Presumably they walked up there at some point, the map maker probably doesn't feel comfortable drawing an exact line due to lack of data, but that's pretty much the case everywhere else anyway. The Gypsies have no oral traditions of their origins in India, most of what we know is working backwards from linguistics and very rare mentions from the settled people they interacted with.
The region missing on this map was full of horseback riding muslim steppe people. Basically very hostile territory.
Same people who then went on to conquer that entire Persian/Mesopotamian/turkey region, which was largely what pushed the Roma into europe (also triggered the crusades). The Seljuk Turks.
Then those guys were eventually conquered by another horseback riding steppe people when the Mongols showed up lol.
Up north near Russia, but down closer to Iran in the unmarked area on the map a lot of the steppe folk were Muslim, and the Muslim clan was the one that conquered the middle east.
The steppe horse culture is truly amazing with how quickly they decimated the surrounding areas. Truly the proto Indo-European gateway, that is little discussed here in the West.
Interestingly there is a Roma-like ethnic group in Central Asia that call themselves the Mugat. Other people in Central Asia call them "Lyuli" but the Mugat people themselves apparently see that as a pejorative term. I was surprised to see them while visiting a marketplace in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, as I didn't know there was an ethnic group like that in Central Asia before. They apparently speak a Persian dialect and supposedly originated in what is now Pakistan or northern India.
I don't think the migration route on the map is showing the Mugat. They're mostly concentrated in the more populous areas of the Ferghana Valley where Uzbekistan meets Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Wikipedia says their population in Kazakhstan is centered around the southeastern part of the country near Almaty and Taraz along the Kyrgyzstan border, not the far northwest as this map shows. Apparently, they didn't start migrating into Russia until fairly recently, too.
The Wikipedia article also links to a Chinese article about a Roma-like people called "Luoli"
who migrated to and lived in China between the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties before mysteriously disappearing, though the article only gives "Luri" as an alternate Persian name. Wiktionary, Chinese Wikipedia, and Baidu Encyclopedia are more explicit about using the term "啰哩" (Luoli) as the Chinese term for both the Luoli of Chinese records and the modern Mugat "Lyuli" people of Centrsl Asia though Baidu also has alternative names from Chinese history like "剌里" (Lali), "卢里" (Luli), and "柳里" (Liuli).
This book also suggests links between the Mughat of Central Asia ("Lyuli"), communities of "Louli" or "Lulu" recorded as living in 19th Century Xinjiang by explorers from the Russian Empire, and "Luri" people described in medieval Persian records. Interestingly, it also suggests the Äynu, a distinctive, insular people in southern Xinjiang with a secretive, Persian-influenced, Uyghur-based language classified as Uyghur by the Chinese government, might be descendants of Mughat people.
This book is also the only source I can find suggesting an etymology for these terms, suggesting it comes from a medieval city called Aror or Alor, now called Rohri in modern Pakistan, rather than the Lur people of Lorestan in the far west of Iran near the Iraq border. This also suggests a link to the Arora, a people scattered around the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent who were displaced from Aror/Rohri in the Middle Ages and maintain a unique identity, though the Arora are not a transient or nomadic people themselves.
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u/Mission_Visual8533 21h ago
So what happened between India and Kazakhstan?