Dom

Dom, the collective name of numerous low-caste communities in many parts of India and Kashmir; are mentioned in the Hindu writings, and are by many supposed to be the original stock of the European gipsies, whom they closely resemble in appearance, habits, and speech. Dom appears to be the same word as Rom (d and r interchange in many linguistic families), the root of Romani, the name by which the gipsies call themselves, and which in their language means "man," though by some writers connected with the Sanscrit doina (domba), a strolling minstrel. The Doms undoubtedly represent a pre-Aryan, possibly even a pre-Mongolic black element in India, and those of the Kumaon district (Himalayas) are described as having "curly hair inclining to wool and being all extremely black" (Traill, Asiatic Researches, vol. xvi. p. 160). But no trace of their primitive language has survived, and even before the gipsy migrations westwards all the Doms had already been Aryanised in speech. Some are found as far east as the Upper Brahmaputra, where the Domes, a fishing tribe of the Sudiya district, Assam,'came originally from India.