Abstract
A constant sense of othering constitutes the core of the Romani diasporic experience. This otherness was not a transient phenomenon in the Romani diasporic history. Its constancy was seemingly unending. It began with their unfortunate exit from India under the historical imperatives characterised by foreign invasion and forced slavery. What followed thereafter embodies the history of the Roma diasporic experience. A deep sense of being othered unequivocally acquired constancy as they moved on under different historical compulsions and forces from Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey to Europe. In Europe, they experienced, contrary to their perception of finding a better ground for an assumed difference, othering in its sinister form. Their movement in Europe and to America subsequently was underlined with servitude, subjection and a deep sense of humiliation. Therefore, this article divides the Roma diasporic experience into three distinct categories—migration, persecution and statelessness—to present the nature of this experience and the acute sense of the othering ingrained therein.
Introduction
This article discusses the diasporic experience of the Romani people, covering their history of migration, persecution and statelessness. But what essentially constitutes the focus of this article is the history of othering and exoticisation 1 that the Roma have been unceasingly subjected to ever since they left India. The Roma migration history has been deeply painful from Afghanistan through Persia and Turkey to Europe and, subsequently, to America. 2 Servitude almost became a permanent condition of their being wherever the force of history drove them. Therefore, this article divides the Roma diasporic experience into three broad categories—migration, persecution and statelessness—to present the nature of this experience and the formation of a distinct history as a people through this experience. This history undergirds suffering, servitude and pessimism. Their history, though consistently traumatic, congeals into forming a Roma identity. However, to argue in support of this position, the article reviews the credible works of both Romani and non-Romani writers using contextual interpretation as a methodology.
Migration
The Romani people in Europe are called gipsies or travellers. Upon their entry into Europe, they were believed to be the Egyptians. Subsequently, they were called gipsies. As they gradually spread over the entire continent, different names were given to address this community of people. These itinerant artists, circus animal trainers, circus performers, musicians, metalsmiths, dancers, craftsmen, tool makers, horse dealers, healers, fortune tellers, peripatetic performers and so on served Europe in different capacities and were differently labelled least kindly and more inhospitably. 3 The group called Bohemians in France, for their supposed origin in Bohemia, Czech Republic, formed a distinct category: Manouches. The Sinti and Jenische constituted the separate nomadic groups mostly seen in Germany and Northern Italy, presumably from the sixteenth century. 4
It is assumed that the Romani people began their migration from northern India between 1000
Geographically, they belonged to the north-western part of India and were more composite as people and defined essentially for their occupational commonality. Comparative linguistic analysis suggests that several words in the Romani language have a commonality with the Indian languages (Hindi, Punjabi and Rajasthani). But these words and expressions are not related to the professions, namely, agriculture, farming, craftsmanship and so on, but more curiously relate to military vocabulary such as attack, soldier, sword, spear, trident, battle cry, gaiters, and so on.
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It indicates that the Romani people were in some way or another connected with warfare or professions related to military activity. This lexical evidence leads the course of research on the Romani origin to the military history of India and related development in medieval India. Their Rajput ancestry is established through the unaltered continuity of their customs, cultures, faith and rituals, which the European Roma followed until today. The Sun and Moon emblems and motifs in their household artefacts and other objects of sacred importance and cultural practices of Shaktism (goddess worship), including goddesses Kali, Durga and Parvati, establish references to their Rajput lineage and customary practices. Given the weight of evidence to assume their Rajput ancestry, Hancock
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supposes that the Romani developed from the mixed languages spoken on the battlefields in northwest India around 1000
Focusing on the military reasons for the Roma migration, the Islamic invasion of northwest India led by the Mahmud Ghazni from a place called Ghazni in Afghanistan between 1001
This forced movement of people from the northwest under the Ghazni’s seizure is assumed to be the Romani people who were further divided into different groups as they moved on in central and western Asia. The Rajputs were appointed forcefully into the military units of Mahmud Ghazni’s expanding army. Others were also on the move as service providers and slaves. As Ghazni’s army made rapid advances westward, Indians engaged as slave soldiers also reached Trans-Oxiana (lower Central Asia). The Ghaznavids confronted the Seljuqs (ethnically Oghuz Turkic tribes) in 1038 and were defeated. The Seljuqs, who expressed their allegiance to the Baghdad caliph, took over Iran and made it the headquarters of the Seljuq empire (1055–1175). 16 This defeat that inevitably followed the consequence of Seljuq onslaught on the Ghaznavid troops and collaborators led the proto-Romani people or the Indians to Khorasan, Iran, Anatolia and Armenia. In Iran, the Romani people were split into two. The group, which headed south through Syria, reached northern Africa and Greece. The other group that moved north reached Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania. Before this split and subsequent migration, the Indian combatants and service providers were re-engaged as auxiliaries in the Seljuq’a force. They became a vagabond nation or a nation on the move, serving the Seljuqs in different capacities both militarily and in related areas as tent-makers, smiths, metal workers, carpenters, servants, bakers, washerwomen, camp followers, cooks, tent-makers, armourers, slaves and so on.
