“It is not the less interesting to examine any point of the very complex question of the origin of the Gipsies, and especially one so important as this appears to be of their connexion with the Jats or Djatt. But this point itself has, so to speak, several faces. There is the part belonging to erudition in the strict sense, and I think that Professor de Goeje has treated it very ably; but there is the ethnological, anthropological, and even the linguistic part of the subject, which does not appear to me to be very far advanced up to the present time. It is this part that Mr. Burton has handled; and as he has lived in the midst of the Jats, he was in some respects in the best condition for throwing great light upon it; but, on the one hand, he ought perhaps to have been better acquainted with the Gipsies, and, on the other, it does not appear that the connexion between the Gipsies and the Jats has occupied him much. He has perceived a probable relation between these two tribes of men, and he has expressed it in half a page; but this is not sufficient.[101] No doubt in occupying himself specially with the Jats, in giving in 1849 a grammar of their language (of which I cannot appreciate the value, but which did not prevent Professor Pott, in 1853, from saying that we were wanting in information respecting this idiom),[102] in collecting some very summary data concerning their division into four tribes, and upon their history and manners, he has furnished some materials, but materials quite insufficient,[103] for a comparison, which is still unmade, between this race and the Gipsies. He tells us, for example, that the appearance and other peculiarities of this race authorize as probable the supposition of a relationship between it and the Gipsies. But he does not give us even the smallest information respecting the type (appearance) of the Jats; and the other ‘peculiarities’ which he does not explain, and which we are obliged to seek in scattered traits, furnish such fugitive comparisons that one can conclude nothing from them. In reality nearly every tribe in India (not to speak of certain tribes in other countries) will furnish, when compared with the Gipsies, quite as many, if not more, points of resemblance. Indeed this is, more or less, the defect of nearly all the comparisons which have been made between the Gipsies and such or such populations of India; the authors of these comparisons are not sufficiently acquainted with the Gipsies, and their study of the resemblances is not sufficiently specific.
“The Jats must belong, I suppose so at least, to the Hamite (Chamite), and more particularly to the Kuschite stratum of the Hindoo populations,[104] and for my part I do not doubt that the Gipsies, although their idiom is connected with the Aryan languages of India, belong to this same branch of the human species.—I remark, by the way, in the division made by Mr. Burton of the Jats into four tribes, that one of the districts inhabited by the second is called ‘Kach (Kutch).’[105]—But this branch is widely spread in Asia and in Africa. It would be necessary, in the Kuschite family, to remark the particular traits which distinguish, on the one hand, the Jats, on the other, the Gipsies, in all the very complex affinities allowed by ethnography, and start thence to compare them. This is what remains to be done in order to throw light upon this part of one side of the question of Gipsy origin. It is useless to say that, in following out more particularly this comparison between the Gipsies and the Jats, the other points of comparison that may be furnished by other tribes, related or not to the Jats, such as that of the Tchangar, for example, pointed out by Dr. Trumpp in the Panjab (Mittheil. der Anthrop. Gesellschaft in Wien, T. II., 1872, p. 294, quoted by Miklosich in his third memoir on the Zigeuner, 1873, p. 2), and several others, which it would be too long to mention, must not be neglected. But all this can only be well done in India, and by a person who has specially studied the Gipsies of Europe, of Eastern Europe especially, and, if possible, those of Western Asia and even of Egypt. Unfortunately these conditions are very difficult to find.
“(Signed) Paul Bataillard.”
FOOTNOTES:
[97] [This letter appeared in the Academy, June 5, 1875.]
[98] The notes appended to this letter are by me.
[99] It has still to be proved of what tribe these Luri are: all that we can say is that they are the natives of modern Lúristán (Elymaïs).
[100] A valuable authority, but still a poem.
[101] The italics are mine. What does the author know about my acquaintance with the Gypsies, especially the Burton Gypsies? The “half a page” will be answered in another place.
[102] This means simply that Professor Pott never saw my paper printed at Bombay.