Isabel Fonseca Essay, Research Paper

Gypsies, the long-lost children of India, number about 12

million worldwide. In Europe, the 8 million Gypsies constitute

its largest minority. Recent films like Tony Gatlif’s Latcho

Drom: A Musical History of the Gypsies from India to

Spain (1994) and books like Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me

Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey (1996) will help

ensure that the Gypsies do not again get lost — outside the

world’s consciousness.

Bury Me Standing — the title comes from the Gypsy saying,

“Bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all my life”– is a

compassionate book about a marginalized and

much-maligned people. Nonetheless, over the past seven

centuries, the Gypsies have made many contributions to

European folk music, dance, and lore. As the Cannes

award-winning Latcho Drom shows, Flamenco dance is an

outstanding example.

When Isabel Fonseca, an American journalist and former

assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement, set out to

write this book in 1991, she “had in mind that the Gypsies

were ‘the New Jews of Eastern Europe.’” After four years of

field work that included living with Gypsy families in many

European countries and researching library documents, she

concluded that the Gypsies “alongside with the Jews are

ancient scapegoats.”

Traditionally, Gypsies never kept any written records nor

maintained an oral history. The research on their origin began

with a systematic philological analysis of their language,

Romani, which has been firmly established as a Sanskritic

language. Words like dand, (tooth), mun, (mouth), lon, (salt),

akha (eyes), khel (play) are identical with those in northwest

Indian languages like Punjabi and Hindi. Fonseca does not

comment on the close resemblance, presumably because of

her unfamiliarity with these languages. She is also puzzled by

the Gypsy habit of shaking head side-to-side to signify yes.

This distinctive gesture alone suffices to pinpoint their India

origin — rendering all linguistic evidence redundant! If

confirmation were needed, it would be readily provided by

the Gypsy use of the bhairavi musical scale as well as the bol

(the rhythmic syllables — tak, dhin, dha — imitating drum

beats).

Current scholarly consensus is that the Gypsies are from the

Dom group of tribes, still extant in India, making their living as

wandering musicians, smiths, metalworkers, scavengers, and

basketmakers. They migrated first from northwest India to

Persia in 950 A.D. at the invitation of Shah Behram Gur. As

recorded by the contemporary Persian historian Hamza, the

Shah “out of solicitude for his subjects, imported 12,000

musicians for their listening pleasure.”

The Dom, or the Rom, as the Gypsies came to call

themselves, appeared in Europe first in 1300 A.D., fleeing

from forcible Islamic conversions by the Turks. In Europe,

ironically, they were accused of being advance spies for the

Turks, and persecuted again. They were also mistaken as

Egyptians, whence the folklore origin of the term Gypsy.

Fonseca apparently is unaware of another etymology:

Punjab-say — from Punjab, which was what the earliest

immigrants to Persia replied when asked where they have

come from. By the time, they reached Byzantium, the locals

heard Punjab-say as Jabsay, Gypsy. The locals took Gypsy

to mean from Egypt, a country they had heard of.

The history of the Gypsies in Europe, gleaned, for the most

part, from court- and church-records and from rare

academic publications, is a horror–Europe’s heart of

darkness. One of the examples Fonseca cites is the 1783

dissertation published by Heinrich Grellman of Gottingen

University. In his book, Grellman describes an event of the

previous year in Hont county, Hungary: “The case involved

more than 150 Gypsies, forty-one of whom were tortured

into confessions of cannibalism. Fifteen men were hanged, six

broken on the wheel, two quartered, and eighteen women

beheaded — before an investigation ordered by the Hapsburg

monarch Joseph II revealed that all of the supposed victims

were still alive.”

During World War II, the Nazis exterminated 1.5 million

Gypsies. At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis’ lawyers argued

that the killing of the Gypsies was justified since they had

been punished as criminals, not as a race. There was no one

to speak for the Gypsies, and the international tribunal

accepted this rationale. Ah, humanity.

Although tyrants, bigots, and the misinformed have often

stereotyped the Gypsies as congenital criminals, sociological

studies show that the Gypsies commit crimes no more than

others. A large-scale study cited by Fonseca: In Romania,

which has the largest Gypsy population of any country, out of

all criminal convictions that of the Gypsies total 11 percent.

Their population in the country? Exactly 11 percent. (The

Gypsies in Romania do not have equal access to the justice

system. Their situation is worse than that of the Blacks and

Hispanics in the U.S.A.)

In recent decades, a Gypsy intelligentsia has begun to

emerge. Fonseca presents detailed profiles of several. Dr. Ian

Hancock, an American Gypsy, and the author of The Pariah

Syndrome, was instrumental in bringing about, in April 1994,

the first-ever Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., on

the human-rights abuses of the Gypsies. After prolonged

efforts, Hancock also succeeded in the Gypsy inclusion in the

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Gypsy inclusion

had long been opposed by Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace

Prize winner! It was only after Wiesel’s resignation, writes

Fonseca, herself an American Jew, that one Gypsy was

allowed onto the museum’s 65-member council. (The council

comprises Poles, Ukranians, Russians, and more than thirty

Jews among others.)

