ROMA: THE INDIAN DIASPORA IN SERBIA

In the war ravaged Balkanic country of Serbia an Indian will always have a definite indulgence: its sizeable Roma population. These migrants from India, about 1000 AD, wow Indians with their appearance and culture, and ways of socializing that is classically Indian. Their burly sense and tradition of music and dance, which anthropologists and ethnologists point to as one of the determinants of their Indian lineage, is one more lure.

About half a million of Roma population are spread across Serbia, the central republic of former Yugoslavia. They are particularly settled in handsome numbers in three towns: Zemun on the north-west of Belgrade – the capital city of Serbia, and Nish, and Leskovac, two prominent towns 200 kilometers down south. As you get down at the entrance of a Roma colony, usually at an end of a town, you unmistakably bump into a little replica of an Indian habitation there. Look-alikes of Indians huddle in undividable groups – old men smoking hookahs, women with babies in arms; young boys and girls in western clothes – welcome you with a warmth that will measure only to an Indian’s. Elderly women bend from balconies to peer. You are their brother, or sister – this is both a shared knowledge and belief as Roma are nostalgic about their motherland – India.

You file past houses with boundary walls of latticed patterns from where miniature cement images of lions and parrots overlook you. Houses with corridors and windows of arched and cusped patterns share a twinned status with traditional Indian houses. Balconies and terraces display ornamental parapets of balusters, from where hang blankets and clothes and garlands of red pepper to bask in the intermittent October-end sunshine. Mobile CD/VCD shops on cycle-trolleys by wayside display and sell Indian films – Ashoka being the latest craze. But the best longing for your memory perhaps is the gesture of appreciation when you give a token gift of a hundred-dinar note to a baby in a family, like we do in India. Although, the gesture will be immediately followed by a senior female member fondly doing a quick thuh to the baby – spitting out vaguely on the baby – to ward off an evil eye.

Though the Roma have left their nomadic ways behind, and have adapted the Western ways of life, their households wear a mystically Indian aura. Indian souvenirs and showpieces embellish the shelves; you will have to take your shoes off before entering the house. The Roma live in joint and extended families. Since they marry early, it is not uncommon to find a gorgeous and lively great grandmother in a family.

They have an enormous homesickness for India. In fact you will have to believe your ears when you hear a plastic surgeon in Belgrade telling you, that he is pursuing the profession of Sushruta, his ancestor and the plastic surgeon from ancient India. For, he is one from the Roma community.

‘Roma’ means a man, a husband. Romany, the language of the Roma, – have many words in common with Indian languages: yaag is fire, kaan (ear), paani (water), ja (go), aawa (come), raat (night), devas (day) – to mention a few. The language owes to the Indo-European family of languages, though this language is largely oral, in the absence of its own script, and Roman alphabets are used for writing. ‘We ran away from India and visited many countries and hence could not retained our language’ – that is how a Rom puts up his poignant defense. In fact, at a point of time the Roma were called ‘gypsies’, alluding to their Egyptian origin.

The Roma in Zemun and Nis are educated and look prosperous. They are about a hundred thousand in number in these two large Serbian towns. You find Roma working for the Embassy. A woman physician or a poet, or a journalist is a pleasant sight. They have sprawling Community Halls where bands play folk music of north-west India and pretty girls and boys cavort to welcome the Indian delegation. Members of the Roma Wives’ Association cook Indian dishes for the guests. You get to hear of their success tales: Mirjana, a poet reveals that 2007 has brought the happiest day in her life as a Rom (singular for Roma) child participated for the first time in the European Festival for children ‘Joy of Europe’, where she sang a Romany song. The Serbian national TV telecast the program. The child, the Roma face of Joy of Europe, too comes on stage – a healthy, beautiful young girl of nine.  

Mirjana recites her own poetry, on the war and its heroes before the delegation. Her poems are brilliant, world-class; even in the absence of translation you know that she is eulogizing her war martyrs (…Stop for a while by my grave; And put a garland of dry autumn leaves on it… ‘On the Day of my Farewell’).

But these stories of glory are few and far between. Roma in Leskovac, a town 100 kilometers down south of Nish, look undernourished. Grimy lanes and dimly lighted houses meet you in the three settlements here where about 10,000 of the populace live. You may even have to walk through brimming drains and garbage mounds, and the mess will give you an inkling only too certain: the Roma are indeed from India.

The older Roma are a happy-go-lucky lot. The younger generations, who are educated, are obviously disillusioned with life in the country. Like all educated youths they want jobs, to integrate into the mainstream. A young boy, reporting for the Serbian Radical Party, who speaks English with a western accent, summarizes: ‘They say, finish school and we will give you jobs; but no job for a Rom… no one does anything for us; we sell sweets on the street.’ Some even forgo their ethnic minority status to be considered for jobs. For the very same reason they disclaim their religion: ‘My father is a Muslim, I am not.’

As a matter of fact a sizeable mass of the population has adopted the leading religion of Serbia, the eastern orthodox Christianity.

Serbian Radical Party (SRP), the party in opposition in the Serbian parliament, is taking up the causes of the ethnic minorities of Serbia, in particular the Roma. Goran Cvetanovic, the Vice President of the SRP, is an informed and educated Serb. A physician by profession, Goran values India, particularly in the context of the Indo-Roma sub-text. SRP under Jovan Damjanovic, a Member in the Serbian Parliament and the Vice-President, World Roma Congress, plans an Indo-Roma center in Belgrade and the project is underway. Jovan is the first Rom in Serbia to be elected an MP and was a Minister in the last cabinet. There are also extremists among the Roma: ‘Why can’t we have the Indian flag and Indian nationality since India is our motherland?’ a member of the Romany Party (another political wing of the Roma population) asks. Roma hope that SRP will replace the ruling Democratic Party in the next elections and they will have a better time!

Numbering about 30 million, the Roma are a major ethnic community in the world. No certain data on them is available to a researcher. This could be deliberate. The earliest of the Roma exodus from India is apparently a consequence of the invasion of India by the Afganistan sultan of Ghaznia. In the fights between might and arrogance, and races and civilizations, theirs is only a weak survival battle. Perhaps the mechanics of survival of the Roma in the Serbian political and economic mainstream is a metaphor of the interminable turbulence in the Balkans itself.

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