The flamenco diaspora

I’m sitting inside a small cave high up in a barrio (district) in the Sacromonte hills of Granada in Spain, which has willy-nilly been home to marginalised groups like the Romani gypsies since the 15th century. I’m all set to watch them dance. The walls of the cave dwelling are rough in texture and whitewashed. Copper and brass utensils hang from the rafters and on the walls, and look familiar: pots, pans, woks, lotas, the likes of which we see back home in India.

This is not surprising because the gypsies were pilgrims, mostly Hindus, who had set off from Rajasthan, Sindh and Punjab to wander over Persian lands and beyond to Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries.

One look at the gypsies (the nomenclature came from the time they spent in Egypt), and the India connect is unmistakable: the colour of their skin, the bone structure of their faces, their mostly long black hair. The linguistic parallels include many words like nak for nose, dant for teeth, yek for one, and trin for three.

India has acknowledged them, though. At a 2016 international Roma convention in Delhi, then Indian external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj told delegates, “You are the children of India who migrated and lived in challenging circumstances in foreign lands for centuries. Yet you maintained your Indian identity. You are indeed the first flag-bearers of Indian culture overseas.” She was echoing Ms Indira Gandhi, who, in 1983, had said pretty much the same thing at a festival of Roma culture in Chandigarh.

Today, there are estimated to be around 10–15 million gypsies of Indo-Aryan origin across Europe, part of bifurcating subgroups and sects, most of them leading very marginalised lives.

The ‘non-people’

Consider these 2025 news snippets. July: Germany and the Czech Republic reported increased attacks on the Roma. June: the Roma community was targeted in the Ballymena riots in Northern Ireland, and large numbers fled the town. May: the leader of a Portuguese political party questioned why houses were being built for gypsies instead of “normal people.” A report by Bridge EU and several NGOs revealed that over €1 billion in EU funding supported projects that reinforced segregation, such as separate housing for Roma, across six EU countries.

Consider their history. During the Nazi rule, Hitler ordered a genocide of the Roma (the porajmos), and it is believed that between 1,500,000 and 220,000 gypsies were killed. In the 1600s, the Gitano language, costume and music were all banned in Spain; settlements were broken up, gypsies were forced to marry outsiders, and they were denounced and excluded from public office.

While the present-day Spanish Constitution protects the Roma’s fundamental rights, and there are special programmes for education, you don’t see too many of them living in common housing or sending their children to neighbourhood schools.

In Spain, our tour guide warned us throughout that we weren’t to encourage, lock eyes with or indulge in any conversation with the gypsy “vagrants and beggars” we’d meet in Seville or Granada.

And on a recent visit to Portugal, I was told that the gypsies were a perpetually drunk, violent lot who married their girls off at 13 and prized virginity, thus refusing to move with the times.

The Museo Cuevas del Sacromonte displays the history of the cave dwellings and the way the region’s Roma residents live, which to me seems a celebration in the midst of ghettoisation.

Painful irony

And yet, and yet. Their contribution to music and dance has been invaluable across the very Europe that refuses to accept them. Professional gypsy musicians learned Spanish flamenco rhythms, added their own strains, and underpinned the whole with passion. People flock to watch the gypsies dance, enjoy the Andalusian art form of flamenco or attend a classical guitar concert season after season.

The legendary opera Carmen gets its inspiration from a dark-eyed, dark-haired gypsy femme fatale. The Spanish writer Lorca has written about celebrating the gitanos. The gypsy celebrity line-up includes musicians like Django Reinhardt, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, Yul Brynner, Rita Hayworth …and Bill Clinton on his mother’s side!

The Bollywood touch

Back to that cave. The dance I watch is full of sound and fury. Some facts are lost in translation, but it resembles a typical Bollywood drama. The heroine is dragged away from her suitor by an irate parent; she goes into a (dancing) decline, but love triumphs, and they marry, wearing suitably resplendent wedding costumes for the last set.

The moment the dance gets over, and the floor is thrown open to the tourists, one of the dancers comes straight up to me and asks me to join them. I demur, smile, and, in a possible non sequitur, tell him I am from India. He nods knowingly but makes no further overtures. While most of them are aware of their Indian origins, they naturally identify more with the countries where they are still struggling to carve a niche.

When I emerge from the barrio, I leave with much to think about. The Roma, silent and impassive when not performing, are still foreigners in the lands they have chosen as their own. Therein lies their tragedy.