and the property of either nobles or monasteries (Achim 1998, 75). Most Kelderara were nomads, and were allowed to wander as long as they paid their dues to their overlord. In summer they travelled across the country selling various metal household items to villagers. In winter they withdrew near forests and lived in huts. Because Kelderara interacted frequently with the majority population, they were often perceived as the authentic Ţigani. Vatrash, the most numerous group, were agricultural workers and the property of either nobles or monasteries. Many of them lost the nomadic aspects of Roma life and became sedentary, tied to the land. From among them came the musicians renowned for fiddle-playing (Achim 1998, 78). Significant status differences among these groups existed during slavery: the Layesh, including Kelderara, had more freedom as craftspeople and were better off than the Vatrash; among the latter, fiddle-playing was the most prestigious occupation; Roma chiefs, who negotiated between their groups and the Romanian masters, had a higher status than the average slave.
In the early 1830s, the first attempts to free the Roma slaves came from intellectuals who had studied in the West and who, under the influence of Western ideas, deemed slavery anachronistic for a small new nation aspiring to European status. In Moldavia and Wallachia, Romanian abolitionists Vasile Alecsandri and Mihail Kogălniceanu criticized slavery as an outdated practice. In his 1837 nonfiction text about Roma, written in French and intended for a Western audience, Kogălniceanu described the tenuous distinction between peasants and Ţigani, specifically the Vatrash. Because the Vatrash were sedentary and had lost their language and customs, Kogălniceanu referred to their assimilation into the peasant population:
The Vatrash are today more civilized than the peasants and deserve that their masters should finally confer on them a freedom of which they are worthy. Boyars have the right to free them and many, those enlightened with the brilliance of civilized Europe, use this privilege in not few circumstances, re-establishing the rights that nature has bestowed on all humans. (Kogălniceanu 1837 [2000], 248)
Kogălniceanu decried Europeans’ lack of concern with the slave problem and hoped to raise an interest which:
unfortunately, will certainly only be temporary, because that is how Europeans are! They form philanthropic societies to abolish slavery in America, while in the heart of their continent, in Europe, there are 400,000 Ţigani slaves and 200,000 more lost in the darkness of ignorance and barbarism! And no one cares to civilize this people. (Kogălniceanu 1837 [2000], 234)
The cause of emancipation intersected with that of nineteenth-century Romanian nationalism: intellectual nobles such as Alecsandri and Kogălniceanu militated for freedom for the Roma from their Romanian masters at the same time as they supported a Romanian nation independent of the empires – Russian and Ottoman – that had ruled it for centuries. The nationalist game began in the mid nineteenth century with competing claims over the territories of Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bucovina. Following the 1848 revolutions in Austria, Hungary and much of Western Europe, Wallachian and Moldavian revolutions occurred that same year. As social historian Daniel Chirot (1978, 111) shows, the goals of the ‘national bourgeois’ revolutions were to end foreign domination – specifically by the Ottomans and Russians – and to create a modern nation-state. This was one of the first attempts to consecrate the Romanian nation. The revolutionaries’ emphasis was mostly nationalist and political, rather than social or economic. The peasantry they chose to represent the nation and demonstrate its traditions lived in extremely precarious conditions, while Roma were still enslaved. Joint Russian–Ottoman military action crushed the revolution, and Russia remained Wallachia and Moldavia’s protector, while the Ottoman Empire continued to be the nominal overlord.
The abolition of slavery in the two principalities was a twenty-year process that ended in 1856. Initially the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia issued laws to free the slaves they owned, only later freeing those who were private property. Owners could receive an amount of cash in redemption for their freed slaves. The abolition of slavery had political but few economic consequences for Ţigani, according to Achim: even when they were given small plots of land, they found the taxes and responsibilities that came with them overwhelming, and allegedly preferred to revert to their situation as slaves. The assimilation of the Roma population increased after the abolition of slavery and became even stronger in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially for the Vatrash (Achim 1998, 56).
The synonymy between ‘Ţigan’ and ‘slave’ in the Romanian language left deep traces in the racialization of inferior social status in Romania, a process that continues today. In 2007 the Romanian government instituted a Committee for the Study of Slavery, modelled on similar committees for the study of the Holocaust and of Communism. However, the Romanian Senate’s discussions of Roma slavery and the disputes within the Committee for the Study of Slavery revealed strong opposition to any critical assessment of the history of Roma slavery. Despite the historical evidence, some non-Roma senators strongly rejected the argument that Roma were not born enslaved outside the territories of today’s Romania. This resistance to a critical appraisal of Roma slavery reflected a refusal to address the history of the Romanian territories through lenses other than the nationalist one, which celebrates heroes and decries the subjugation by successive empires of the small Romanian nation avant la lettre. The argument that the crown and other institutions in Moldavia and Wallachia had actively enslaved Roma, and that the institution of slavery was specific to those territories, contradicted the narrative of victimization of the Romanian nation.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, during the 2010 Senate debate about the declaration of Emancipation Day, politicians used the construction of Roma as foreign as a justification for proposing the ethnonym ‘Ţigani’ instead of ‘Roma’. The insistence of non-Roma senators on defining Roma, and their attempts to legislate distinctions between Roma and non-Roma, maintained the racialized logic of Ţigani as Other. As I show in Chapter 5, non-Roma take the liberty of naming Roma ‘Ţigani’ on national television, even when the latter reject this ethnonym. The symbolic violence of this renaming is obscured and trivialized by claims that Roma use the term themselves. Non-Roma’s use of this term to name Roma symbolically excludes Roma from the prerogatives of citizenship, and represents an imposition of racial privilege.
The Roma and Romanian Nationalism
The invention of a folk, the imposition of a standard language, the claim over a national territory, and the naturalization of ‘imagined communities’ were all part of the nationalist projects that swept throughout Europe and Latin America in the second half of the nineteenth century, as Benedict Anderson shows (1983). In this section I discuss the Romanian nationalist project in relation to Roma in two ways: first, by showing that Roma stand out from other ethnic groups and minorities across Europe, in that they did not go through this process in the nineteenth century; and second, by showing the changing role of the Roma in the development of Romanian nationalism.
Roma do not have a territory to claim as exclusively theirs, and their Indian origins have not engendered a ‘return to the motherland’ type of nationalism. The ethnic nationalisms hegemonic in the region do not help us to understand how Roma relate to their homelands. Similarly, the focus during post-socialism on ‘distinct cultures’ erases how Roma and other ethnicities have interacted across centuries. The 2002 Roma Fair made this process visible through the presence of Rudara, as I have demonstrated above.
The relationship between Roma and the development of Romanian nationalism has changed since the nineteenth century. While in the mid nineteenth century Romanian nationalism was a subaltern cause, just like the emancipation of Roma slaves, after Romanian independence the two causes were no longer congruent. Many nineteenth-century abolitionist-nationalists predicted a seamless transition of the Roma into the Romanian nation post-emancipation and post-independence and did not foresee that Roma would continue to be marginalized in the new nation. As Étienne Balibar (1991, 54) argues: ‘racism is not an “expression” of nationalism, but a supplement of nationalism or more precisely