The consistency of Romani migration to Europe was due to the rise and spread of the Ottoman Empire. This historical event led to the sack of Byzantium in 1453
These migration tendencies had already started almost a century before because of the contagious spread of the epidemic bubonic plague, most ominously known as the ‘black death’, in western Anatolia. The bubonic plague generated sufficient fear in the region, so they moved to better places to avoid contagion. Therefore, migration to Europe in the most general way began, and in the process, several Romani people joined the migration flow to Europe. The presence of the Roma in Europe at the time of the outbreak of the plague made them the victims of European racist conclusions that they brought contagion to Europe. 18 However, by year 1500, the Romani people were reported to have been seen across Europe. The Romani visibility in Europe, when the overwhelmingly anti-Islamic sentiments brewing on account of the rise of the Ottoman and its atrocities on the crumbling Byzantine Empire, the Mongol invasion of northern Europe and the Moorish threat in the south-west, was not taken positively. Their stateless status made them immediate victims of the growing angst against the Islamic forces. They were casually taken to be the people from Egypt or the collaborators or spies for the Islamic forces and, therefore, accorded a nomenclature as gipsies in a pejorative sense suggesting the inflated European racial indifference. Europe made the optimum use of their remarkable skills in the areas discussed earlier and oppressed and persecuted them as and when it found fit to do so.
Persecution
Persecution of the Roma did not just begin in Europe. It began when they left India under the duress of the Islamic invasion. The geography they covered before they reached Europe was equally discriminatory, exploitative and harsh. Given this history, the European phase was particularly tortuous because their non-identity was their biggest drawback. Their difference in complexion and language made them racially other. Racism-inspired violence exacerbated their condition and reduced them to the subjects of unending apathy. They became victims of Europe’s untutored commonplace perception shaped by the obsession with racial supremacy. The nearly black skin of the Romani people was associated with inferiority and evil. 19 This rationalisation or the unguided equivalence-building between dark skin and evil got overwhelming clearance for racial prejudice and punishment for possessing such skin features. This prejudice got ingrained in the folk memory of the people and had a definitive bearing on the prejudices against them. In the imaginative folk memory, these prejudices acquired the form of proverbs. In one of the Greek proverbs, there was a reference made to the skin of the gipsies, ‘Go to the Gypsy children and choose the whitest’. 20 In Yiddish, it is, ‘The same sun that whitens the linen darkens the Gypsy’ and ‘No washing ever whitens the black Gypsy’. 21 These proverbs also played a notorious role in exacerbating the gipsy life in Europe.
