The Ancestors of the Roma were Dalits, not Rajputs or Kshatriyas! / Amare Phurene Dalita sàs le, na Rajputa ni Kshatriye!

(December 2017)

There is a romantic myth that many of us, even some of our own historians, love to believe: that our ancestors were high-caste Rajput or Kshatriya warriors. It is simply not true. Lately this silliness has become highly politicised, and fake-Roma led by the notorious (and proven academic fraud) Ian Hancock have been pushing this nonsense aggressively. Even some (self-professed) Roma (usually those with highly questionable Romanipen; real Roma mostly know very well what our origins were and are proud of ourselves nonetheless) have been getting themselves highly worked up about it and attacking our historians -- such as myself -- for daring to speak the truth. Which is absurd: they are simply demonstrating their own caste prejudice... and they're not even Hindus!

So, this article sets out the evidence.

A good deal of DNA work, not to mention our own oral history, suggests that the claim of Rajput/Kshatriya ancestry for us is nonsensical, but far more importantly (due to the uncertainties surrounding the DNA work), linguistic evidence destroys it totally. And two separate DNA studies have suggested that Roma DNA correlates far better with today's Dalits, than with the higher castes.

More significantly, the phuro pachipen, the belief system of Roma who never converted to Christianity (which applies to my entire family) places very high stress on the principle of Ahimsa and we are strictly pacifist except for defending self and family -- in fact that even went across into at least some of the clans who had lost the old beliefs, so that in the two world wars many of the men refused to have any involvement and when dragged away at gunpoint by the various Allied Armies, they rebelled and ran away, often repeatedly, not from cowardice but from moral outrage -- and those were nominal Christians! The older male members of my own family, those from my mother's mother's branch of my family who were in the UK back then, were either imprisoned or sent to the mines for refusing to fight (and very seriously abused for being both combat refusers and non-white). Such a pacifist philosophy does not sound much like that of the descendents of warrior clans to me.

There is another excellent piece of evidence directly from the phuro pachipen also: although much of it is of clearly Hindu origin, there is a lot of it that isn’t -- the magical, animistic and Pagan parts. They are quite obviously pre-Hindu Indian beliefs and are remarkably well preserved when compared to the beliefs of some of today’s nomadic tribes in India. Would such mixed beliefs have been held by high-caste Hindus? Really?

Now, some historical evidence. The claimed timeline for the “defeated Hindu Army” or indeed the "Slaves from Kannauj" story is wrong. Roma were reported in many parts of western Europe during the 15th century, and my maternal clan got to the British Isles circa 1500 CE, having not only migrated across Europe in such a way as to collect French, German, Slavic and Hungarian loanwords in our dialect, but having previously stayed long enough in Romania that my native dialect of Romani contains enormously many Romanian loans, as I have described in my linguistics articles (and as my Romani-speaking friends undoubtedly know from talking to me!). Add to that the time spent in the Byzantine Empire, which must have been appreciable given the Greek loanwords in our language, and before that the time spent crossing Armenia and Persia, again considerable for linguistic reasons, and it just doesn't add up. Even if one accepts that there were multiple waves of migration out of India (a theory which I do accept for various reasons, although as yet it is still contentious), the earlier waves must have come far too early for that story to work. And if one argues that some of the proto-Roma were Dalits and others were high-caste in order to “rescue” the story, you run up against another problem: would members of the warrior castes really intermarry with Dalits? I think not!

The adherents of the Rajput/Kshatriya story at this point try to rescue themselves by claiming that all of the proto-Roma were Indians of mixed castes who were sold into slavery by Arab invaders (the so-called "Kannauj story"). This is also nonsense: if that were the case, for one thing our ancestors would have been far too few and scattered, especially after a couple of generations in slavery,to retain their culture (especially as nomads) and traditions intact; secondly, had that happened they would have soon acquired Arabic loanwords in their dialects, yet no Romani dialect has sufficient Arabic influence to fit this story, and moreover, such Arabic roots as exist in various Romani dialects can readily be proved to have arrived via Ottoman Turkish, rather than directly as would have been the case if we had been slaves to Arabs.

Yet another piece of historical evidence is that it is many times recorded that our ancestors when they first came to Europe were very dark-skinned. That is not correct for the high-caste warriors, who are light-skinned and more ‘European-looking’ (the Sanskrit/Hindi word for caste is वर्ण [varna], which literally means colour -- it is based on skin colour). We have become lighter now because of admixture of European blood to our bloodlines as well as biological adaptation to the European climate, which takes between 500-1000 years. The Roma have certainly been away from the original tropical climate for long enough to adapt.

Finally, we come to the most compelling evidence of all, which is linguistic. First of all, one would expect that if we descended from a warrior clan or the rump of a defeated Hindu army as is often claimed, we would all have one common (Indic) word for “sword”, and indeed other military terminology, in all our dialects, sword being a pretty fundamental word for a warrior clan. But we don't -- there are all kinds of weird and wonderful words for sword in different dialects of Romanes, many being loanwords.

But the best evidence of all is this: many of today's Dalit/out-caste clans (including some of the “denotified tribes”, who are mostly nomadic) don't use the usual terms for human children to refer to their children, nor for giving birth, they use the terms used for animals -- the prejudice of the higher castes, who consider them sub-human, has become ingrained and internalised. The same exactly was true of our ancestors because they were Dalits, and here is the proof:

What do we call Roma children? Chavo, chai. Where do the words chavo and chai come from? The Sanskrit word शाव [shāva], which means a young animal! (chai is simply a contraction of the feminine form, chavi, which still exists in its own right in some of the oldest dialects, including mine). What do we call gàdje children? ràklo, ràkli. Those are the words for human children -- straight from Prakrit, simple metatheses of Hindi लड़का [laɽka] (plus the a/o shift, of course) and लड़की [laɽki] (the symbol ‘ɽ’ denotes the retroflexed flap r of the Indo-Aryan languages). Furthermore, how do we say "give birth"? Te bianel. That comes from the Sanskrit विजायते [vijāyati], which when used for birth is only used to refer to animals, never humans.

High-caste warriors would most certainly not refer to themselves with such terminology, neither would they allow anyone else to refer to their children as animals. That would be gravely offensive to them. Only Dalits use, and accept, such appellations. The evidence of our Dalit origins is right there in our language, and those of us who are Romani speakers use the words every day -- and we have used them ever since we left India!

QED.