The Bulgarian Untouchables

Mena, my wife, and I were walking on a street of Yambol, a small town in Bulgaria. I noticed two young men nearby. I looked at them, they looked at us and we couldn’t take our eyes off. It was like a Bollywood scene where siblings separated in childhood accidentally bump into one another as adults. Five minutes later, a car passed by. A girl was in its passenger seat. Again the same reaction, we stared at her, she stared at us. Nobody said anything.

That evening, we were accosted by a young bearded guy. Except for us, the street was empty. He began talking to me in a language I didn’t understand. I don’t speak Bulgarian, but I can recognise it. This language was very different. The young man looked disappointed when we couldn’t understand him. For a mile, he silently walked with us, then went ahead.

The following day, on our routine evening stroll, a bubbly, middle-aged man came out of his house and greeted us. He looked like my ground-floor neighbour from Bombay. He wanted to talk to us. Though we had no common language, we recited numbers 1 to 10 in our respective languages and found them to be similar. His extended family and friends gathered. Photos were taken. His daughter posed with my wife. One could be forgiven for thinking both belonged to the same community.

All these people were Bulgarian Gypsies.

Roma, not Gypsies

The word ‘Gypsy’ suggests a group of exotic wanderers and fortune-tellers, playing music and dancing, possessing powers to heal as well as curse, riding in caravans with horses and mules.

Gypsy, as a matter of philological fact, is a mistaken term. When these dark-skinned nomads reached Europe fifteen centuries ago, the Europeans thought they were from Egypt. Gypsy is short for e-gypsy-ans (Egyptians). Columbus erroneously called the American tribes Indian, they were not Indian. On another continent, the nomadic communes arriving in Europe were thought to be Egyptian, but they were actually Indian.  

Linguistics has long established this hypothesis. The Gypsy language ‘Romani’ is based on Sanskrit. Apart from numerals, they share Hindi words like naak (nose), kaan (ear), aankh (eye), baal (hair) and churi (knife). They call themselves ‘Kaale’ (black in Hindi).

They are called ‘Roma’, a word that comes from Doma (house chief) or Domba. [As to how D changes into R, read my open diary week 9:2017]. In Marathi, Domba-ri is a travelling community of street performers.

A 2012 DNA research confirmed the Roma’s ancestry. A Y-chromosome comparison linked European Roma to men from Punjab and Rajasthan. Some 1500 years ago, their families began travelling from North-western India towards Europe in groups. Each group had less than one hundred people, and was headed by a person called the count or duke in Romani. It is speculated these people were the lowest caste, India’s untouchables. They might have left to avoid harassment from upper caste Hindus, or from the Moguls who had begun their attacks on India. If you look at the map, you will find that the distance between Rajasthan (India) and Yambol (Bulgaria) is nearly 6000 km. Interestingly, that entire route is Islamic land; Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. It could have taken them a couple of years to walk/ horse-ride that distance. On the way, most were obliged to accept Islam as their religion to avoid death. By the 13^th century, the Roma had spread across Europe.

Romani people have preserved their language and culture through centuries. They value freedom and independence. Their culture believes in the ‘here and now’ – enjoy this place and this moment without worrying about the future. In Roma culture, a millionaire is a person who has spent a million. He may be bankrupt today, but if he has enjoyed spending a million in the past, he qualifies as a millionaire. (A lesson for modern miser millionaires who will die without enjoying their money).

Every 20^th person in Bulgaria is a Roma. Bulgarian Roma are either Muslims or Orthodox Christians, but they speak Romani, the Sanskrit-based language. You can change your religion in a matter of minutes, but you can’t change your DNA. The Romani people were the first Non-Resident Indians (NRIs).

Legend, or myth?

One legend says a Sassanid Monarch, Baharam Gul, who ruled Persia during the 5^th century felt his subjects were becoming soul-less. He invited 10,000 musicians/entertainers from Hindustan. On their arrival, he gifted to each a bag full of wheat, an ox and some agricultural land. The ox would help them plough the fields; they would grow enough vegetables for themselves, and play music for the citizens in their free time. That was the plan. However, a few months later, the musicians approached the monarch. They had been lazy - not only had they finished eating bread made from the wheat, but also the oxen. Baharam Gul got so angry, he drove the Hindustani musicians out of Persia. Since that time, they have been roaming around the world always looking for a new habitat.

Of course, there is no historical basis for this legend. It sounds outlandish that a group of musicians from a vegetarian land should suddenly become meat-eaters and consume thousands of oxen.