Saip Jusuf is the author of one of the first Romani grammars

and a principal leader in Skopje, Macedonia, which has the

largest Gypsy settlement anywhere. Jusuf helped organize the

first world Romany Congress in 1971 in London. The

conference was financed in part by the Government of India,

and at its urging the U.N. agreed first to recognize the Rom

as a distinct ethnic group and several years later accorded

voting rights to the International Romani Union.

In an interview with the author, Jusuf, having converted from

Islam to Hinduism, joyously displayed his new icon collection

of Ganesha, Parvati, and Durga . Ramche Mustupha, a poet,

showed his passport. Under “citizenship” it recorded

Yugoslav; under “nationality,” Hindu. The lost children of

India, having found their ancestral land, are very proud of its

ancient civilization — the oldest continuous civilization in the

world — “Amaro Baro Thanh” (Romani for “our big land”).

Fonseca observed: “Many of the young women, fed up with

the baggy-bottomed Turkish trousers they were supposed to

wear, have begun to wear saris.”

Unlike other beleaguered and marginalized minorities, the

Rom are not seeking a homeland of their own, a Romanistan,

in or outside India. The Rom are resisting, as they always

have, to maintain the freedom for a life-style of their

choosing. “To allow this to the Gypsies,” Vaclav Havel, in

Prague, said, “is the litmus test of a civil society.” However,

Havel’s is a lonely voice. All over Central and East Europe

“Death to the Gypsies” graffiti can be observed. Since the

Velvet Revolution in Czechoslavakia, twenty-eight Gypsies

have been murdered.

Fonseca cites several specific cases of terrorism against the

Gypsies during the 90’s. “In February 1995, in Oberwart,

Austria, a town seventy-five miles south of Vienna, four

Gypsy men were murdered. A pipe bomb had been

concealed behind a sign that said, in Gothic tombstone

lettering, ‘Gypsies go back to India’; the bomb exploded in

their faces when they tried to take it down. The first response

of the Austrian police was to search the victims’ own

settlement for weapons; ‘Gypsies killed by own bomb,’ the

papers reported.” Oberwart, Austria, is in Burgenland, where

the Gypsies have been settled for three centuries.

The resurging repression of the Gypsies is Europe’s

continuing crime against humanity. At the Nazi trials in

Nuremberg, there was no one to speak on behalf of the

Gypsies. Now, the Gypsies have at least this eloquent book

exposing Europe’s recrudescing genocidal threats to them.

Gypsies, the long-lost children of India, number about 12

million worldwide. In Europe, the 8 million Gypsies constitute

its largest minority. Recent films like Tony Gatlif’s Latcho

Drom: A Musical History of the Gypsies from India to

Spain (1994) and books like Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me

Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey (1996) will help

ensure that the Gypsies do not again get lost — outside the

world’s consciousness.

Bury Me Standing — the title comes from the Gypsy saying,

“Bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all my life”– is a

compassionate book about a marginalized and

much-maligned people. Nonetheless, over the past seven

centuries, the Gypsies have made many contributions to

European folk music, dance, and lore. As the Cannes

award-winning Latcho Drom shows, Flamenco dance is an

outstanding example.

When Isabel Fonseca, an American journalist and former

assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement, set out to

write this book in 1991, she “had in mind that the Gypsies

were ‘the New Jews of Eastern Europe.’” After four years of

field work that included living with Gypsy families in many

European countries and researching library documents, she

concluded that the Gypsies “alongside with the Jews are

ancient scapegoats.”

Traditionally, Gypsies never kept any written records nor

maintained an oral history. The research on their origin began

with a systematic philological analysis of their language,

Romani, which has been firmly established as a Sanskritic

language. Words like dand, (tooth), mun, (mouth), lon, (salt),

akha (eyes), khel (play) are identical with those in northwest

Indian languages like Punjabi and Hindi. Fonseca does not

comment on the close resemblance, presumably because of

her unfamiliarity with these languages. She is also puzzled by

the Gypsy habit of shaking head side-to-side to signify yes.

This distinctive gesture alone suffices to pinpoint their India

origin — rendering all linguistic evidence redundant! If

confirmation were needed, it would be readily provided by

the Gypsy use of the bhairavi musical scale as well as the bol

(the rhythmic syllables — tak, dhin, dha — imitating drum

beats).

Current scholarly consensus is that the Gypsies are from the

Dom group of tribes, still extant in India, making their living as

wandering musicians, smiths, metalworkers, scavengers, and

basketmakers. They migrated first from northwest India to

Persia in 950 A.D. at the invitation of Shah Behram Gur. As

recorded by the contemporary Persian historian Hamza, the

Shah “out of solicitude for his subjects, imported 12,000

musicians for their listening pleasure.”

The Dom, or the Rom, as the Gypsies came to call

themselves, appeared in Europe first in 1300 A.D., fleeing

from forcible Islamic conversions by the Turks. In Europe,

ironically, they were accused of being advance spies for the

Turks, and persecuted again. They were also mistaken as

Egyptians, whence the folklore origin of the term Gypsy.

