Again, Ghenghis Khan, in a.d. 1206, and his descendant Turmachurn, who in a.d. 1303 invaded India and carried off hosts of prisoners, may have given impulse to the current westward. Lastly, about two centuries after, the great Conqueror whom Europe has apparently determined by sectarian nickname, “Tamerlane,” swept over Northern India in a.d. 1398-1400, and his horde must have caused a wide scattering of the weaker tribes.
The Jats, I may here notice, inhabited the Indine Valley, whence emigration westward is easy; the other tribes, like the Nats, fancifully connected with the Gypsies, were by no means so favourably situated for an exodus. Originally the Gypsies must have been outcasts, not Hindu Pariahs, as some have supposed them to be; although they may have borrowed from those Aryans the horse-sacrifice and the burning of the dead—the latter custom has become obsolete in Europe, and now only a few of the deceased person’s clothes are thrown into the fire. They had words for God (Deob) and the Devil (Bad God—Benga), “Já li benga” (Go to the Devil) being a popular curse. They were unalphabetic: so clever a race would certainly not have lost a written character, and they became nominal Christians and Muslims in imitation of those among whom they settled.
The Jats are still half nomads, and perhaps of old they were wholly nomadic. They are breeders of cattle and rude veterinary surgeons. They are fond of music, as are all these races; and their dances are exactly represented by those of the Egyptian Gypsies, a similarity which has yet to be insisted upon. Their iron-smelting, like that of the Mahabaleshwar tribes, is exactly like that of the Romá. Their sword play is that of the Hindu, whereas the Gypsies in Scotland use a direct thrust straight to the front,[158] certainly not learned in India. The village Jats are said to mould the babies’ heads; perhaps the idea arose by the shampooing of the younger children by the mothers. Divination seems to be the growth of the soil, and palmistry palpably derives from India. Snake-charming is also common amongst them. As their history in the Panjab proves, they are disposed to robbing and to violence. Lastly, though the history of the country universally derives them from the Land of the Five Rivers, the modern date of Muslim annals would not be proof against their being a race of remote antiquity.
Believing that the Jats may fairly have sent forth the last wave of Aryan emigration, the Gypsies, a western flood which was probably preceded by many others, I attempted during my last trip through Sindh in the spring of 1856 to enlist fellow-workmen in the task of illustrating their ethnology and philology. Able linguists like Lieutenant-Colonel Dunsterville, Collector of Hydrabad, and others, were willing to assist me. But I was much disappointed by the incuriousness of a certain professor who met me at Milan before my visit to Western India and Sindh. He had never seen my Grammar and Vocabulary, of which he desired the republication; but he accepted with enthusiasm my offer to enlist collaborators in the Valley of the Indus for the purpose of proving or disproving his favourite theory that the Gypsies are Sindhis who have long dwelt in Afghanistan.[159] This professor had of course no personal experience; anything he had written on the subject was derived from theory only. Object lessons are not yet popular in Italy; it is easier to visit the camel of the Jardin des Plantes than the camel of the desert, and we can hardly expect a littérateur to take interest in gathering together raw new facts.
§ 2. The Jats of Belochistan.
The following interesting extract is borrowed from The Country of Balochistan,[160] by A. W. Hughes (London, 1877):
“In returning to a consideration of the Jat race of Kachh Gandāva, it may be mentioned that wherever they are found—and they may it seems, from what Masson states, be seen not alone in the Panjab and Sindh and in those countries lying between the Satlej and Ganges Rivers, but even at Kābul, Kandahār, and Herat—they preserve their vernacular tongue, the Jatki. Of this language many dialects are believed to exist, and it may well be suggested by Masson that the labour of reviewing would not be found altogether unprofitable. It appears to be a fact that the Jats in some places preserve the calling of itinerant Gypsies, and this more particularly in Afghanistan; and it is not unlikely that some affinity in their language and habits might very possibly be traced between them and the vagabond races of Zingāris which are spread over so large a portion of Europe. The Jats of Eastern Kachhi, the supposed descendants of the ancient Getæ, form the cultivating and camel-breeding classes, and are of industrious and peaceable habits, but are dreadfully harried and plundered by the marauding Balochis of the neighbouring hills. They are, so to speak, the original inhabitants of this district, the Rinds,[161] Balochis, and Brahuis having settled in the country at an apparently recent period. The Jats are numerously subdivided among themselves, some tribes amounting, it is said, to nearly forty in number. Some of these are known under the names of Aba, Haura, Kalhora, Khokar, Machni, Manju, Palal, Pasarar, Tunia, and Waddera. In general they are all Muhammadans of the Suni persuasion.”
As El Islam was established in these countries before our tenth century, and the Hinduism of the Lower Valley of the Indus and of Multán dates from the days of Alexander the Great, the original emigration of Gypsies, who hardly preserve a trace of Hinduism, must either have been outlying pagans or a race of extreme antiquity.
§ 3. The Gypsies of Persia.
Captain Newbold, after visiting the Gypsies in Sindh, Belochistan, and Multán, found them in the “great plain of Persepolis; in the blossoming Valley of Shiráz in the Butchligar Mountains; on the scorched plains of Dashtistan and Chaldea.” He thinks that they may be traced to, and probably far beyond, the Caspian, and easterly to the deserts of Herman and Mekran. They affect but little the scanty fare and the uninteresting life of the desert. Perfectly distinct from the pastoral “Iliyát,” the Bedawin of nearer Asia, the Turkomans, Kurds, and other nomads who camped far from the abodes of settled men, these tribes wander from town to town and village to village, always pitching tents near the more industrious, on whose credulity they partly subsist, here and elsewhere.