The Roma, who arrived in Europe during the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople, were engaged in several sectors as an unpaid labour force to ease the economic strain Europe experienced because of the closure of the trade routes. In Germany and Poland, they were treated with utmost cruelty as they were thought to be Muslims. 22 In 1471, the Moldavian prince Stephen the Great sent 17,000 Tsigani [Gypsies] to Moldavia as a labour force during his adventure into the Wallachian neighbourhood. 23 They became commodities for use without payment. This is just one instance of subjugation. The practice of enslaving the gipsies became quite common across the Balkan principalities, where they lived ‘as many as 800 or 900 years’. 24 They were either engaged as house slaves or field slaves. The former refers to the slaves whose area of activity was confined to the boundaries of the households and institutions. They were slaves for the crown, the rich, the church, noblemen and so on. The field slaves were engaged with the barons and the landowners. There was another category of slaves who worked for the crown performing the service of gold washing. The gipsies, who were entertainers, were allowed to move and did all kinds of music and performance to earn their livelihood. They were often looked down upon for their poverty and complexion. The Exchequer of the Hapsburg Empire restricted them not to involve too much in music, and the masters of these gipsy slaves were instructed to beat them if they failed to perform the assigned work and waste time on music. 25 Gipsy slaves were given different house names that included ‘Pharoah, Bronze, Dusky, Dopey or Toad’ or for their women, ‘Witch, Camel, Dishrag or Whore’. 26
The auctioning of the gipsies in the market was almost a regular affair. Women, men and children were bundled up and sold, sometimes as a whole or separately, to white masters across Europe. In the event of mixed marriages, as it happened in several places, the children born out of this union were neither recognised as white nor given the legal right to inherit the property of the white master. They were declared slaves, and their fair complexion was not taken into consideration to grant them some concession. Mixed marriages, moreover, were legally prohibited. If such marriages were solemnised in the church, the priest who performed the rites in the rarest of cases ran the risk of ex-communication. To discourage the recurrence of such deeds, Constantin, Prince of Moldavia, issued a proclamation in 1776 calling the act of mixed marriages essentially ‘evil and wicked’, ‘against the Christian faith’, ‘hateful to God’, ‘contrary to human nature’ and ‘their children remain forever in unchanged slavery’. 27 In 1785, the union between whites and gipsies were further forbidden. Legal efforts were made to curb such occurrences. The Moldavian Penal Code of 1833 further crystallises the slavery laws: (a) ‘Legal union cannot take place between free persons and slaves’, (b) ‘Marriages between slaves cannot take place without their owner’s consent’, (c) ‘The price of a slave must be fixed by the Tribunal, according to his age, condition and profession’ and (d) ‘If anyone has taken a female slave as a concubine … she will become free after his death. If he has had children by her, they will also become free’. 28 The Wallachian Penal Code of 1818 introduced the statutes concerning gipsies that include (a) ‘Gypsies are born slaves’, (b) Anyone born of a mother who is a slave, is also a slave, (c) ‘Any owner has the right to sell or give away his slaves’ and (d) ‘Any Gypsy without an owner is the property of the Prince’. 29 By 1833, a pass system, obtainable only from the slave owners, was introduced for the gipsy slaves. On production of the same to the appropriate authority, they were allowed to cross the inter-district borders. In Romania, the gipsy repression was intensified ‘during the emergence of a pan-Romania social formation’. 30 It created ‘conditions of prejudice that became hegemonic’. 31
The reverberations of emancipation began gaining more force in the 1830s. Along with America, Europe made efforts to introduce legal measures to emancipate the slaves. However, the Balkan states were too late in terms of releasing the gipsy slaves. By 1848, when the revolutionaries and radicals building required pressures to end slavery in Rumania, Moldavia and Wallachia against the boyars’ stubbornness to retain the practice, the Russians and Turks attacked the Balkans and reinstituted the practice of slavery against the mood of the time and the prohibitive legal measures. The boyars made the most effective use of the opportunity and repossessed the free slaves. Before they became aware of the taste of freedom, as the emancipation wave promised them, they were re-captured and engaged in the same inhuman system of slavery. It was an act of social disgrace for Moldavia and Wallachia to retain the practices of slavery when the global urgency was for the necessity of liberation. It was only on 23 December 1855 that slavery was declared illegal in Moldavia. 32 Following this, the Wallachian slaves were freed. It took too long for the Balkan states to end this savage practice. The European monarchies left no stone unturned to enslave the gipsies and made them their Negroes. They were liberated quite later than the Blacks in America. The mockery of this vision of freedom came in the form of Hitler, who imposed the horror of the holocaust on the gipsies eighty years later. This freedom was short-lived for the Roma, who escaped one horror to meet another and the most terrifying of all.
