To move is not only desirable, but will become necessary. Irish Travellers could be at the forefront of this change: Sandhya Devesan

Tyson Fury trains in Riyadh on May 16, ahead of the match with Oleksandr Usyk. Photo from his official Facebook Page

At 22.00 GMT on May 18, Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk will square off against each other in the Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in what is being billed as one of the biggest events in the history of boxing in 25 years.

The match will elect the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world, something that has been muddied in recent years with multiple boxing bodies announcing their own champions.

Besides its importance for world boxing, the match is also significant given the background of the boxers. Usyk’s homeland, the Ukraine, has been invaded and is under siege from Putin’s Russia since 2022. But it is Fury who draws even more curosity.

The 6 foot nine inch boxer goes by the moniker of ‘Gypsy King’, an ode to his Irish Traveller heritage. The Travellers are an ‘itinerant’ group on the island of Ireland and parts of Britain.

Their itinerant nature has made them a marginalised group. Fury himself has spoken about the discrimination he faced as a Traveller. According to the European Union, Travellers face some of the worst poverty and discrimination in Europe, resulting in very poor health indices.

Racism and discrimination towards nomadic-pastoralism remains a reality even in the 21st century. Perhaps, in a bid to counter this, the United Nations has designated 2024 as the ‘Year of the Camelids’ as camels, llamas and alpacas “are an important livelihood for millions of poor families that live in the most hostile ecosystems of the earth”. Many of these poor families are pastoralists and nomads.

The UN has also declared 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, reflecting the important role healthy rangelands play in creating a sustainable environment, economic growth and resilient livelihoods for communities across the world.

But why the hate for nomadic-pastoral peoples like the Travellers? Down To Earth spoke with Sandhya Devesan, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Convenor, Women’s Studies Centre, Jesus & Mary College, University of Delhi about the Travellers and the reasons for racism against them and other such groups. Edited excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): What do we know about the Irish Traveller community’s origins?

 

Sandhya Devesan (SD): The Irish Travellers also called ‘Pavees’ or ‘Mincéirs’, are a separate ethnic group in Ireland and parts of Britain, that lead a nomadic, pastoralist existence. There are similarities with other such ethno-pastoralist groups such as the Romani, although recent studies have refuted any genetic similarities between the groups.

The Irish Travellers are presumed to have been around since the Middle Ages, with some speculations going as far back as the 11th century. The lack of written records make it difficult to state their origins with absolute certainty, but their mentions in some state records imply that they have been a separate ethnic group at least since the 1500s. They were formally recognised by the state of Ireland on March 1, 2017, after decades of campaigning by different campaign groups, chiefly the ITM (Irish Traveller Movement).

RG: Apparently, the community faces discrimination in Ireland because of its ‘itinerant nature’. Why do sedentary people, who constitute most of humanity today, hate itinerance so much?

SD: A lot of mainstream views about the itinerant community (called ‘gypsies’ and ‘tinkers’ pejoratively) derive from the conflict with land owning communities, who view their right to land as unquestionable. This leads to questions of law, and demands for police action when itinerant families make camp on these lands, and as with other itinerant groups over the world, immediately turns into a legal conflict over land occupancy, and social conflicts over brawling, suspicions of theft, and most keen of all — waste dumping.

For farming communities, the arrival of the Travellers is then immediate cause for anxiety and suspicion, coupled with pre-existing prejudices regarding ‘public decency’ and ‘unruly’ communities.

These attitudes are also directly related to colonial interventions regarding itinerant populations, with the colonial British government often reducing them to ‘vagrants’ or vagabonds, and outlawing ‘fortune telling’, minstrelsy, and “unlicensed acting” (the famous Vagabonds Act of 1572 that also affected Shakespeare’s productions, since travelling actors were also included as vagrants), and viewing them as already criminal/transgressive persons. The unsettled nature of the nomadic communities also made it harder to police/surveil them effectively, especially as a resistance group against the government.

The disorganised nature of their resistance, and their ‘disorderliness’ made them ungovernable, and therefore always a potentially disruptive force for the state, the land owning aristocrats, farmers, and settler regimes. They were also excluded from several parishes despite professing to being Roman Catholic, and were excluded from parish activities until relatively recently, when a concerted effort has been made to recognise them.

