The wandering Indians ...

Ever since a few ancestors wandered out of Africa, we humans have always been peripatetic.  However, new people coming into an established settlement has not always been welcomed with open arms.  We here in America have had our own complicated relations with newcomers, and the contemporary anti-Muslim rhetoric is yet another variation of this theme.

The Romas in Europe know these, and more, all too well.  After all, they are viewed with suspicion and hate even now, though they have been on the continent for centuries.

Having grown up in a country with a very long and rich history means that I am connected to the Roma, who, too, originated from India.  About a thousand years ago, the Roma started moving west, perhaps in response to the Muslim invasions from Central Asia.  Soon, they were past Turkey and into Eastern Europe.

By then, Europe was already beginning to feel the effects of the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire, and the darker-skinned Roma were not  welcomed.  The Roma maintained their ways of life, as minorities typically do, and their intra-group interactions vastly exceeded those with other groups, which then further compounded the relationship. 

The Nazis and the Communists were not good for the Roma either. It is estimated that the Nazis killed a fifth of the Roma population at that time.  The Nazis are long gone, and so is the Communist Bloc, but the status of the Roma has not improved to an equal standing with the rest.   Evidence include the recent developments in France, which is expelling Romas back to Romania, even though the European Union allows unrestricted movement for citizens of member countries.

Against such a backdrop is another Indian connection to the European Roma. The Czech Republic has a significant Roma population, and the Czech-Roma relations have always been strained.  One of the leading personalities working to bridge this divide is Srikumar Vishwanathan—my close friend from my school days in the small town of Neyveli in India.

Kumar—as he is known now—and I were crazy about physics as high-schoolers, and I moved on to study electrical engineering while he went to the Soviet Union to study theoretical physics. 

Even before he completed his studies, the Soviet system started crumbling and his girl friend, Ladka, decided to head back to her home country—Czechoslovakia.

Kumar followed her and was an active and enthusiastic participant in the Velvet Revolution that ousted the Communists from power.  He gained citizenship in the new Czech Republic and, thanks to his training in physics, became a high school teacher in a town called Olomouc. 

One evening, when he was returning home, a group of young Czechs beat the pulp out of Kumar because they thought he was one of the Roma.  The massive floods that intensely highlighted the plight of the Roma further transformed Kumar.  He soon ditched his teaching job and started his own initiative to not only help the Roma, but to also find ways to normalize the Czech-Roma relations.

A decade ago, when we spent a couple of days with Kumar, Ladka and their infant son,  Kumar had just been honored by the Czech government as one of the leading lights in the country. 

Since then, Kumar has received a lot more recognition for his work—including from our own government.  In 2005, the US Embassy in Prague awarded Kumar the Alice Garrigue Masaryk Award, which was established “to recognize persons in the Czech Republic who have made an exceptional contribution to the advancement of human rights in the country through courageous promotion of social justice and defense of democratic liberties and an open civil society.”  A year later, Kumar was here in America, to experience the country and its peoples as a guest of the State Department. 

A month ago, while highlighting the Roma’s plight, a CNN report featured Kumar and his work.  It is surreal that an Indian immigrant is a well-recognized social activist in the Czech Republic. But then, it is equally a story of the wandering Indians—this time a newcomer helping out the descendants of the old ones who left India a millennium ago.  I am delighted that we still have in us the wandering trait of our African ancestors, even if means running into the metaphorical, and sometimes literal, gunfire.