Emancipation coincided with large-scale migration from the Balkans to Scandinavia and Western Europe. Many gipsies were transported to North and South America as indentured labourers since European colonies required a labour force to adjust the post-emancipation labour deficit. Sadly, other gipsies could not move without resources and chose to resale themselves to their erstwhile masters. In September 1879, an attempt was made by the liberated gipsy slaves in the form of a pan-European Congress to seek unity among the gipsies to improve their living conditions and to establish political and civil rights for them in Europe. 33 Such initiatives were mocked because of their ‘gipsiness’, a state of being that could not be washed away by any act of intellection. This general perception of the gipsies was pervasive among the Europeans. This explained that the emancipation initiatives were largely legal and synthetic and had no bearing on public perception. Furthermore, the long period of servitude ends with the beginning of a period of discrimination. In the post-Emancipation period, the gipsies had to undergo vicious discrimination almost in every country and government in Europe. The American experience was not even remarkably different, but it gave them a great sense of anonymity in the face of increasing diversity. The notions of ‘magic, deviancy, and wanderlust’, historically associated with the gipsies, developed an imperative in the community to hide their identity to become America’s ‘Shadow Minority’. 34 The legitimacy of their identity required ‘the Romani political, cultural and historical background’. 35 Romophobia and anti-gypsyism ensured their marginalisation to whichever countries they migrated to. Their othering acquired regularity as they never held the agency of representation. They were represented by people other than themselves, which embodied the scope for misrepresentation, distortion, stereotype formation and incorrect assessment of their identity and historicity. However, the term ‘anti-gypsyism’ acquired lexical prominence in the 1920s and 1930s as the Romani activists used it. It was rediscovered in the 1980s as the Romani issues attracted global attention. It was variously described as racism accompanied by serious forms of hate, violence, systematic discrimination, stigmatisation, and homogenising and essentialist perception. 36
Institutionalised oppression against the gipsies was quite common in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They became the property of the crown, nobility and the landowners. Anti-gypsyism in Hungary acquired consistency as they were accused of some strange and imaginative crimes that included vampirism and cannibalism. Some weird stories of witchcraft and black magic were in circulation from anonymous sources but caught the most inquisitive attention from the general public. Therefore, the public perception gradually turned hostile to the gipsies. The charges sometimes made against the gipsies were unfounded, but the impact of these charges was deep in the public sphere. Despite the existence of anti-gipsy tendencies and institutionalised forms of oppression in Eastern Europe, the Eastern European states expected the gipsies to remain slaves or cheap labour force. In Western Europe, the perception of the gipsies was quite contrary. The latter found exceptional consensus in the idea of transporting the gipsies to the American colonies to get rid of them completely. They characterised the gipsies as a curse on their soil, and the sooner they got rid of them closer they were to their project of racial purity. This tendency found the most sinister manifestation in Hitler’s policy of cleansing the Jews and gipsies from Europe. The colonial plantation economy opened the scope to flush the gipsies from Western Europe as there was growing popular support built for it. But the leftover gipsies became victims of Hitler’s liquidation drive.
