Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent :800-1500: Gypsy Migration

10:22 AM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT
Outline of South Asian history
History of Indian subcontinent
Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent mainly took place from the 12th to the 16th centuries, though earlier Muslim conquests made limited inroads into modern Afghanistan and Pakistan as early as the time of the Rajput kingdomsin the 8th century. With the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, Islam spread across large parts of the subcontinent. In 1204, Bakhtiar Khilji led the Muslim conquest of Bengal, marking the eastern-most expansion of Islam at the time.
Prior to the rise of the Maratha Empire which was followed by the conquest of India by the British East India Company, the Muslim Moghul Empire was able to annex or subjugate most of India's kings. However, it was never able to conquer the kingdoms in upper reaches of the Himalayas such as the regions of today's Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Nepaland Bhutan and the extreme south of India such as Travancore and Tamil Nadu.

Background[edit]

Like other societies in history, South Asia has been attacked by nomadic tribes throughout its long history. In evaluating the impact of Islam on the sub-continent, one must also note that the northwestern sub-continent was a frequent target of tribes from Central Asia who arrived from the North West. With the fall of the Sassanids and the arrival of the Caliphate's domination of the region these tribes began to contest with the new power and were subsequently integrated into it giving rise to Muslim dynasties of Central Asian heritage, generally Turkics and Persians.[1] In that sense, the Muslim invasions of the 10th century onwards were not dissimilar to those of the earlier invasions in the History of Central Asia during the 1st through to the 6th century. What does however, make the Muslim invasions different is that unlike the preceding invaders who assimilated into the prevalent social system, the Muslim conquerors retained their Islamic identity and created new legal and administrative systems that challenged and usually superseded the existing systems of social conduct and ethics. They also introduced new cultural mores that in some ways were very different from the existing cultural codes. While this was often a source of friction and conflict, it should also be noted that there were also Muslim rulers, notably Akbar, who in much of their secular practice absorbed or accommodated local traditions.
The first incursion by the new Muslim successor states of the Arab World occurred around 664 CE during the Umayyad Caliphate, led by Al Muhallab ibn Abi Suffrahtowards Multan in Southern Punjab, in modern day Pakistan. Muhallab's expeditions were not aimed at conquest, though they penetrated only as far as the capital of theMaili, he returned with wealth and prisoners of war. This was an Arab incursion and part of the early Umayyad push onwards from the Islamic conquest of Persia into Central Asia, and within the limits of the easternmost borders of previous Persian empires. The last Arab push in the region would be towards the end of Umayyad reign under Muhammad bin Qasim, after whom the Arabs would be defeated by the south Indian Emperor Vikramaditya II of the Chalukya dynasty and the Rajputs like Nagabhata of the Pratihara Dynasty at the Battle of Rajasthan in 738, and Muslim incursions would only be resumed under later Turkic and Central Asian Mongol dynasties with more local capitals, who supplanted the Caliphate and expanded their domains both northwards and eastwards.
It took several centuries for Islam to spread across India and how it did so is a topic of intense debate.

Conversion theories[edit]

