> 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.