Fonseca apparently is unaware of another etymology:

Punjab-say — from Punjab, which was what the earliest

immigrants to Persia replied when asked where they have

come from. By the time, they reached Byzantium, the locals

heard Punjab-say as Jabsay, Gypsy. The locals took Gypsy

to mean from Egypt, a country they had heard of.

The history of the Gypsies in Europe, gleaned, for the most

part, from court- and church-records and from rare

academic publications, is a horror–Europe’s heart of

darkness. One of the examples Fonseca cites is the 1783

dissertation published by Heinrich Grellman of Gottingen

University. In his book, Grellman describes an event of the

previous year in Hont county, Hungary: “The case involved

more than 150 Gypsies, forty-one of whom were tortured

into confessions of cannibalism. Fifteen men were hanged, six

broken on the wheel, two quartered, and eighteen women

beheaded — before an investigation ordered by the Hapsburg

monarch Joseph II revealed that all of the supposed victims

were still alive.”

During World War II, the Nazis exterminated 1.5 million

Gypsies. At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis’ lawyers argued

that the killing of the Gypsies was justified since they had

been punished as criminals, not as a race. There was no one

to speak for the Gypsies, and the international tribunal

accepted this rationale. Ah, humanity.

Although tyrants, bigots, and the misinformed have often

stereotyped the Gypsies as congenital criminals, sociological

studies show that the Gypsies commit crimes no more than

others. A large-scale study cited by Fonseca: In Romania,

which has the largest Gypsy population of any country, out of

all criminal convictions that of the Gypsies total 11 percent.

Their population in the country? Exactly 11 percent. (The

Gypsies in Romania do not have equal access to the justice

system. Their situation is worse than that of the Blacks and

Hispanics in the U.S.A.)

In recent decades, a Gypsy intelligentsia has begun to

emerge. Fonseca presents detailed profiles of several. Dr. Ian

Hancock, an American Gypsy, and the author of The Pariah

Syndrome, was instrumental in bringing about, in April 1994,

the first-ever Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., on

the human-rights abuses of the Gypsies. After prolonged

efforts, Hancock also succeeded in the Gypsy inclusion in the

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Gypsy inclusion

had long been opposed by Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace

Prize winner! It was only after Wiesel’s resignation, writes

Fonseca, herself an American Jew, that one Gypsy was

allowed onto the museum’s 65-member council. (The council

comprises Poles, Ukranians, Russians, and more than thirty

Jews among others.)

Saip Jusuf is the author of one of the first Romani grammars

and a principal leader in Skopje, Macedonia, which has the

largest Gypsy settlement anywhere. Jusuf helped organize the

first world Romany Congress in 1971 in London. The

conference was financed in part by the Government of India,

and at its urging the U.N. agreed first to recognize the Rom

as a distinct ethnic group and several years later accorded

voting rights to the International Romani Union.

In an interview with the author, Jusuf, having converted from

Islam to Hinduism, joyously displayed his new icon collection

of Ganesha, Parvati, and Durga . Ramche Mustupha, a poet,

showed his passport. Under “citizenship” it recorded

Yugoslav; under “nationality,” Hindu. The lost children of

India, having found their ancestral land, are very proud of its

ancient civilization — the oldest continuous civilization in the

world — “Amaro Baro Thanh” (Romani for “our big land”).

Fonseca observed: “Many of the young women, fed up with

the baggy-bottomed Turkish trousers they were supposed to

wear, have begun to wear saris.”

Unlike other beleaguered and marginalized minorities, the

Rom are not seeking a homeland of their own, a Romanistan,

in or outside India. The Rom are resisting, as they always

have, to maintain the freedom for a life-style of their

choosing. “To allow this to the Gypsies,” Vaclav Havel, in

Prague, said, “is the litmus test of a civil society.” However,

Havel’s is a lonely voice. All over Central and East Europe

“Death to the Gypsies” graffiti can be observed. Since the

Velvet Revolution in Czechoslavakia, twenty-eight Gypsies

have been murdered.

Fonseca cites several specific cases of terrorism against the

Gypsies during the 90’s. “In February 1995, in Oberwart,

Austria, a town seventy-five miles south of Vienna, four

Gypsy men were murdered. A pipe bomb had been

concealed behind a sign that said, in Gothic tombstone

lettering, ‘Gypsies go back to India’; the bomb exploded in

their faces when they tried to take it down. The first response

of the Austrian police was to search the victims’ own

settlement for weapons; ‘Gypsies killed by own bomb,’ the

papers reported.” Oberwart, Austria, is in Burgenland, where

the Gypsies have been settled for three centuries.

The resurging repression of the Gypsies is Europe’s

continuing crime against humanity. At the Nazi trials in

Nuremberg, there was no one to speak on behalf of the

Gypsies. Now, the Gypsies have at least this eloquent book

exposing Europe’s recrudescing genocidal threats to them.