Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvementSmith, George
History
Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvement
Smith, George
Romanies -- Great Britain
bold race of North-Western India which at one time had such power as to
obtain important victories over the caliphs. They were broken and
dispersed in the eleventh century by Mahmoud, many thousands of them
wandering to the West. They were without religion, ‘of the horse,
horsey,’ and notorious thieves. In this they agree with the European
Gipsy. But they are not habitual eaters of _mullo balor_, or ‘dead
pork;’ they do not devour everything like dogs. We cannot ascertain that
the Jat is specially a musician, a dancer, a mat and basket-maker, a
rope-dancer, a bear-leader, or a pedlar. We do not know whether they are
peculiar in India among the Indians for keeping their hair unchanged to
old age, as do pure-blood English Gipsies. All of these things are,
however, markedly characteristic of certain different kinds of wanderers,
or Gipsies, in India. From this we conclude—hypothetically—that the Jat
warriors were supplemented by other tribes.
“Next to the word Rom itself, the most interesting in Romany is Zingan,
or Tchenkan, which is used in twenty or thirty different forms by the
people of every country, except England, to indicate the Gipsy. An
incredible amount of far-fetched erudition has been wasted in pursuing
this philological _ignis-fatuus_. That there are leather-working and
saddle-working Gipsies in Persia who call themselves Zingan is a fair
basis for an origin of the word; but then there are Tchangar Gipsies of
Jat affinity in the Punjab. Wonderful it is that in this war of words no
philologist has paid any attention to what the Gipsies themselves say
about it. What they do say is sufficiently interesting, as it is told in
the form of a legend which is intrinsically curious and probably ancient.
It is given as follows in ‘The People of Turkey,’ by a Consul’s Daughter
and Wife, edited by Mr. Stanley Lane Poole, London, 1878:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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