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Articles about the Romani people

by Alin Dosoftei

I work from the year 2000 on a presentation of the Romani people and of the Romanipen (the Romani worldview), also on some ideas about a public modern Romani identity.

Roma - the invisible Desi people

An introduction of the Romani people in the contemporary Desi context. A population who emigrated from the Subcontinent a millennium ago, nevertheless preserving all this time in the European, American or Australian heartlands of the Western civilization the caste purity rules, their Indo-Aryan language, whose number is nowadays of about 15-20 million people.

India - Bharat - Tenjiku: one reality, more perspectives

The public images of the South Asian cultural area, their appearance, evolution and effects in the diasporic social life.

The ethnogenesis of the Romani people

There are no direct historical accounts about the Romani people prior to the sources that attest people who seem to be our ancestors, in the Byzantine Empire, by the end of the 11^th century and the beginning of the 12^th century. The studies of the Romani language and of the historical framework of those times point to an emigration in the context of the invasions that devastated the Northern part of the Subcontinent. It is not known who were exactly the ancestors in the Subcontinent, it seems that it occurred a reorganization of the identity once arriving in Diaspora, focused on the basic, fundamental elements of the South Asian identity, something similar to the contemporary emergence of the Desi diasporic identity (later it reappeared a Romani caste system).

Names of the Romani people

The names employed by the Romani people, the names given by the non-Roma, contemporary issues concerning these names.

Romani society

The beginning of a diasporic life reorganized the identity, shaping the Romanipen (named also in the last years Romani Dharm), the specific Romani organization of the social life. This makes an obvious distinction between what really belongs to the Romani culture and what does not, giving the possibility to keep a Romani interpretation of the Word and of the Self, even from a landless minority's point of view, assimilating novelties without losing the identity. In areas with high Romani presence it organizes also the Romani caste system, giving a framework for the different social positions of the different Romani groups. I write more about the Romani view of religion, about the misunderstandings that created the image of Roma as non-religious people. This further determined an unofficial position for the Romanipen, the dismissal of the Romani culture as a non-culture or as a counter-culture and the prevalence in the public space of the Gypsy imagery.

Romani history

The Romani history as it happened, until nowadays very much influenced by misunderstandings, but also by assimilation pressures and Romani non-violent resistance.

Rom/Gypsy, the reality vs. the image

The internal mechanisms of the Gypsy imagery, the way it is created by the non-Roma, becoming a part of the non-Romani wolrdview and taking the place of the Roma from the public space.

Romani identity

Some thoughts

Here are the ideas that made me start this endeavor. A view of the notion of identity at two levels, a visible static one, as usually imagined by the people, and a less visible reality in motion.