All of these forms of exclusion have become sedimented as history, tradition, and cultural practice, and continue as contemporary truisms about the Travellers, despite narratives and histories to the contrary.

RG: A related question is that the hate for itinerance has led to discrimination for the Roma in Europe, the murder of Roma during the Holocaust and today’s wars in the Sahel between herders and farmers. Groups like the Gujjar-Bakarwals, the Van Gujjars and other nomadic-pastoral groups are also despised in our own country. Can it ever end?

SD: Rather than asking if the hate towards the itinerant would end, perhaps a more productive question would be, what kinds of structures produce such hate as a continuing legitimate force, and certain lines of power might reveal themselves. As always, the foundation of these affective forces, derive from questions of territory and land — the right to lands that were previously public, and the settler imagination of all land as private enclosure. Especially in these times of potential planetary collapse and the mass species death rising out of old territorialities, it might perhaps be worthwhile to imagine beyond the enclosure, for both land and people, including in postcolonial nations and societies such as in India.

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Could we potentially see and exist beyond being ‘land locked’ people, and learn something from itinerant communities in the imagining and building of a different planetary relation and habitat, is a crucial question.

RG: Today, we are fighting to keep pastoralism alive across the world. How can most of humanity be convinced that itinerance is their own past and is natural and nothing to be despised?

SD: ‘Recovering’ a pastoralist past, could come with its own dangers of ethno-nationalism and recidivism, and the danger of romanticising the very material problems associated with itinerancy — poverty, disease, illiteracy, high death rates, and the consequential dangers of social isolation, addictions, increased criminalisation, and violence.

In societies already primed to view privatised land as the only legitimate reality, and to view itinerant communities as potentially criminal, it would require at least four large scale interventions:

a. To shift from assimilative to integrative policies regarding the Travellers, maintaining their rights, cultures, languages as valuable not just valid;

b. To shift from thinking about itinerant groups as unschooled/illiterate, and rather to ask what learnings might they possess that might be valuable in rewilding ecologies that have been severely impacted due to colonial and modern logging/mining/ deforestation, such as in the Scottish Highlands or in reviving the forest cover in Ireland, where only 11per cent is currently forested, as opposed to 80 per cent a few centuries ago;

c. To do the work of ecological schooling among land owning populations, who have proved to be most resistant to climate change logic,

d. To re-establish the ecological ties between the Travellers and the landscape, and return to presently mutilated connections with nature, tasking them with new responsibilities and rights vis-a-vis the guardianship of forest/wild lands, and alternative farming techniques, such as jhoom (slash-and-burn) cultivation that has been practised in India.

In short, to think of movement itself as an essential and invaluable exercise, in allowing the land to recover and regrow, in mapping vaster geographies, in the ability to collect a diverse range of information (about climate hotspots, damaged sites or sites of recovery for instance), in being able to tap into a bigger network of active agents (than any settled community), who could propel further learning and action about the coming climate challenges.

RG: Do you see the nomadic lifestyle making a comeback anytime in the future, given that our settled, sedentary lives have not given us much other than a planet in chaos?

SD: It is entirely possible that nomadicity makes a comeback (although I would desist from calling it a ‘lifestyle’, since it relates to very concrete material necessities). It is also entirely possible that we become all the more territorial in our imaginations, and primitive in our hatred. The vocabulary and lens of globalisms need to be turned away from commodity and consumption, to creation: of Traveller actor-network groups who lead climate action, of Traveller advocacy platforms, and of new pedagogical interventions.

It would take some hard work, some political and social will, and multiple interventions — in education, in policy, in cultural integration, in ecological refashioning — to even begin to get away from our own colonised, violently privatised affiliations towards what Glissant had called the ‘poetics of Relation’.
The Traveller emblemises not just the outsider then, but the tightly held claustrophobic interior of ‘settled’ histories and imaginations that is leading us into planetary collapse soon.

To move is not only desirable, but will become necessary, and the Travellers as a community could potentially be at the forefront of the coming change.