Considerable controversy exists both in scholarly and public opinion as to how conversion to Islam came about in Indian subcontinent, typically represented by the following schools of thought:[2]
  1. Conversion was a combination, initially by violence, threat or other pressure against the person.[2]
  2. As a socio-cultural process of diffusion and integration over an extended period of time into the sphere of the dominant Muslim civilization and global polity at large.[3]
  3. That conversions occurred for non-religious reasons of pragmatism and patronage such as social mobility among the Muslim ruling elite[2][3]
  4. That the bulk of Muslims are descendants of migrants from the Iranians or Arabs.[3]
  5. Conversion was a result of the actions of Sufi saints and involved a genuine change of heart.[2]
An estimate of the number of people killed remains unknown. Based on the Muslim chronicles and demographic calculations, an estimate was done by K.S. Lal in his book Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, who claimed that between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, the population of Hindus decreased by 80 million. Although this estimate was disputed by Simon Digby in (School of Oriental and African Studies), Digby suggested that estimate lacks accurate data in pre-census times. In particular the records kept by al-Utbi, Mahmud al-Ghazni's secretary, in the Tarikh-i-Yamini document several episodes of bloody military campaigns.[4] Hindus who converted to Islam however were not completely immune to persecution due to the caste system among Muslims in India established by Ziauddin al-Barani in the Fatawa-i Jahandari,[5] where they were regarded as an "Ajlaf" caste and subjected to discrimination by the "Ashraf" castes.[6]
Critics of the "religion of the sword theory" point to the presence of the strong Muslim communities found in Southern India, modern day Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, western Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines coupled with the distinctive lack of equivalent Muslim communities around the heartland of historical Muslim empires in South Asia as refutation to the "conversion by the sword theory".[3] The legacy of Muslim conquest of South Asia is a hotly debated issue even today. Not all Muslim invaders were simply raiders. Later rulers fought on to win kingdoms and stayed to create new ruling dynasties. The practices of these new rulers and their subsequent heirs (some of whom were borne of Hindu wives of Muslim rulers) varied considerably. While some were uniformly hated, others developed a popular following. According to the memoirs of Ibn Battuta who traveled through Delhi in the 14th century, one of the previous sultans had been especially brutal and was deeply hated by Delhi's population. His memoirs also indicate that Muslims from the Arab world, Persia and Turkey were often favored with important posts at the royal courts suggesting that locals may have played a somewhat subordinate role in the Delhi administration. The term "Turk" was commonly used to refer to their higher social status.[citation needed]However S.A.A. Rizvi[7] points to Muhammad bin Tughlaq as not only encouraging locals but promoting artisan groups such as cooks, barbers and gardeners to high administrative posts. In his reign, it is likely that conversions to Islam took place as a means of seeking greater social mobility and improved social standing.[8][better source needed]

Impact of Islam and Muslims in India[edit]

Expansion of trade[edit]

"Gypsies" Esmeralda and Victor Hugo

10:16 AM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT
"Gypsies" (or Gipsies): The Romani (also spelled Romany), or Roma

Esmeralda

Victor Hugo

Gypsies, Earth People, Outcast, Free Spirit, People without a country.


"Gypsies" (or Gipsies): The Romani (also spelled Romany), or Roma

10:15 AM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT
The Romani (also spelled Romany), or Roma, are an ethnicity of Indian origin, living mostly in Europe and the Americas.[24][25] Romani are widely known among English-speaking people by the exonym "Gypsies" (or Gipsies). Other exonyms are Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians and Sinti.
Romani are dispersed, with their concentrated populations in Europe—especially Central and Eastern Europe and Anatolia, the Iberian Peninsula and Southern France. They originated in India and arrived in Mid-West Asia, then Europe, around 1,000 years ago,[26] either separating from the Dom people or, at least, having a similar history;[27] the ancestors of both the Romani and the Dom left North India sometime between the sixth and eleventh century.[26]
Since the nineteenth century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States;[4] and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the nineteenth century from eastern Europe. Brazil also includes Romani descended from people deported by the government of Portugal during the Inquisitionin the colonial era.[28] In migrations since the late nineteenth century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada.[29]
The Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million.[30] The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large (several times as large according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the language current in their country of residence, or of mixed languages combining the two; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.[31]

The Romani people, also referred to depending on the sub-group as Roma, Sinti or Sindhi, Kale, or Romani , are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, who live primarily in Europe. They originated in northwest regions of the Indian subcontinent[1][2][3] and left sometime between the 6th and 11th century to work in Middle Eastern courts of their own volition, or as slaves. A small number of nomadic groups were cut off from their return to the subcontinent by conflicts and moved west,[1] eventually settling in Europe, Turkey and North Africa via Iran.[4]

Origin[edit]

The initial arrival of Romani outside Bernin the 15th century, described by the chronicler as getoufte heiden "baptized heathens" and drawn wearing Saracenestyle clothes and weapons (Spiezer Schilling, p. 749).
The Romani have been described by Diana Muir Appelbaum as unique among peoples because they have never identified themselves with a territory; they have no tradition of an ancient and distant homeland from which their ancestors migrated, nor do they claim the right to national sovereignty in any of the lands where they reside, rather, Romani identity is bound up with the ideal of freedom expressed, in part, in having no ties to a homeland.[5] The absence of traditional origin stories and of a written history has meant that the origin and early history of the Romani people was long an enigma. Indian origin was suggested on linguistic grounds as early as 200 years ago.[6]
Genetic evidence identified an indian origin for Roma.[7][8] One theory suggests that the name ultimately derives from a formḍōmba- 'man of low caste living by singing and music', attested in Classical Sanskrit.[9] An alternative view is that the ancestors of the Romani were part of the military in Northern India. When there were invasions by Sultan Mahmud Ghaznaviand these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire between AD 1000 and 1030.[10]
Genetic evidence connects the Romani people the descendants of groups which emigrated from South Asia towards Central Asia during the medieval period.[11]

