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A geneticist named Vijender Bhalla performed a series of “serological analyses" and as a result, was able to identify “a common ethnic substratum in India that Romanies share with Jat Sikhs, Panjabi Hindus and Rajputs" (9). Bhalla also concluded, “Romanies are genetically most like the Rajput populations in India and least like the present-day Dom" (13). This statement dispels the theory that the Romanies descended from the Doms. From a linguistic examination by two prominent linguistic researchers on the subject, Kochanowski and Ronald Lee both are under the opinion that their vocabulary suggests that the “Romanies began as settled peoples rather than nomadic peoples" (14).
The Seljuks were proponents of Islam and they with their captives migrated through Persia, Turkey, and the Balkans. This pattern is also suggested in the language of the Romanies (14).
The Rajput warriors did not go into battle by themselves. They were assisted by the shiviranuchara. The shiviranuchara were a mixture of non-warrior caste men and women who resembled in function like a traveling city. They performed a variety of services, including “clearing the battlefields, erecting tents, cooking for the soldiers, entertaining them, mending broken weapons and attending to the wounded" (11).
In “fifty years or less", the Romanies moved through the Middle East to reach Anatolia. It would be there that the early Romani ancestors would remain for about two hundred and fifty years. While in Greece, they became “metal workers, carpenters or entertainers" (16). Being enslaved in Romania was to be the fate of the half of the Romani population at that time. They were called tsiganes (whose meaning is synonymous with “slave"). This lasted over 500 years. Slave labor was divided into various categories. The various occupations of the Romani slaves give further insight into the future generations of Romani tribes. Occupations such as “Gold-washer, Charcoal-burner, Bowl-maker, Flower-seller, Basket-maker, Fortune-teller, Sieve-maker, Blacksmith, Handyman, Seamstress, Hut-builder, Torturer, Fisherman, Bear-trainer, Spoon-carver, Metal-worker, Cauldron-maker, Whitewasher, Brush-maker, Knife-grinder, Locksmith, Violin-player, Musician, Cook, Laundryman, Boot-mender, Executioner. There were Slaves of the Crown, Slave of the Church, Slaves of the householders, Slaves of the Court, Slaves of the noblemen, Slaves of the Boyars (Barons), and Slaves of the small landowners (Hancock, 19).
There were Romani slaves called scopiti who were castrated male slaves assigned to the noblewomen. All of these slaves had no legal rights for redress of wrongs done to them. They were considered foreigners and non-Muslims in an Islamic world. “By the 1500's the word tsigan had come specifically to mean ‘Romani slave' (18). The House slaves were not allowed to speak their native tongue, so generations of not being allowed to use their native tongue separated and isolated them from the other Romani. The female House slaves were often forced to serve as sex slaves to entertain the guests of their master. The children born from this were also born into slavery. Slaves were punished by “flogging, the falague (shredding of the soles of the feet with a whip), cutting off the lips, burning with lye, being thrown naked into the snow, and hanging over smoking fires and wearing a three-corned spiked iron collar" (21).
The infamous “Vlad the Impaler" was known for the inventive and inhumane tortures he inflicted on the Romanies. Russians took over after the Ottomans in 1826. The Romani people yet remained as slaves. Slavery was abandoned by 1790 in Transylvania, while slavery still existed in Moldavia and Wallachia. The 1850's brought the Industrial Revolution that made the “ownership, care and feeding of the slaves a liability rather than an asset". Romanian students returning to Romania from Sorbonne University in France brought with them views of slavery being backward and “old-fashioned" (23). On 23 December 1855, the Moldavian General Assembly unanimously voted to abolish slavery. They were not fully freed until two years after Romania became a country.
That was when Mihail Kogalniceanu, the new leader of new Romania “abolished serfdom and redistributed the land to the lower classes of society," including the Romani. Tsigane did not mean slave anymore, but was continued to identify the Romani people by the Romanians. The Romani people had been scattering and spreading throughout the world during the time the group in Romani were enslaved in Romania. In the other countries, the Romani did not fare much better. In the sixteenth century, Romanies were to be “branded with a V on their breast, and enslaved for two years…if they escaped and recaptured, they were then to be branded with an S and made slaves for life."
The Romanies in Spain were treated poorly also. Three Romanies from Spain were aboard Columbus' third voyage in 1498 to the Americas. Spain, England, and Scotland used the Americas as a ‘dumping ground' of Romani slaves. Forced labor workers consisting of Romani were shipped from Portugal to Brazil, Angola, and India. Russia made the Romani in their country “Slaves of the Crown". Scotland forced the Romani there to work as slaves in the coalmines. It is estimated that half of the original group of Romani were taken into slavery by the various countries, while the remaining half were able to continue their exodus to various lands and into Europe. The Europeans and their monarchs did not look or behave kindly to the new arrivals of Romani in their lands. A variety of notions and ideas about their character were based on their appearances and unusual behavior. As a result, negative stereotyping caused declarations and laws that would try to undermine the Romani people. Laws were passed that made it illegal to speak the Romani tongue. There were laws regulating the “movement" and “treatment" of the Romanies.
The German “Emperor Karl VI called for the extermination of Romanies everywhere throughout his domain." In the year 1740, any Romani person found in Bohemia was killed by order of an edict. In 1782, 200 Romani were taken on charges of cannibalism and were tortured and then executed. The charges were proved false when the ‘victims' of the supposed crime appeared alive. In England and Finland it was “illegal to be born a Romani". In short, they were not even allowed to exist (32).
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