves Zingan is a fair basis for an origin of the word; but then
there are Tchangar gypsies of Jat affinity in the Punjab. Wonderful it
is that in this war of words no philologist has paid any attention to
what the gypsies themselves say about it. What they do say is
sufficiently interesting, as it is told in the form of a legend which
is intrinsically curious and probably ancient. It is given as follows
in “The People of Turkey,” by a Consul's Daughter and Wife, edited by
Mr. Stanley Lane Poole, London, 1878: “Although the gypsies are not
persecuted in Turkey, the antipathy and disdain felt for them evinces
itself in many ways, and appears to be founded upon a strange legend
current in the country. This legend says that when the gypsy nation
were driven out of their country (India), and arrived at Mekran, they
constructed a wonderful machine to which a wheel was attached.” From
the context of this imperfectly told story, it would appear as if the
gypsies could not travel farther until this wheel should revolve:—
“Nobody appeared to be able to turn it, till in the midst of their
vain efforts some evil spirit presented himself under the disguise of a
sage, and informed the chief, whose name was Chen, that the wheel would
be made to turn only when he had married his sister Guin. The chief
accepted the advice, the wheel turned round, and the name of the tribe
after this incident became that of the combined names of the brother
and sister, Chenguin, the appellation of all the gypsies of Turkey at
the present day.”
The legend goes on to state that in consequence of this unnatural
marriage the gypsies were cursed and condemned by a Mahometan saint to
wander forever on the face of the earth. The real meaning of the
myth—for myth it is—is very apparent. Chen is a Romany word,
generally pronounced chone, meaning the moon; {341a} while
guin is almost universally given as gan or kan. That
is to say, Chen-gan or—kan, or Zin-kan, is much commoner than
Chen-guin. Now kan is a common gypsy word for the sun. George
Borrow gives it as such, and I myself have heard Romanys call the sun
kan, though kam is commoner, and is usually assumed to be
right. Chen-kan means, therefore, moon-sun. And it may be remarked in
this connection, that the neighboring Roumanian gypsies, who are nearly
allied to the Turkish, have a wild legend stating that the sun was a
youth who, having fallen in love with his own sister, was condemned as
the sun to wander forever in pursuit of her, after she was turned into
the moon. A similar legend exists in Greenland {341b} and in the island
of Borneo, and it was known to the old Irish. It is in fact a
spontaneous myth, or one of the kind which grow up from causes common
to all races. It would be natural, to any imaginative savage, to regard
the sun and moon as brother and sister. The next step would be to think
of the one as regularly pursuing the other over the heavens, and to
this chase an erotic cause would naturally be assigned. And as the
pursuit is interminable, the pursuer never attaining his aim, it would
be in time regarded as a penance. Hence it comes that in the most
distant and different lands we have the same old story of the brother
and the sister, just as the Wild Hunter pursues his bride.
It was very natural that the gypsies, observing that the sun and
moon were always apparently wandering, should have identified their own
nomadic life with that of these luminaries. That they have a tendency
to assimilate the idea of a wanderer and pilgrim to that of the Romany,
or to Romanipen, is shown by the assertion once made to me by an
English gypsy that his people regarded Christ as one of themselves,
because he was always poor, and went wandering about on a donkey, and
was persecuted by the Gorgios. It may be very rationally objected by
those to whom the term “solar myth” is as a red rag, that the story, to
prove anything, must first be proved itself. This will probably not be
far to seek. Everything about it indicates an Indian origin, and if it
can be found among any of the wanderers in India, it may well be
accepted as the possible origin of the greatly disputed word zingan. It is quite as plausible as Dr. Miklosich's very far-fetched
derivation from the Acingani,—[Greek text],—an unclean, heretical
Christian sect, who dwelt in Phrygia and Lycaonia from the seventh till
the eleventh century. The mention of Mekran indicates clearly that the
moon story came from India before the Romany could have obtained any
Greek name. And if gypsies call themselves or are called Jen-gan, or
Chenkan, or Zingan, in the East, especially if they were so called by
Persian poets, it is extremely unlikely that they ever received such a
name from the Gorgios of Europe. It is really extraordinary that all
the philologists who have toiled to derive the word zingan from
a Greek or Western source have never reflected that if it was applied
to the race at an early time in India or Persia all their speculations
must fall to the ground.
One last word of John Nano, who was so called from two similar
Indian words, meaning “the pet of his grandfather.” I have in my
possession a strange Hindu knife, with an enormously broad blade,
perhaps five or six inches broad towards the end, with a long handle
richly mounted in the purest bronze with a little silver. I never could
ascertain till 1 knew him what it had been used for. Even the old
ex-king of Oude, when he examined it, went wrong on it. Not so John
Nano.
“I know well enough what that knife is. I have seen it
before,—years ago. It is very old, and it was long in use; it was the
knife used by the public executioner in Bhotan. It is Bhotani.”
By the knife hangs the ivory-handled court-dagger which belonged to
Francis II. of France, the first husband of Mary Queen of Scots. I
wonder which could tell the strangest story of the past!
“It has cut off many a head,” said John Nano, “and I have seen it
before!”
I do not think that I have gone too far in attaching importance to
the gypsy legend of the origin of the word chen-kan or zingan. It is their own, and therefore entitled to preference over the
theories of mere scholars; it is Indian and ancient, and there is much
to confirm it. When I read the substance of this chapter before the
Philological Society of London, Prince Lucien Bonaparte,—who is beyond
question a great philologist, and one distinguished for vast
research,—who was in the chair, seemed, in his comments on my paper,
to consider this sun and moon legend as frivolous. And it is true
enough that German symbolizers have given us the sun myth to such an
extent that the mere mention of it in philology causes a recoil. Then,
again, there is the law of humanity that the pioneer, the gatherer of
raw material, who is seldom collector and critic together, is always
assailed. Columbus always gets the chains and Amerigo Vespucci the
glory. But the legend itself is undeniably of the gypsies and Indian.
It is remarkable that there are certain catch-words, or test-words,
among old gypsies with which they try new acquaintances. One of these
is kekkavi, a kettle; another, chinamangri, a bill-hook,
or chopper (also a letter), for which there is also another word. But I
have found several very deep mothers in sorcery who have given me the
word for sun, kam, as a precious secret, but little known. Now
the word really is very well known, but the mystery attached to it, as
to chone or shule, the moon, would seem to indicate that
at one time these words had a peculiar significance. Once the
darkest-colored English gypsy I ever met, wishing to sound the depth of
my Romany, asked me for the words for sun and moon, making more account
of my knowledge of them than of many more far less known.
As it will interest the reader, I will here give the ballad of the
sun and the moon, which exists both in Romany and Roumani, or
Roumanian, in the translation which I take from “A Winter in the City
of Pleasure” (that is Bucharest), by Florence K. Berger,—a most
agreeable book, and one containing two Chapters on the Tzigane, or
gypsies.