In early life, as among the Indians, some of the girls are pretty and interesting, but with exposure, cruelty, immorality, debauchery, idle and loose habits, the pretty, dark-eyed girl soon becomes the coarse, vulgar woman, with the last trace of virtue blown to the winds. If any one with but little keen sense of observation will peep into a Gipsy’s tent when the man is making pegs and skewers, and contrast him with the low-caste Indian potter at his wheel and the carpenter at his bench—all squatting upon the ground—he will not be long in coming to the conclusion that they are all pretty much of the same family.
Ethnologists and philologists may find certain words used by the Gipsies to correspond with the Indian language, and this adds another proof to those I have already adduced;
but, to my mind, this, after the lapse of so many centuries, considering all the changes that have taken place since the Gipsies emigrated, is not the most convincing argument, any more than our forms of letters, the outcome of hieroglyphics, prove that we were once Egyptians. No doubt, there are a certain few words used by all nations which, if their roots and derivations were thoroughly looked into, a similarity would be found in them. As America, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa have been fields for emigrants from China and Europe during the last century, so, in like manner, Europe was the field for certain low-caste poor emigrants from India during the two preceding centuries, with this difference—the emigrants from India to Europe were idlers, loafers who sought to make their fortunes among the Europeans by practising, without work, the most subtle arts of double-dealing, lying, deception, thieving, and dishonesty, and the fate that attends individuals following out such a course as this has attended the Gipsies in all their wanderings; the consequence has been, the Gipsy emigrants, after their first introduction to the various countries, have, by their actions, disgusted those whom they wished to cheat and rob, hence the treatment they have received. This cannot be said of the emigrant from England to America and our own or other colonies. An English emigrant, on account of his open conduct, straightforward character, and industry, has been always respected. In any country an English emigrant enters, owing to his industrious habits, an improvement takes place. In the country where an Indian emigrant of the Gipsy tribe enters the tendency is the reverse of this, so far as their influence is concerned—downward to the ground and to the dogs they go. In these two cases the difference between civilisation and Christianity and heathenism comes out to a marked degree.
In a leading article in the Edinburgh Review, July, 1878, upon the origin and wanderings of the Gipsies, the following
appears:—“We next encounter them in Corfu, probably before 1346, since there is good reason to believe them to be indicated under the name of homines vageniti in a document emanating from the Empress Catharine of Valois, who died in that year; certainly, about 1370, when they were settled upon a fief recognised as the feudum Acinganorum by the Venetians, who, in 1386, succeeded to the right of the House of Valois in the island. This fief continued to subsist under the lordship of the Barons de Abitabulo and of the House of Prosalendi down to the abolition of feudalism in Corfu in the beginning of the present century. There remain to be noted two important pieces of evidence relating to this period. The first is contained in a charter of Miracco I., Waiwode of Wallachia, dated 1387, renewing a grant of forty ‘tents’ of Gipsies, made by his uncle, Ladislaus, to the monastery of St. Anthony of Vodici. Ladislaus began to reign in 1398. The second consists in the confirmation accorded in 1398 by the Venetian governor of Nanplion of the privileges extended by his predecessors to the Acingani dwelling in that district. Thus we find Gipsies wandering through Crete in 1322, settled in Corfu from 1346, enslaved in Wallachia about 1370, protected in the Peloponnesus before 1398. Nor is there is any reason to believe that their arrival in those countries was a recent one.”
Niebuhr, in his travels through Arabia, met with hordes of these strolling Gipsies in the warm district of Yemen, and M. Sauer in like manner found them established in the frozen regions of Siberia. His account of them, published in 1802, shows the Gipsy to be the same in Northern Russia as with us in England. He describes them as follows:—“I was surprised at the appearance of detached families throughout the Government of Tobolsk, and upon inquiry I learned that several roving companies of these people had strolled into the city of Tobolsk.” The governor thought of establishing a colony of them, but they were too cunning for
the simple Siberian peasant. He placed them on a footing with the peasants, and allotted a portion of land for cultivation with a view of making them useful members of society. They rejected houses even in this severe climate, and preferred open tents or sheds. In Hungary and Transylvania they dwell in tents during the summer, and for their winter quarters make holes ten or twelve feet deep in the earth. The women, one writer says, “deal in old clothes, prostitution, wanton dances, and fortune-telling, and are indolent beggars and thieves. They have few disorders except the measles and small-pox, and weaknesses in their eyes caused by the smoke. Their physic is saffron put into their soup, with bleeding.” In Hungary, as with other nations, they have no sense of religion, though with their usual cunning and hypocrisy they profess the established faith of every country in which they live.
The following is an article taken from the Saturday Review, December 13th, 1879:—“It has been repeated until the remark has become accepted as a sort of truism that the Gipsies 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 those nomads than is peculiar to many other peoples. What these discoveries or grounds of belief are we shall proceed to give briefly, our 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 North-Western 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 Gipsies of Europe. What other elements entered into these, with whom we are all familiar, will be considered presently. These Gipsies 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 the most prosperous Gipsies 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 monopolised 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 travelling 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. Admitting these as the peculiar pursuits of the race, the next step should be to consider what are the principal nomadic tribes of Gipsies 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 North-Western 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 Gipsy. 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 pedlar. 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 Gipsies. All of these things are, however, markedly characteristic of certain different kinds of wanderers, or Gipsies, in India. From this we conclude—hypothetically—that the Jat warriors were supplemented by other tribes.