“Our authors[116] probably err when they suppose the Jat to be the original Hindu of Scinde converted to Islam. Native historians and their own traditions concur in assigning to them a strange origin; their language, to this day, a corrupt dialect of that spoken throughout the Indine provinces of the Panjab, gives support and real value to the otherwise doubtful testimony.[117] It is probable that, compelled to emigrate from their own lands by one of the two main causes that bring about such movements in the East, war or famine, the Jats of Scinde travelled southward about the beginning of the eighteenth century of our era.
“Under the quasi-ecclesiastical Kalhorá dynasty, when Scindians composed the aristocracy as well as the commonalty of the country, the Jats, in consequence of their superior strength, their courage, and their clannish coalescence, speedily rose to high distinction. The chiefs of tribes became nobles, officials, and ministers at court; they provided for their families by obtaining grants of ground, feoffs incidental to certain military services, and for their followers by settling them as tenants on their broad lands. But the prosperity of the race did not last long. They fell from their high estate when the Belochis, better men than they, entered the country, and began to appropriate it for themselves; by degrees, slow yet sure, they lost all claims to rank, wealth, and office. They are now found scattered throughout Scinde, generally preferring the south-eastern provinces, where they earn a scanty subsistence by agriculture; or they roam over the barren plains feeding their flocks upon the several oases; or they occupy themselves in breeding, tending, training, and physicking the camel. With the latter craft their name has become identified, a Jat and a sarwan (camel-man) sounding synonymous in Scindian ears.
“The Jats in appearance are a swarthy and uncomely race, dirty in the extreme, long, gaunt, bony, and rarely, if ever, in good condition. Their beards are thin, and there is a curious (i.e. Gypsy-like) expression in their eyes.[118] They dress like Scindians, preferring blue to white clothes; but they are taller, larger, and more un-Indian in appearance. Some few, but very few, of their women are, in early youth, remarkable for soft and regular features; this charm, however, soon yields to the complicated ugliness brought on by exposure to the sun, by scanty living, and by the labour of baggage-cattle. In Scinde the Jats of both sexes are possessed of the virtues especially belonging to the oppressed and inoffensive Eastern cultivation; they are necessarily frugal and laborious, peaceful, and remarkable for morality in the limited sense of aversion to intrigue with members of a strange Kaum.[119] I say in Scinde; this is by no means the reputation of the race in the other parts of Central Asia, where they have extended (or whence possibly they came).[120] The term ‘Jat’ is popularly applied to a low and servile creature, or to an impudent villain; and despite of the Tohfat el Kiram,[121] a Beloch would consider himself mortally affronted were you to confound his origin with the caste which his ancestors deposed, and which he despises for having allowed itself to be degraded. The Brahins, Afghans, and Persians all have a bad word to say of them.”
Thus far M. Paul Bataillard has shown himself only the carpet-slippered littérateur de cabinet, who laboriously borrows from others, and who evidently expects his second-hand labours to faire époque.
But my rival claimant, let me hasten to own, has solid merits. His theory that Gypsy emigrations are of ancient date, and probably of high antiquity, deserves consideration. His later notices of the Jats correct the vulgar error which made Taymur the Tatar cause the first exodus of our “sorners.” He notes the especial hatred, possibly racial, nourished by these Gentile vagrants against the other scattered nation, the Jews. Other minor but still interesting matters of which he treats are the history of the Gypsies especially with respect to their slavery and serfdom—Crown captives, not chattels personal; their periodical wanderings and visitings; their vestiges of faith; their vernacular and humble literature; their private and tribal names suggesting those of the modern Israelitic Synagogue; and their supplying the dancing-girls of the nearer East, while in the lupanars of Europe a Gypsy girl is unknown.
I now propose to run as rapidly as the subject permits through M. Paul Bataillard’s four papers seriatim. The critique will not only notice novelties, but will also attempt to correct what to a practical man appears to want correction in connexion with the Gypsies.
§ 2. “Derniers Travaux, etc.”
This paper treats chiefly of South-Eastern Europe, which has been estimated to contain at least six hundred thousand of the Romá—a number, by-the-bye, wholly inadequate. The author’s self-imposed limits would be the western Slav frontier, a meridian drawn from the southern bend of the Baltic to the Adriatic head. Topographically disposed, upon a line trending from east to west, the review deals in its progress with writers mostly modern; and it forms an excerptive rather than an exhaustive or even a summary bibliography.
The first of the two component parts travels with the authorities who treat of Russia, Poland and Lithuania, Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Transylvania, the Banat, the Rumanian Principalities, and Turkey, or rather Constantinople. The lands about the Balkan Range, so unknown not many years ago and now so much talked of, are justly considered a second Gypsy patria, the “old home” being India. The review is accompanied and followed by side-glances at those who treat of Finland and Norway, of Persia and Basqueland, of Scotland and Holland, of Sicily and Italy, which once owned an exceptional castrum Giptiæ. This section ends with linguistic and ethnographic remarks borrowed from many sources and specifying a considerable number of requisites.
In the second part the critic reviews M. Alexandre G. Paspati, D.M., a famous name in Gypsydom. This learned Greek physician—one of the few children, by-the-bye, who escaped the “gentle and gallant” Turk in the foul Chios massacre of 1822—was educated in America, and is as highly distinguished for his Indian and Byzantine as for his Gypsy studies. The Étude, etc., of 1870, which continued and completed his elaborate memoirs (1857-1862), is the work of a scholar who knew the Romá personally, not of a mere littérateur. The book teemed with novelties. For instance, it suggested that the article (o or u; í and e), as unknown to the Asiatic Gypsy (?) as to the Sanskrit and the Prakrit, had been borrowed by his European congener from the Greek [Greek: ὁ: ho] and [Greek: ἡ: hê], thus suggesting long residence in Hellas and familiarity with its people. Might it not, however, have been a simple development of íhá and uha, the demonstrative pronouns in Játaki—this and that becoming the? But as all Germanic, neo-Latinic, and Slav tongues have either produced or borrowed an article, the same may have been the case with the Gypsy, which comes from the same root.