Harking Back: Our original inhabitants and the treatment they face

In the coming week the British House of Lords is set to pass a bill that will permit the police to arrest and jail for up to three months any gypsy who passes their territory without informing them, or if they stop unannounced. Just how can the old colonial power do that to our forefathers?

It is amazing how little we know about the oldest inhabitants of our land – the nomads. But then it is not surprising as we consider them to be below our dignity to even talk to them, let alone a friendly handshake, or even a welcoming hug, let alone sharing a meal with them. For many years now I have been researching these ‘people of the tents’ [derogatorily referred to as Changars in Punjab] as they live on our riverside.

The Rigveda (in the 7th portion) tells us about them living on the banks of the River Ravi when the ‘Mahabharta’, or the Battle of the Ten Kings took place. In Sanskrit this is called ‘Dasarajna Yuddha’ and in the 7th collection (Mandala) is described as the battle between the ruler of Lahore, the King Bharata, and a federation of nine rulers from different areas, including Waziristan and Khurram and other places like Multan. The reason was that they wanted monopoly of the river trade along the Ravi.

Now Bharata, the ruler of Lahore, was assisted by the river bank nomads who supplied them with animals, food and information from far away, and all for free. They supplied them with long river bank twigs to make arrows and bows. Amazingly, these very people were taken away by Mahmud and also by Timur and, lastly, Babar, to work as farriers for their horses. It were these services that saw them described as ‘blacksmiths’, a rather racist description that still holds. The victory for the Lahore Army resulted in the Kuru Policy being formulated, strengthening the Hindu dispensation.

But then with each invasion we see these river folk either being enslaved, or quickly moving southwards and then westward along the coasts over the centuries. They all speak Punjabi, or Seraiki, some with a Rajasthani twist. When they want to speak among themselves some even today use Old Parsi (Persian as spoken by Zoroastrian immigrants from an oppressed Pars province of Iran). My connection started when I assisted a UNO programme collecting DNA from 150,000 gypsies from every country of the world. Yes Sir, our forefathers are everywhere. As a war correspondent during the Falklands War, I came across a gypsy from near Sialkot running a fish and chip shop.

But my most interesting encounter was when I was browsing books in Hay-on-Wye in Wales when a group of gypsies camped nearby were speaking a sort of Punjabi. They had moved on from Europe and were described as ‘Roma’, for they have collected there over the centuries in large numbers. Hitler gassed over 200,000 for being ‘Impure’. The British never tell you about the evil that befell our forefathers, but then a lot of us, mostly the upper classes, love to describe themselves as being of a higher social class from Iran or Arabia, or even beyond. The cursed complex of racist religiosity, now dangerously meshed with a secular touch, prevails still, with deadly consequences for our country and people.

Let us trace the routes our nomads took with every invasion. The basic escape route was towards the southern coast, then moving westwards. Once past the Iranian coast we see, as research by the University of Porto tells us, the nomads taking two basic routes. One towards Egypt and the other towards Turkey, from where they headed in various directions into Europe. Once there they headed towards Romania, which even today has a very large collection of them. The Council of Europe has estimated (2019) that 1.85 million Roma, or 8.3 per cent of the total population, live there. They are officially called the ‘Roma Gypsies’. The Egyptian route led to the French invaders calling them ‘gipcyan’, a short for ‘La-Egypt’, from where the word gypsy comes. That term still holds.

The North African coast led the nomads towards Morocco, from where they crossed over to Spain. These ‘gypsies’ played an important role in assisting the Muslim rulers of Spain. Once the Christian forces prevailed, a lot of them were shipped off to South America as slaves working on their plantations. Once relatively free they moved northwards and today the USA State of California has a sizable population. When visiting Berkeley a few years ago I met a few who spoke reasonable Punjabi words, mixed with Spanish and Arabic twists. But again, their secret language of the Zoroastrian legacy comes in handy as a survival language.

Now back to the UN research on the gypsies of the world. The startling result has been, to a great extent, hidden. My take is the same complex that ruling classes still suffer from, be they black, brown or white or even yellow. Just why the Chinese are called ‘yellow’ is another racist term coined by the colonial powers for those drug addicts suffering from what doctors call a ‘yellowing skin’. The DNA of the entire sample of 150,000 gypsies taken from all the five continents was that they all belong to the Punjab and its river banks, to Sindh and its river banks, and to western portions of Rajasthan. This is now a confirmed scientific fact.

But then before we conclude this piece let me narrate a small personal episode. While researching the nomads of the Ravi, I was invited to lunch in one of their tents. There they watched TV thanks to an impressive battery. For lunch was chicken ‘karahi’ and ‘pilau’ with salad, a spread as impressive as in any well-off house. They then asked me to help them search for a missing young girl, who used to beg to help out. Using my journalistic connection I found her in a nearby police lockup.

The last I learnt of the lady was that the local police had arrested her for begging and after a ‘weekend’ of ‘service’ allocated a point to beg. A van now drops her there every day and picks her up in the evening. So being in Spain, or Romania, or Egypt, or on the plantations of South America, or even in Lahore, their lives are before the reader to imagine.

It is sad that the laws concerning their movement has not changed over the last 500 years. Last week in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper of London there was a story about the laws that govern the Roma, the Gypsy and the Traveller people. They still stand ‘criminalised’ for moving on without informing the police, or even stopping without informing them. Yes, this is England. Those very laws, the 1824 Vagrancy Act, are still law in India and Pakistan.

So we have the British House of Lords all set next week to confirm these punishments, with the additional act of confiscating their travelling homes. To add to this these Roma, the Gypsy and the Traveller people (RGT) are banned from protesting. That means another three months in jail, and without a case being registered. So much for the human rights of the poor.

The racist manner in which the original people of our river banks, no matter where they live, are treated needs at least our country to protest against such laws. At least we should provide them with some security as human beings. But then the 1554 law in Britain allowed them to be killed by any citizen. Not much has changed since, except that now they cannot be killed … maybe.