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.