“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 Panjabī.”
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 Trablūs, which means Syrians, but they were full-blood Hindus, and not Syrians.” And here I may observe that this word Trablūs 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 Trablūs. 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 Trablūs 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 Trablūs, 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, dūm 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, nāk 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 Trablūs, 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 Trablūs. 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