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- There are no historical documents (found by now) about the early history. Only by the end of the 11^th century and the beginning of the 12^th century there appear the first written statements about Roma in the eastern parts of the Byzantine Empire, in Anatolia (in contemporary Turkey), being named “Atsinganoi” (after a local heretic sect). But, for the time elapsed since they left the Indian Subcontinent and arrived there, it was not found, until now, any conclusive historical document that could attest the moment and the circumstances of the departure (and what happened in that span of time) .

- Then, an obvious question from a Western point of view would be: what are saying the Romani traditions about the origins? What is the history that the people remember? The answer is that the Romani culture use to work with different terms. While there is a strong respect and praise for the cultural traditions and ancestors, specific events from the past, until now, were not preserved beyond a few generations. The experience of the past is used rather to reveal the abstract patterns that repeat themselves under the veil of the concrete occurrences. The social event of telling and discussing fictional stories, paramicha, is one of the ways used to share and refine upon the collective memory, thus helping people to decipher the meaning of the present events. Thus, there are no popular accounts inside this ethnic group about their origin. Sometimes there are borrowed theories of the local non-Roma, like the supposed Egyptian origin.

Here it should be considered the fact that the Romani culture is stemming from another worldview than would expect a person brought up in an environment of an Abrahamic religion. The Subcontinent, before the Muslim conquest, had a vision of the time as being repetitive, nothing really new happens, with the attention focused on the patterns that come time and again under the shape of the particular events. In every event it was searched for the abstract pattern that gave it a social meaning. The pre-Muslim Subcontinent did not preserve a historical account of the past in the way the Christians, Muslims or Chinese did. There are enough written documents from those times but, usually, they are not dated. And many of them do not deal with concrete historical details (from a Western point of view), but with the positioning of the event in the idealistic view of the world.

Arabs and Turks wrote (in the period of the first encounters, 8^th – 11^th centuries) about the fact that Desis didn’t keep a dated memory of the past and about the habit of telling stories and abstracting the events. With the Muslim conquest and the subsequent British (Christian) one, the Subcontinent was integrated in the worldview of the Abrahamic religions where the time is considered as a succession of unrepeatable moments that explain and secure for every person a place in the society. The Desi society proved to be a resilient one, finding means to adapt it to (just to remember that the contemporary Hindi has the same word, kal, for both English terms “yesterday” and “tomorrow”).

As stated at the beginning of the article the first accounts appear only when they reached the Byzantine Empire. Material vestiges for this people that were on move in those times were not found till now. The knowledge about the specific moments in the early Romani history, as it is nowadays, is based extensively on linguistic studies.

The contemporary Romani language is composed of many dialects, due to the fact that the people became scattered in many countries in groups which could not remain connected through long distances (until the development of modern telecommunication). Another reason is the separation in castes of the Romani people living in the same area. However, the study of all dialects proves that they come from a single original language (also genetic researches found common ancestors for all the groups). There is also in the Armenian-speaking area a group named Lom, while in the Middle East there is a group named Dom, both of obvious South Asian origin. The partial similarities of these ethnic names raised the question of the relation between them.

There are not yet in depth ethnographic studies to compare the cultures and the ways of life of these groups. There was presented a possible etymology for all of them from the Ḍom/Domba group living in the Indian Subcontinent. After some time, the focus on the low status of the contemporary Domba that gained some popularity among non-Roma determined a reaction of Romani individuals, many times channeled towards finding an origin compatible to the Romani purity rules (while the usual Romani folk is not very interested in this issue). The fact is that, in an non-Desi environment, the presentation of a Desi origin must come with additional explanations, namely that the jati system is mobile, the ranking of a jati depending on the reputation, influence, on the cleanliness preserved by the purity rules, that in history jatis went up through the process of Sanskritization, but also went down, also that in different areas they may have different statuses. In fact this relativity is something inherent to the idea of a caste system on a large scale in time and space, the Desi caste system supposes that, at the group level, if there is resilience and determination, one can be whoever it wants to be (in this sense, just to remind of the huge discrepancies between the Romani castes in the Balkans). The Domba is rather a cover name for different unrelated groups, such theory should present more in depth the details of a relation, keeping in mind that there are possible enough etymologies stemming from the Indian Subcontinent that could produce any of the words R(r)om, Lom, Dom. Also Roma respect elaborate purity rules that would point to a higher status and there are enough specific cultural Romani features that may be compared with those of the other South Asian populations to permit some conclusions. The word Rom itself in its contemporary meaning points to a basic, fundamental identity feature for the South Asian people, the marriage, not to specific details of an ethnicity (Rom means “married person”, while its counterpart, Chhavo, means “unmarried person”).

In this sense, there appear some questions. What was the meaning of Dom in the Subcontinent? Was it the same as the contemporary meaning among Roma? The same question appears for Lom and Middle Eastern Dom. Also it should be available an origin of Chhavo. Were Rom/Chhavo a pair also in the Subcontinent? Can it be perceived a linguistic and a semantic continuity or evolution of them from a certain part of the South Asian society?

The fact is that the ethnic names were not studied until now in their cultural context, i.e. in the Romani case by addressing its meaning in the Romani language, keeping it in the Rom/Chhavo context and seeing what reliable comparisons can be made with other contexts or evolutions from other contexts from other Desi groups. Plus, among what is known as the modern Romani people, there are used also other ethnic denominations, like Manush (“human being”), Kalo (“black”), also words with a basic, fundamental meanings (more at Names of the Romani people).

There appeared also other theories, proposing origins from the Rajputs who fought against the Muslims at the beginning of the 11th century or from a mixture of different castes.

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