Origins and the long road

Linguistic and genetic research points to an origin in northwestern India more than a thousand years ago. Romani is an Indo-Aryan language. The old occupations remembered in song and craft — metalwork, animal trade, entertainment — match a pattern of itinerant service groups on the subcontinent.

There is no surviving “original Romani music” that can be played as a fossil. What travelled was a way of learning: ear, family, professional skill for a paying public, and a habit of taking the local repertoire and making it more complex. Percussive vocables — oral bass — are one of the few musical threads scholars will still trace, with caution, toward India.

Northern Indian roots are historical background, not the same as European professional styles. Tony Gatlif’s film Latcho Drom (1993) is filed here as a romanticized map from India to Spain — useful, not a fact sheet. That caution is in the research notes for this archive, not a claim about what any one book argues. Kalbelia of Rajasthan has its own style page. Linguistic origin of Romani in India is strong. A musical lineage from Kalbelia to flamenco, jazz or csárdás is not demonstrated.

Groups moved slowly westward through Persia, Armenia, and the Byzantine world, reaching the Balkans by the late Middle Ages. From the early fifteenth century, written records appear in Western Europe. In 1417 a group is mentioned in Hildesheim. In 1420 they are recorded in the Netherlands and Belgium. In 1427 a larger party arrives near Paris.

Chroniclers often called them “Egyptians.” Among themselves they later became known by many names: Roma, Sinti in the German-speaking lands, Manouche in France, Calé or Gitanos in Spain, Roman in Turkey. The names matter. This archive uses the words families use for themselves, and uses “Gypsy” only where a style or a search term still carries it — as in gypsy jazz — with the outside history of that word in view.

The music did not pass through the twentieth century unharmed. Across German-speaking Europe the Nazi state hunted Sinti and Roma. Families were registered, deported, and murdered. At Auschwitz-Birkenau a family camp held about twenty-three thousand; almost none of them came home. The total killed across Europe is counted in the hundreds of thousands.

This is not a side note to the records. It is why so many German Sinti players of the next generation treated Django’s tunes as survival, not nostalgia — and why an archive of Romani music is also a record of who was meant to disappear.

Petra Gelbart, RomArchive: the song Gelem, gelem — also Dželem, dželem — was institutionalised as the Romani anthem at the first World Romani Congress in 1971. Until then it was a folk song to many Roma, primarily in the Balkans.

After the congress the song spread as an international anthem. Gelbart: the third and fourth verses were conceived more or less anew there, together with the Romani flag. Some Romani people have never heard it, or do not take it as theirs.

Many notices name Žarko Jovanović as the writer of those lyrics. This page files the 1971 congress act from Gelbart. The writer’s year is listed under Later.

Unless we use the circular definition — music played by Romani people — there is no musicological genre that covers flamenco, jazz manouche, Hungarian csárdás, Balkan brass, Russian romances and Turkish 9/8. These styles often have less in common with one another than they do with the music of the country around them.

What they share is a social fact: Romani musicians have repeatedly become the professionals of other people’s celebrations, and have changed those musics from the inside. Non-Roma also play “Gypsy style.” Liszt claimed a Gypsy origin for Hungarian music; Bartók and Kodály later said the café band was Hungarian popular art music performed by Roma, distinct from village song. Petra Gelbart criticises that line for denying Romani creative agency. The scholars page holds the argument. The index of this site remains an atlas of families and styles.

Roma and Sinti are not two words for the same people. They are kin from the same long road who took different names, languages and trades. Some of the café music — Hungarian csárdás, Romanian hora, Russian romances — was later played by both. That story has its own chapter.

That circular-definition test is Petra Gelbart’s, on RomArchive: Is There Such a Thing as Romani Music? She writes that there is no Gypsy scale, rhythm or harmony that unites flamenco, jazz manouche, csárdás and the rest.