In 1568, Pope Pius V ordered the expulsion of the gipsies from the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church. 37 Their heathenism and statelessness blocked the possibility of their religious acceptance. These expulsion writs issued by none other than the Roman Catholic Church had ramifications on the general public perception of the gipsies. The anti-gipsy tendencies received some form of religious legitimacy. Spain desired the expulsion of the gipsies as early as 1499. With its Empire expanding to Latin and Central America in the immediate aftermath of Columbus’ discovery of the new land, Spain was the first among the Europeans to transport the gipsies to America on 11 February 1581. 38 The second in the line was Portugal. To banish the Romani people from Portugal, the Portuguese in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries imposed the legal imperatives to conduct the trans-Atlantic shipment of the gipsies. 39 The city of Bahia in Brazil around 1718 was the principal offloading station for the gipsies taken from Portugal. But the shipment of the gipsies to America was occasioned by sheer hatred, whereas for the Africans, it was for economic reasons. 40 The European racist hatred determined the swift shipment of the gipsies to the new world to get rid of the supposed menace that the latter was thought to be. Similarly, France also transported them to North America in 1700. Germany, too, did its part in sending them to its colony in Pennsylvania. 41
Around ten thousand gipsies lived in England by 1528. 42 Around that time, the first Anti-Gipsy Act was passed to restrict their entry into the British Isles, and this Act instructed the gipsies to leave within two weeks. In 1547, a law was enforced by Edward VI to seize the itinerant gipsies and enslave them. The letter ‘V’ was stamped on their breasts as an identifying mark of slavery, and they were forced to work in the most inhuman conditions. If any gipsy was found missing and recaptured later, the letter ‘S’ was stamped on him to ensure his life-long servitude. 43 It was a capital offence to be a Rom under Henry VIII: ‘If caught, a Rom could be tortured, flogged, branded, and banished. If caught a second time, the penalty was death for men and women’. 44 In Cromwell’s England in the 1600s, the Anti-Gypsy Law was equally terrifying. To be born as a gipsy or any non-gipsy association with gipsies amounted to death by hanging. 45 The Church also did its part in spreading anti-gipsy propaganda as it felt insecure about the gipsy popularity in fortune-telling and magic. 46 England also deported its gipsies to its plantation colonies in Virginia, Jamaica and Barbados. In 1714, British planters and merchants approached the Privy Council to transport them as slaves to the Caribbean. 47 The English made Barbados the entry point for slave offload and distribution purposes for quite a long time.
The gipsies in Germany underwent the harshness of its winter and the harshness of its people. As a culmination of the history of persecution, Hitler just pronounced the endgame of the gipsies. The German treatment of the gipsies was never charitable. Torturing a gipsy for a reason or not was a commonplace occurrence in Germany. In 1726, Charles VI legislated a law that permitted the killing of male gipsies and their womenfolk and children with severe punishment if found in the country. 48 Gipsy hunting was also a celebrated sporting event. This genocidal hatred, combined with the racist German academic scholarship on gipsies, made the lives of the gypsies in Germany extremely difficult. This prejudice is finely illustrated in the German ethnographer Heinrich Grellmann’s study in 1783 that presents the conclusion that while doing his fieldwork, he felt ‘an evident repugnancy, like a biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interest of science’. 49 The standard that Grellmann set became the prototype for the racist research that followed thereafter. The feeling of mistrust and repulsion remained the regulatory mechanism in determining the gipsy research. The Romani culture, language and music had generated significant interest, mainly the philological and musicological research, in the wake of the Enlightenment as the Rousseauistic romantic notions of ‘noble savage’ had attracted scholarly curiosity towards the gipsy exoticism. However, this tendency was a short-lived one because soon the concepts of social Darwinism and ‘Aryan racism of Count Gobineau and Richard Wagner’ 50 took over and increasingly marginalised the Roma as racially inferior. The Zigeuner-Buch declared the Romanies as a ‘plague’ and ‘menace’ and prohibited ‘the Romani and German gene pools’. 51
The conference on ‘The Gypsy Filth’ held in the closing years of the nineteenth century in Swabia decided to encircle the gipsies in the German-ruled territories. A methodology of ringing the bell to highlight the presence of the gipsies was proposed to be implemented in the villages to capture these social outcasts effectively. In Munich, an institutional framework was enforced in the form of the Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance in 1899 under the directorship of Alfred Dillman to control them. The organisation continued to exist, to the consternation of many, until 1970. 52 This was the German preparedness for handling the gipsies. The precise form of this preparedness came in the form of Nazi comprehensive control of the itinerant community. Their exotic appearance, weird customs, nomadic lifestyle and linguistic distinctiveness constituted their otherness. To eliminate this awkward other, special security arrangements were made in the 1920s in Bavaria and Prussia to extend deep surveillance on them. The Hanseatic laws that ensured punishment to the people who had no permanent job or home and were not found in the taxpayers’ register in the German-speaking lands subjected the gipsies to punishment and expulsion. 53 With the Nazi takeover of Germany, a special motif of racial inferiority embodying the possibility of further contamination was invented to liquidate the gipsies. 54 Anti-gipsy law became more defined under Hitler’s Nazi administration. The Research Centre for Racial Hygiene and Biological Population Studies undertook the codification process to identify the individuals of Romani origin. The gipsies were subjected to the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor on 15 September 1935, and intermarriage and sexual intercourse between the Aryan and the non-Aryan were strictly forbidden. 55 The legal measures for sterilisation and building camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Mahrzen and Vennhausen to confine them were introduced.
