A popular misnomer (derived from “Egyptian”) referring to an ethnic group of Indian
origin numbering more than one million in the United States and about ten million
worldwide. Linguistic observation in late-18th-century Europe led to the discovery of the
Gypsies’ Indian roots. North American Gypsy populations all speak some form of
Romani, an Indian language similar to Sanskrit with overlays from Persian, Armenian,
Byzantine Greek, South Slavic, Romanian, and several Romance languages. Gypsies call
themselves Rom or Roma and those outside their own ethnic group gazhe or some variant
of the term. Comprised of several subgroups with distinct histories, the Roma share a core
culture consisting of the Romani language and an intuited cosmology of structural
oppositions (God/devil, good/evil, purity/pollution, Roma/gazhe). This worldview
informs many Romani traditions, particularly a strict boundary maintenance between
Roma and gazhe.
After their departure from India (sometime before A.D. 900), the Roma dispersed into
many countries, where they were generally feared, persecuted, or executed because of
their unfamiliar appearance, language, customs, and religious beliefs. Records
documenting their arrival in eastern Europe in the Middle Ages emphasize the Roma’s
dark hair and complexion as symbolic of incarnate evil. They often suffered when
Christians misidentified them as Muslims, especially during the late medieval period
when Christendom was threatened by Islamic invaders.
Paradoxically, while the Roma were frequently persecuted as unbelievers in Christian
countries, they were often forced to worship outside the established church when they
became Christians. In much of Europe, Gypsies were prohibited from entering Catholic
churches until the late 19th century. At the close of the 20th century, many Roma in the
United States are folk Catholics, practicing a syncretistic religion that draws some (more
ancient) elements from Zoroastrianism and Hinduism (such as animal sacrifice, herbal
healing, use of household shrines) and others from Eastern Orthodox Catholicism (such
as monotheism, belief in the efficacy of prayer and the saints’ intercession, and
celebration of the saints’ days and festivals of the Eastern Orthodox calendar). Several
thousand North American Roma have joined the significant Romani evangelical
movement and consider themselves “born-again” Christians.
In the 1990s, the Roma are a little-known group in the Americas but constitute the
largest non-White minority in Europe. In each European country where a Romani group
has settled without the recent threat of expulsion or extermination (such as France, Spain,
and the British Isles), their language and culture have altered under the influence of those
of the host nation. In Great Britain, they are called Romanichals and speak AngloRomani (which retains much of the lexicon but little of the grammar and syntax of earlier
Romani). In Spain they are known as Gitanos and speak Caló. Romani subgroups have
developed distinct identities, and representatives of those European populations have
emigrated to the Americas at different times for varying reasons. In the United States,
scholars have focused on one such Romani subgroup: the Kalderash (Russian Coppersmiths). Ancestors of American Kalderash lived in Russia until the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, and, as a result, Kalderash Romani contains many Russian and
Slavic loan words and combining forms.
Linguistic assimilation is probably the least oppressive of the negative forces that the
Roma have historically endured. Throughout their millennium-long diaspora, they have
withstood not simply marginalization (perhaps in part a natural result of their own
cultural prohibitions on interaction with outsiders), but also persecution and even
genocide. They were enslaved for more than 500 years (until 1864) in the Balkans, and
more than half a million were exterminated in the Nazi regime’s Final Solution. While
Romani-Americans do not suffer the intense persecution apparently endemic to many
European countries, they face widespread stereotyping and prejudice. Organizations
active in combating persecution of Roma include the International Romani Union (which
sends a delegate to the United Nations) and the Romani Congress. After then Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi officially recognized the Roma as an expatriate Indian population,
the Indian government was able to assist in financing the first world Romani Congress,
which was held in 1971 and included several Indian delegates.
As the stereotypical “Gypsies,” the Romani people have inspired a huge body of
expressive culture and oral tradition. The word “Gypsy” has developed into a synonym
for a range of stock characters and fanciful beings of American folklore and popular
culture: the clever trickster, the happy-go-lucky vagabond, the irresponsible itinerant, the
mysterious soothsayer, and the picturesque free spirit. Elite and popular art, literature,
and music—from the Victorian era to modern-day Hollywood—have used the Gypsies
collectively as a convenient vehicle for fantasies of freedom, escape, and licentiousness.
While the Gypsies of folk and popular culture are largely irrelevant to actual North
American Romani life, one point of intersection is fortune-telling, still a source of
livelihood for some Romani-American families who make solid commercial use of their
secure traditional identity as psychics, astrologers, palm readers, and Tarot-card readers.
An outstanding example of the successful marketing of expressive culture, this ubiquitous
element of the colorful stereotype of Gypsy life is likely to endure for another thousand
years in spite of frequent legal and religious prohibition. Fortune-telling—like other
exoteric entertainment functions of the Gypsies—is rooted in the Roma’s proficiency in
absorbing, transporting, and marketing folk and popular culture throughout their history.
Various Romani groups possess rich oral-performance traditions not limited to their skills
in fortune-telling: Folk and popular music, folktales, myths, legends, proverbs, riddles,
jokes, memorates, and other folkloric forms have been observed in contemporary Romani
performance tradition in Europe and North America.
Over the centuries, the Roma have survived through fortune-telling and other forms of
entertainment, agricultural work, metalwork and munitions manufacture, horse trading,
and other similarly portable, flexible occupations. Many modern-day Romani-Americans
pursue careers in industry and the professions, while others have selected more traditional
means of livelihood such as fortune-telling; auto-body and fender repair, boiler repair, retinning, copper-plating, metal recycling, and other metalwork; and used-car sales
(perhaps a descendant of horse trading). Many of the older generation of RomaniAmericans were once migrant agricultural workers, a form of livelihood still common to
the Romani population in the British Isles but rare among Roma in the United States inthe
1990s.
Romanologists disagree as to when and why the Roma left India. Until recently, the
predominant hypothesis identified modern-day Roma as descendants of 10,000 Luri
musicians given to the ruler of Persia by his brother, the sovereign of India, in A.D. 439.
However, recent research in India itself has exposed evidence that the Roma’s exodus
from India may have occurred somewhat later, perhaps in the 8th or 9th century.
According to this theory—promulgated at first by a few scholars but now gaining more
extensive acceptance—the Indian forbears of modern-day Roma were a group of Rajput
warriors and their camp followers who moved westward into Persia for reasons
associated with the Indo-Persian wars and later, instead of returning to India, continued
traveling farther and farther west.
Ruth E.Andersen
References
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Frazer, Angus. 1993. The Gypsies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Gropper, Rena C. 1975. Gypsies in the City: Culture Patterns and Survival. Princeton, NJ: Darwin
Press.
Hancock, lan F. [1981] 1985. Land of Pain: Five Centuries of Gypsy Slavery. Ann Arbor, MI:
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——. 1987. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. Ann Arbor, MI:
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Kenrick, Donald, and Grattan Puxon. 1972. The Destiny of Europes Gypsies. New York: Basic
Books.
Sutherland, Anne. 1975. Gypsies: The Hidden Americans. New York: Macmillan.
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