Language origins[edit]

Linguistic evidence indicates the Romanies originated from the Rajasthani people, emigrating from India no earlier than the 11th century.[12]
Linguistically speaking, the Romani language is a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA) − it has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Until around the year 1000, the Indo-Aryan languages, named Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). By around the start of the 2nd millennium, they changed over to the NIA phase, losing the neuter gender.
Most of the neuter nouns became masculine, while a few became feminine. For instance, the neuter अग्नि (agni) in the Prakrit language, became the feminine आग (āg) in Hindi and jag in Romani. The parallels in grammatical gender evolution between Romani and other NIA languages suggest that the change occurred in South Asia.
Vagish Shastri posits that it is impossible that the ancestors of the Romani people left India prior to AD 1400. They then stayed in the Byzantine Empire for several hundred years. However, the Muslim expansion, mainly under the Seljuk Turks, into the Byzantine Empire recommenced the movement of the Romani people.[13]
Until the mid-to-late 18th century, theories of the origin of the Romani were mostly speculative. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published his research that pointed out the relationship between the Romani language and Hindustani.[14] Subsequent work supported the hypothesis that Romani shared a common origin with the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India,[15] with Romani grouping most closely with Sinhalese in a recent study.[16]
The majority of historians accepted this as evidence of an Sindhi origin for the Romanies, though some scholars maintained that the Romanies acquired the language through contact with Indian merchants.[17]

Domari and Romani language[edit]

Main article: Domari language
Domari was once thought to be the "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the South Asia, but more recent research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) Saraiki language group of languages. The Dom and the Rom are therefore likely to be descendants of two different migration waves from the Indian subcontinent, separated by several centuries.[18][19]
Numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with Hindi and Persian forms for comparison.[20] Note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed from Greek.
HindiRomaniDomariLomavrenPersian
1ekekh, jekhyikayak, yekyak, yek
2dodujdīluidu, do
3tīntrintærəntərinse
4cārštarštarišdörčahār
5pāñcpandžpandžpendžpandž
6chešovšaššeššaš, šeš
7sātiftaxauthafthaft
8āţhoxtoxaišthašthašt
9nauinjananunuh, noh
10dasdešdeslasdah
20bīsbišwīsvistbist
100saušelsajsajsad

Genetic evidence[edit]

Further evidence for the South Asian origin of the Romanies came in the late 1990s. Researchers doing DNA analysis discovered that Romani populations carried large frequencies of particular Y chromosomes (inherited paternally) and mitochondrial DNA (inherited maternally) that otherwise exist only in populations from South Asia.
47.3% of Romani men carry Y chromosomes of haplogroup H-M82 which is rare outside the South Asia.[21] Mitochondrial haplogroup M, most common in Indian subjects and rare outside Southern Asia, accounts for nearly 30% of Romani people.[21] A more detailed study of Polish Roma shows this to be of the M5 lineage, which is specific to India.[22] Moreover, a form of the inherited disorder congenital myasthenia is found in Romani subjects. This form of the disorder, caused by the 1267delG mutation, is otherwise known only in subjects of Indian ancestry. This is considered to be the best evidence of the Indian ancestry of the Romanies.[23]
The Romanies have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations".[24] The number of common Mendelian disorders found among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect".[24] See also this table:[25]
A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group".[26] Also the study pointed out that "genetic drift and different levels and sources of admixture, appear to have played a role in the subsequent differentiation of populations".[26] The same study found that "a single lineage ... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males.
A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romanies are "a founder population of common origins that has subsequently split into multiple socially divergent and geographically dispersed Gypsy groups".[23] The same study revealed that this population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".[23]

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