The establishment of the International Centre for the Fight against the Gypsy in Vienna in 1936 globalised the anti-gipsy campaign. 56 This campaign that the Nazi Party floated found overwhelming cooperation from several European governments. This facilitated the process of identifying and locating the gipsies in Europe. It helped Hitler to plan complete extermination in pursuing his programme of establishing purity of the Germanic race. The Nazi Party proclamation came in the year 1938 and categorically stated that the gipsy problem was essentially a matter of race. The Jews and the Gypsies were identified to have possessed racial contamination. The only way to settle this racial issue was through extermination. To achieve this neurotic project, ‘The total number of Romani dead is now estimated to be some 600,000’. 57 Donald Kenrick argues that there were between 200,000 and half a million Gypsies were exterminated by the Nazis in Auschwitz and Treblinka. 58 Gipsies in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Holland and other countries were nearly eliminated.
In July 1938, the decision of the Final Solution was enforced, which led to the transportation of the gipsies to Berlin and subsequently to Poland. This decision was not essentially limited to Germany. It was effectively implemented in all the Nazi-controlled European countries. Gipsies were sent to the camps and exterminated. Deportation and elimination were regularly done. In the concentration camps, they were starved to death. The malnourished, rickety bodies were finally consigned to death. The gipsies, mostly young girls, were selected to conduct medical experiments adhering to absolutely no modicum of research ethics. 59 Thereafter, nothing was known about them, and they never reappeared. By 1943, Hitler’s henchman Himmler unleashed the gipsy pogrom that led to large-scale killing. 60 The Roma call this pogrom the ‘Porrajmos’, meaning ‘devouring’.
Statelessness
This episode of horror in the history of the twentieth century could not exert any distinctive impact on the global community. The gipsy suffering was hardly given any attention in the aftermath of the Second World War. The gipsy point of view was never sought, and, unfortunately, no single gipsy was asked to testify neither at the Nuremberg Trial nor by the subsequent war crime tribunals as it happened for the Jews. For the Jews, justice was served, and a new state, Israel, was formed to secure the Jewish life from the precarity of statelessness. However, no such scope was extended to the gypsies, and the shadow of statelessness follows them even today. The collapse of the Third Reich did not improve the gipsy condition. West Germany paid 715 million dollars to different Jewish organisations as compensation for the war crimes, whereas the gipsy suffering attracted no compensation. 61 An impression was gradually developed as if nothing had happened to them. They do not claim a separate state of their own like the Jews. They demand to belong to the state where they are and have lived for centuries. In Europe, their otherness remains evident. In the 1970s, Gerold Tandler, spokesperson for the German government, turned down the gipsy proposal of war crime reparations as ‘unreasonable’ and ‘slanderous’. 62 In 1985, Gunther Metzger, the Mayor of Darmstadt, described that the gipsy association with the holocaust was an insult to its memory as the claimed suffering of the gipsies did not take place. 63 This shows the selective character of the German conscience. Their treatment of the Jews and Gypsies in the post-holocaust period was noticeably different.
However, the gipsy suffering during the holocaust was equally exceptional. In the absence of proper recognition, reporting and representation of gipsy suffering in the holocaust, it was assumed that nothing substantive happened to them, and they remained in the dispensable category. This callousness towards the gipsy human rights violation became evident in the Czechoslovakian newspaper Vychodoslovenske Noviny. It published an article in May 1976 that presented the government proposal of forced sterilisation of the gipsies. 64 Hitler’s Germany making such proposals and executing them was quite understood, but in socialist Czechoslovakia, it was unacceptable. The report on the infant mortality rate among gipsies in England published in 1983 by the Save the Children Fund found it ‘fifteen times higher than the national average’. 65 The New York Times reports on 25 October 1984 that in Zaragosa, Spain, the non- gipsies seriously opposed the government proposal to build houses for the gipsies and burnt their houses and restricted their children to go to schools. 66 Discrimination against gipsies in Europe continued even after the brutal holocaust. These incidences were not sporadic or accidental cases. They constitute a pattern as similar anti-gipsy tendencies are also seen across Europe. In Eastern Europe, Communism in the Cold War politics had its share of persecution of the Roma. Under Communism, the Romani language was banned, nomadism was forbidden, the Roma were not allowed to form political organisations, and they were denied pursuing their traditional occupations. 67 In the 1970s and 1980s, there were thousands of women sterilised in Czechoslovakia. 68 The post-1989 social reality shaped by the racially motivated violence was equally worse for the Roma.
