Kaye (India Museum, 1868), we are
told that the appearance and modes of life of the Doms indicate a marked
difference from those of the people who surround them (in Behar). The
Hindus admit their claim to antiquity. Their designation in the Shastras
is Sopuckh, meaning dog-eater. They are wanderers; they make baskets and
mats, and are inveterate drinkers of spirits, spending all their earnings
on it. They have almost a monopoly as to burning corpses and handling
all dead bodies. They eat all animals which have died a natural death,
and are particularly fond of pork of this description. "Notwithstanding
profligate habits, many of them attain the age of eighty or ninety; and
it is not till sixty or sixty-five that their hair begins to get white."
The Domarr are a mountain race, nomads, shepherds, and robbers.
Travelers speak of them as "gypsies." A specimen which we have of their
language would, with the exception of one word, which is probably an
error of the transcriber, be intelligible to any English gypsy, and be
called pure Romany. Finally, the ordinary Dom calls himself a Dom, his
wife a Domni, and the being a Dom, or the collective gypsydom, Domnipana.
_D_ in Hindustani is found as _r_ in English gypsy speech,--_e.g._,
_doi_, a wooden spoon, is known in Europe as _roi_. Now in common Romany
we have, even in London,--

Rom . . . A gypsy.

Romni . . . A gypsy wife.

Romnipen . . . Gypsydom.

Of this word _rom_ I shall have more to say. It may be observed that
there are in the Indian _Dom_ certain distinctly-marked and degrading
features, characteristic of the European gypsy, which are out of keeping
with the habits of warriors, and of a daring Aryan race which withstood
the caliphs. Grubbing in filth as if by instinct, handling corpses,
making baskets, eating carrion, being given to drunkenness, does not
agree with anything we can learn of the Jats. Yet the European gypsies
are all this, and at the same time "horsey" like the Jats. Is it not
extremely probable that during the "out-wandering" the Dom communicated
his name and habits to his fellow-emigrants?

The marked musical talent characteristic of the Slavonian and other
European gypsies appears to link them with the Luri of Persia. These are
distinctly gypsies; that is to say, they are wanderers, thieves,
fortune-tellers, and minstrels. The Shah-Nameh of Firdusi tells us that
about the year 420 A.D. Shankal, the Maharajah of India, sent to Beh