Milena’s perception

Milena, an enterprising 30-year old Bulgarian lady, owns a shop next to where we are now staying in Plovdiv, the second largest Bulgarian city. Her shop selling chocolates, snacks, cigarettes, drinks, ice cream is open till midnight. She sleeps only for four hours a day, and her three year old son sits next to her playing video games in the shop. I managed to have a couple of long chats with her.

“I worry about the future of Bulgaria,” she tells me. “I’m struggling to look after one child. But the Tsigani (Bulgarian word for gypsies) women have 5-6 children. I get 200 lev a month as child allowance from the government, a Tsiganka gets 1200 lev. And everything is free for them. They don’t pay for water, for electricity. They live in large ghettos. The inspector who reads the electric meters is scared to go there. So, nobody pays the bills. We are subsidising the Tsigani population. And we are not a rich country.

“You know, officially, Tsigani are 5%. But lots of them write “Turks” as their nationality during census. So the real figure is much higher. And with tsiganki becoming pregnant all the time, this country will one day become a Roma country. I’m really worried about the future of my son.”

Roma Ghettos

Wherever a majority community complains about the “outsiders”, both sides carry certain perceptions about one another. The truth usually lies somewhere in between.

Milena’s worry is understandable. Stolipinovo, an area of Plovdiv with 50,000 Romani people is the largest Roma ghetto in Europe. The Plovdiv Mayor has called it ‘a Gypsy republic’. It is generally described as filthy and unsafe, with people living on top of garbage, children never going to school.  The non-payment of electricity bills is a genuine problem on which serious books have been written.

As I write this diary, Asenovgrad, another Bulgarian town, is organising protests every weekend. Following an incident in June, a few young Roma boys have been arrested. The protesting Bulgarians are demanding that all newly arrived Roma, more than 5000 of them, should be evicted and sent somewhere else. (Where to send people whom nobody wants?)

The root of many of these problems lies in the history of the Roma.

Discrimination, marginalisation, extermination

Europe has historically hated Romani people. Probably for their alien looks, for their loyalty to their language and nomadic culture.

In the 17^th century, ‘gypsy hunt’ was a form of public entertainment. The Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm, an autocrat, had permitted all adult gypsies to be hanged without trials.

Closer to our times, Hitler targeted Roma along with the Jews for extermination. In the holocaust, half a million Roma were killed, 21,000 gassed in the Auschwitz concentration camp alone.

Between 1970-90, Czechoslovakia forcefully sterilized thousands of Romani women.

A cover of a major magazine in Switzerland said: They come, they steal, they go. In some European countries, the Roma children are sent to special schools for the mentally lagging. In Bulgaria, Romania and some other countries, many Roma were forced to change names and ordered to hide their shacks behind concrete walls.

In France and Italy, Sarkozy and Berlusconi used the Gypsy problem as a tool in every election. They promised forceful eviction of Roma from their countries.  

Many Roma have no papers. They call themselves ‘no people with no nation’. Despite several generations having lived in Europe, they remain stateless. EU’s free movement laws don’t apply to them.

The Romani people are trapped in a vicious cycle. Living in ghettos, born to illiterate parents, speaking in Romani language, the children are deprived of good education. With no papers, the Roma are unable to get proper jobs. Many of them are street sweepers. Those who can’t get even these lowly jobs beg or steal.

The Roma we met in villages were very decent. They were cheerful and educated. They worked on the farms to earn their honest living; had one or two children; appeared to be well assimilated in Bulgarian society. However, the stereotype of Roma is a politically protected, good-for-nothing bunch of people with large families, drinking, stealing and pick-pocketing. A Bulgarian proverb says: One who doesn’t work must not eat. I suspect it is directed at the Roma.

Hitler wished to exterminate Jews, gays, disabled people and Roma as part of his holocaust campaign. Jews, gays and the disabled have since that time been rehabilitated, even gaining respect and dignity in many places. Gays can marry and adopt children in some countries. Developed countries make sure the disabled have access to most facilities denied them in the past. Jews are a strong political and financial force. Roma is the only category that continues to be discriminated against, maligned, persecuted and marginalised.

Worldwide population of Jews and that of Roma is almost the same – about 16 million people each. Europe alone has 11 million Roma. But Roma remain the poorest, most vulnerable Europeans. They face poverty, exclusion and discrimination.

Fifteen centuries ago, when they left India, they belonged to the lowest caste. They were the untouchables.

Tsigani, the Slavic word, comes from the Greek Atsingani, meaning untouchable. Except for the fact that they are in Europe, fifteen centuries later Romani are still untouchables.

Ravi