Assessing the current scenario, especially in Europe, Roma constitute the largest ethnic minority. As per the European Commission report, the number of Roma living in Europe at present is estimated at around 10–12 million, of which around 6 million are residents of the European Union. 69 It suggests that around 4–6 million live a life of itinerancy. The European Commission mentions that the continuity of Roma victimhood, social exclusion, discrimination and prejudice has seemingly not seen an end despite the existence of legal imperative across the EU member states for the prevention of any misconduct against the Roma minority. Following the earlier framework, which focused on socio-economic integration, the European Commission refashioned the existing measures under the EU Roma strategic framework on 7 October 2020 with a comprehensive three-pillar approach: ‘equality’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘participation’. 70
On 16 July 2012, the killing of a gens du voyage [travelling people] by the French police at Saint-Romain-sur-Cher in central France and the subsequent spiralling of violence created a situation that led to the French government’s decision to dismantle 500 Roma camps. These camps were declared illegal even though the Roma were EU citizens. Nicolas Sarkozy issued a statement criticising the French government’s soft approach towards unregulated immigration over 50 years. 71 The course of events that followed involved political and media representations and sensationalisation over nomadism, criminality, illegal immigration and the status of camps in France. By October, around 1,230 Roma were deported by the French government despite objections raised by the EU and the Roma activists. The repressed Anti-gypsy instincts in France found the most uncharitable expression in these racist and discriminatory acts. Historically, France has been accused of having extended a very hard treatment to the gipsies. 72 The current episode unfolds the unceasing continuity of this racial antagonism against the wandering Roma community. The 2006 report by the US-based National Democratic Institute states that even after 16 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe remain ‘politically marginalised’. 73 Lulius Rostas 74 calls them a ‘politically insular minority’. The Roma condition has not substantively improved despite the recurrent noise around human rights protection. Even in the post-2008 financial crisis, Matache writes, ‘Poverty, along with racism, has contributed to keeping Romani communities isolated and ghettoised, and the children segregated in low-quality schools’. 75 In 1997, Canada restricted Roma applications for migration from Slovakia and the Czech Republic. They sought asylum in the United Kingdom because of the ‘institutional racism and discrimination’ in their home countries. 76 However, the reception in the United Kingdom was quite unsavoury, charged with both subtle and gross forms of racism indicating the signs of anti-gypsyism.
Gipsies have historically been victims of strange stereotypes and an overwhelming degree of baseless mischaracterisation. These stereotype formations were occasioned by their lack of cogent identity. They became a scattered nation soon after their choiceless exit from India under the historical imperative imposed by foreign invasion. A scattered nation united only by origin, culture and language found no confident anchorage anywhere. Being different, they suffered the problem of acceptability. Being identifiably different, they underwent historically a brutal experience of otherness. They paid a huge price for being different. Their defencelessness and lack of assertiveness on the question of identity made them mobile communities exposed to horror, humiliation and inhumanity. They were misconstrued as Egyptians, Moors and Tartars for their dark skin. The dogmatic and superstitious Medieval Europe unleashed its repressed creativity in portraying the gipsies in the darkest terms possible. The gipsy talent for magic and astrology was misconceived as evil. From this misconception followed the appetite for stereotype formations. The nature of stereotypes was such that they spread faster than truth. The distinct Romani sense of hygiene and cleanliness, the binary of pollution and purity and other curious customs reinforced their strangeness as these sociocultural attitudes did not find any common ground on the land they lived in. These differences made them vulnerable and began othering them seriously. This also underlined the fact of European intolerance towards otherness. An impression was built gradually about the gipsies as idle, miserable, dishonest, capable of criminality and incorrigible by any act or degree of cultural refinement and moral rectitude. This impression acquired an uncanny commonness of approval among the non-gipsy communities that the gipsies were the unwanted other. The gipsies were seen as a countercultural force capable of engendering subnational tendencies. Unreasonable, though it appears, the nature of the European notion of nationalism characterised by ethnic, religious and linguistic distinctiveness is considered such an antithetical tendency capable of underlying dangers. Assimilative factors were legally denied on the issue of racial corruption or degradation. The gipsy identity protectionism restricted them from an integrationist outlook. However, it was not commonly easy to assimilate with the non-gipsy others against the overwhelming sense of stigma attached to these nomadic and itinerant communities.
