FREE ESSAY ON ISABEL FONSECA

ISABEL FONSECA

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.
Bibliography
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.