2. The Kanjars and the Gipsies.

The Kanjars and Berias are the typical gipsy castes of India, and have been supposed to be the parents of the European gipsies. On this point Mr. Nesfield writes: “The commonly received legend is that multitudes of Kanjars were driven out of India by the oppressions of Tamerlane, and it is inferred that the gipsies of Europe are their direct descendants by blood, because they speak like them a form of the Hindi language.”[17] Sir G. Grierson states:[18] “According to the Shāh-nāma, the Persian monarch Bahrām Gaur received in the fifth century from an Indian king 12,000 musicians who were known as Lūris, and the Lūris or Lūlis, that is gipsies, of modern Persia are the descendants of these.” These people were also called Lutt, and hence it was supposed that they were the Indian Jāts. Sir G. Grierson, however, shows it to be highly improbable that the Jāts, one of the highest castes of cultivators, could ever have furnished a huge band of professional singers and dancers. He on the contrary derives the gipsies from the Dom tribe:[19] “Mr. Leland has made a happy suggestion that the original gipsies may have been Doms of India. He points out that Romany is almost letter for letter the same as Domni (डोमनी), the plural of Dom. Domni is the plural form in the Bhojpuri dialect of the Bihāri language. It was originally a genitive plural; so that Romany-Rye, ‘A gipsy gentleman,’ may be well compared with the Bhojpuri Domni Rai, ‘A king of the Doms.’ The Bhojpuri-speaking Doms are a famous race, and they have many points of resemblance with the gipsies of Europe. Thus they are darker in complexion than the surrounding Bihāris, are great thieves, live by hunting, dancing and telling fortunes, their women have a reputation for making love-philtres and medicines to procure abortion, they keep fowls (which no orthodox Hindu will do), and are said to eat carrion. They are also great musicians and horsemen. The gipsy grammar is closely connected with Bhojpuri, and the following mongrel, half-gipsy, half-English rhyme will show the extraordinary similarity of the two vocabularies:[20]

Gipsy.		The	Rye (squire) he	mores (hunts)	adrey the	wesh (wood)
Bhojpuri.			Rai	mare	andal	besh (Pers. بيش)

Gipsy.		The	kaun-engro (ear-fellow, hare) and	chiriclo (bird).
Bhojpuri.			Kānwāla	chirin

Gipsy.		You	sovs (sleep) with leste (him)	drey (within) the	wesh (wood)
Bhojpuri.			soe	andal	besh

Gipsy.		And rigs (carry) for leste (him) the	gono (sack, game-bag).
Bhojpuri.			gon

Gipsy.		Oprey (above) the	rukh (tree)	adrey (within) the	wesh (wood)
Bhojpuri.		Upri	rukh	andal	besh

Gipsy.		Are	chiriclo (male-bird) and	chiricli (female-bird).
Bhojpuri.			chirin	chirin

Gipsy.		Tuley (below) the	rukh (tree)	adrey (within) the	wesh (wood)
Bhojpuri.		Tule	rukh	andal	besh

Gipsy.		Are	pireno (lover) and	pireni (lady-love).
Bhojpuri.			pyara	pyāri

In the above it must be remembered that the verbal terminations of the gipsy text are English and not gipsy.”

Sir G. Grierson also adds (in the passage first quoted): “I may note here a word which lends a singular confirmation to the theory. It is the gipsy term for bread, which is mānrō or manro. This is usually connected either with the Gaudian mānr ‘rice-gruel’ or with manrua, the millet (Eleusine coracana). Neither of these agrees with the idea of bread, but in the Magadhi dialect of Bihāri, spoken south of the Ganges in the native land of these Maghiya Doms, there is a peculiar word mānda or mānra which means wheat, whence the transition to the gipsy mānrō, bread, is eminently natural.”

The above argument renders it probable that the gipsies are derived from the Doms; and as Mr. Nesfield gives it as a common legend that they originated from the Kanjars, this is perhaps another connecting link between the Doms and Kanjars. The word gipsy is probably an abbreviation of ‘Egyptian,’ the country assigned as the home of the gipsies in mediaeval times. It has already been seen that the Doms are the bards and minstrels of the lower castes in the Punjab, and that the Kanjars and Sānsias, originally identical or very closely connected, were in particular the bards of the Jāts. It is a possible speculation that they may have been mixed up with the lower classes of Jāts or have taken their name, and that this has led to the confusion between the Jāts and gipsies. Some support is afforded to this suggestion by the fact that the Kanjars of Jubbulpore say that they have three divisions, the Jāt, Multāni and Kūchbandia. The Jāt Kanjars are, no doubt, those who acted as bards to the Jāts, and hence took the name; and if the ancestors of these people emigrated from India they may have given themselves out as Jāt.