Against the general perception of anti-gypsyism, the critical Romani studies made discursive attempts to examine the essentialist nature of the Ramani narrative and its assumed homogenisation. It questions certain positions and representational ambiguities, historically circulated as uncritical, singular and essentialist. Mirga-Kruszelnicka discusses the layered and nuanced nature of the Romani ethnicity, identity and migration histories. 77 She reviews the works of Brubaker, Stuart Hall and Steven Vertovec to highlight the essentialist character of the Romani knowledge production. The objective is to de-essentialise the Romani discourse and its representational determinism. She critically reads Brubaker’s notion of ‘groupness’, Hall’s conceptualisation of ‘new ethnicities’ and Vertovec’s coinage ‘super-diversity’ concerning mapping the migration matrix to de-essentialise the categorising logic. Matache refers to white normativity embedded in the social sciences approach to the Roma scholarship, which generates representational equivocation. 78 In the Roma scholarship, the suffering of the Romani women has not been given definitive attention. They have been glossed over under the narrative burden of the Roma generic suffering and its historical consistency. Therefore, Ethel C. Brooks asserts the urgency of Romani feminism to represent their voices of suffering, trauma and angst. 79
Conclusion
This article covers the Roma experience of migration, persecution and statelessness since their unfortunate exit from India in the event of foreign invasion. It has tried to capture the experience of restlessness that continues even today among the Romani people for always being the other. The othering experience remains stubbornly the same without the warmth of acceptance. The baggage of criminality and the misconstrued images of Roma being the non-negotiable and non-dialogic other continue to circulate in the public sphere. The French administrative decision in 2012 to mobilise the forced eviction of the Roma from its territory indicates the undercurrent existence of prejudice against them. Therefore, the Roma question becomes all the more relevant as discriminatory tendencies against them persist despite the presence of measures that encourage deterrence. The persistence of prejudice against the Roma even today engenders ambiguity concerning their future free from being the dispensable other. This ambiguity finds the most fitting manifestation in the words of a Slovakian Roma and an Auschwitz survivor Ilona Lackova, ‘It’s the end of the war, we’ve survived. After darkness comes the dawn. But after every dawn also comes the darkness. Who knows what’s in store for us’. 80 This expression of ambiguity laced with anxiety comes from her own experience of the sameness of suffering and its unceasing continuity. She survived the Nazi terror to end up in the repressive communist rule in Eastern Europe. Her career as a writer and spokesperson for the Romani cause began only after the collapse of socialism in 1989. The 1989 political and ideological stirrings in Europe and its aftermath witnessed the Roma Renaissance, legal rearrangement for their security and representation as a minority and the development of the Romani organisational frameworks to support the Roma cause. Despite this background, the cloud of uncertainty still hovers over the Roma future as stereotypes and prejudices have seemingly not escaped the European racial unconscious. Therefore, she is not incorrect in her apprehension about the uncertainty of the Romani future. On a note of optimism, Ismael Cortés argues in favour of building ‘a new shared schema of perception and appreciation towards the Roma’ to give them a sense of belonging. 81 It will not be achieved in ‘a climate of misrecognition, distrust, fear, or hatred’ or economic reforms for Roma assimilation. The recuperation of the Roma rests on recognising them as assets, not as an unnecessary social weight.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.