Dr. Ambedkar School

Istvan Lazi, a Hungarian Dalit, speaks of struggles for a better life.

My name is Istvan Lazi. My nickname is Benu. I was born at Kazincbarcika, in Northern Hungary, in 1987. My family are gypsies. It is difficult for non-gypsies to understand what that really means. Most non-gypsies think it is a matter of race or skin colour, but it is not. To be a gypsy is a belonging. It is to be part of a community where everyone knows, ‘We are gypsies’. Gypsies are a community of people who have the same way of thinking about things. Even though skin colour is not the main point about being a gypsy, many gypsies are dark skinned. When two Buddhist friends visited us recently from India, people seeing us together thought they were my relatives. If an Indian doesn’t speak English then people in Hungary will think he is a gypsy.

In my village there are several gypsy localities, all separate from the non-gypsies. There is the gypsy locality where I live - most of these, my people, are gypsies who have been in Hungary for many centuries and speak Hungarian. There is another smaller gypsy locality for Vlach gypsies who came from Romania a century or so ago and speak the ancient gypsy language, which is quite similar to Hindi and other North Indian languages. The number of gypsies is growing in my village as more gypsy families move in and they are now in the majority. So conflicts are growing with the non-gypsies because none of them want a gypsy neighbour. The mayors of many Hungarian villages are always counting how many gypsies there are in the village - because it is obvious that they are becoming the majority and that they do not want.

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