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.
The Essay on Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Dee browns Bury My Heart at Wounded knee is a fully documented account of the American Indian in the late 1800s ending at the battle of Wounded Knee. Brown brings to Attention the storys of torture not well known americans. The way the american indian was Exterminated was best summed up by Standing Bear of the poncas indians. He said When People want to slaughter ...
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.
The Research paper on India Country
Below is a free essay on “India” from Anti Essays, your source for free research papers, essays, and term paper examples. 1.What is the climate for doing business in India? Is it supportive of foreign investment? oThe climate for doing business in India is continuously evolving. Today, the Indian economy is characterized by a liberalized foreign investment and trade policy, the ...
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.
The Essay on Monaco – Ancient Country
Monaco, Is an ancient country that has a rich and colorful history. It is considered by many to be Europe’s most fascinating country. Monico is a popular resort, attracting many tourists to its casinos and sandy beaches. Monaco is the smallest independent country in Europe. It is located on the southeastern part of France, and borders the Mediterranean Sea and is surrounded by France. The ...
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.
The Term Paper on Gypsy People In Europe part 1
Gypsy People in Europe Throughout history Gypsy people have been seen as outcasts from mainstream society. It seems that nothing has changed. We have still not learnt to be tolerant of those whose lifestyles are different to our own. For many centuries Gypsies have been romanticized and reviled. Their traditional lifestyle seems to attract and repel the popular imagination in equal measure -- ...
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”).
The Term Paper on How was the Gupta Empire (India) scientifically advanced
When thinking back to the Gupta Empire in India, one might remember the famous works of literature, or perhaps the vast lands conquered by the great rulers of the time. But it would be imprudent to ignore the influential achievements made in the areas of science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy that made the empire scientifically advanced. Many people fail to realize that countless things ...
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.
The Essay on Gypsies Eastern Europe
Regan Chewning Essay 4/Draft 111/19/00 Gypsies: The last nomads, the free-spirited, passionate bohemians with their mysterious rituals and powers. This romanticism is nearly as unfair as the fear and hate distracting us from recognizing the hardships and persecution these "carefree" people have undergone for centuries. In Europe, the Roma (as they wish to be call) have been cast out, burned at the ...
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.
