Bury Me Standing--The Gypsies and Their Journey (book review by C. J. S. Wallia)

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Bury Me Standing--The Gypsies and Their Journey

by Isabel Fonseca

(New York: Vintage, 1996)

322 pages, $13

 

Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia

 

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 disappear --

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. An

outstanding example of these contribitions --Flameno-- highlights

the Cannes award-winning Latcho Drom .

 

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 sustained

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 Punjabi spoken in northwest India.

Fonseca does not comment on the obvious resemblance with Punjabi,

presumably because of her unfamiliarity with it or any other modern

Indian language. 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 music's use of the Indian ragas such as

Bairavi, Mulkausa, and Kalyani as well as the bol (the rhythmic

syllables -- tak, dhin, dha -- imitating drum beats).

 

Fonseca seems to think that the 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. "

 

Fonseca errs in stating that the Gypsy designation for themsleves as

Roma is derived from Dom, one of the outcaste tirbes in India. Roma

is a variation of " ramante, " a Punjabi word meaning moving,

wandering. This etymology is cogently discussed in W.R. Rishi's

book " ROMA: The Panjabi Emigrants in Europe, second edition "

published in 1996 by Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India.

Rishi traces the origin of the Roma to the 500, 000 prisoners of war

taken by Muhamad Ghaznvi in 1001 from the Punjab to Afghanistan and

subjected to Islamic conversion by the sword. Many of them resisted

by escaping westward to the Christian lands of Armenia and Greece.

To this day, the Roma use the word Gajo, derived from Ghazi-- the

Koranic title of infidel-killing Muslims-- as a disparaging term.

The Roma are from the warrior castes of the Punjab.

 

The Roma 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

yet 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 Roma 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 as exonerating defense! 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

comprised more than thirty Jews as well as Poles, Ukranians, and

Russians among others but not a single Gypsy.)

 

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 his ancestral 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 observes: " 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.

 

Bury Me Standing--The Gypsies and Their Journey

Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia