From what I am reading I am not sure. Some sources say they were brought in by the Mongol hordes, while others indeed say they were outcasts.

https://www.travellerstimes.org.uk/features/feature-roma-and...

This link claims that they were captured by the mongols and brought to europe where they were then enslaved, for instance, by romanians and by others.

Other sources indeed claim that they fled india as they were a lower caste and while initially allowed to live freely they were eventually enslaved.

I know for a fact that in Romania they were enslaved - there are articles in the Romanian media showing ads from the interwar period where roma slaves were sold on the open market. In some regions they were still slaves until the early 90s (they were called “sluga”).

The fact that we know little about their history and there are virtually no museums or places to learn about it is quite telling. Western europe for instance completely erases their history and uniqueness by conflating them with romanians.

All I can gather are sparse sources, but they all point to india, slavery, and loads and loads of historical abuse towards them.

Romanis were enslaved in most of Europe for long periods of time. In Romania they were liberated in... 1861, I think.

Their history is super sad, yes.

Contemporary scholarship has posited that the ancestors of the Roma left India as e.g. camp followers of armies pursuing their livelihoods, not necessarily as outcasts intentionally turning their backs on India.

> Their original name is from the Sanskrit word डोम (doma) and means a member of a Dalit caste of travelling musicians and dancers.

For those unaware, Dalits are "untouchables", the lowest Indian caste.

Ironic that if they left India on their own, they were and are treated worse in Europe. Meanwhile in India today, of just the ruling party's 303 representative seats, 190 are held by the 'lower caste' (officially under either the Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe lists, or Other Backward Caste list).

Really puts paid to the affirmative action fueled india-bad-caste-bad-hindu-bad notion that gets so much traction in Europe.

The real question is: how are their socioeconomic stats? That's the crux of the matter. I'd be happy to hear that they're average or above.

Some sources indicate they were captured from india by the mongols and then brought to europe only to be enslaved again. These people are seriously unfortunate.

Contemporary scholarship holds that at least a large portion of the Roma had already left India for Persia long before the Mongol invasion.

Interesting. I find it frustrating that there is little coherent documentation available on this topic.

The documentation is less incoherent than you assume. My own background is in linguistics, so I am familiar with the literature on the history of the Roma that take evidence of historical language contact into account. The relevant chapter in Matras’ Romani: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2004) has a pretty accessible overview of prior scholarship and the modern state of the art. As Matras points out, interaction between the Romani and the Byzantine Greeks was ongoing from the eleventh century at the latest, so they had left India well before the Mongol invasion (which happened in the mid-twelfth century).

Thank you for sharing this. I will look it up in more detail.