The Rom have a long tradition as a nomadic people but they originated in northern India and migrated sometime in the Middle Ages but there is no certain account that describes exactly when or why this happened. They spread across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and eventually the Americas, in a diaspora. Some theorize that they may have migrated either with the Dom another nomadic people who they later diverged from, or shortly after them. Another is that they were the descendants of 10,000 luteplayers, male and female sent to entertain a Sassanid king, or that they left India around 500 AD to escape raids and moved to the Byzantine Empire with their families. These are however, only theories and as the Romani did not keep any written historical records but passed down oral traditions among themselves it is hard to pin down an exact account.

The Romani never actually had a nation in the sense of a physical country with national boundaries of their own but are instead connected by ethnic and cultural ties which have survived for centuries and which have been passed down from generation to generation in a rather impressive tradition. Most Romani were originally Hindu but sometimes converted to Islam or Christianity depending on the regions they inhabited, although many of their beliefs and traditions were retained in adapted form and they retain a caste system they brought with them from India as well as their own social conventions and a distinct Romani language which varies from region to region and is quite often full of loanwords and borrowings due to all Romani speakers being at least bilingual. On the whole, if you were to look for a historical and ethnic Romani homeland it would be India, but India is of course not just Romani, and the Romani have their own distinct culture that is related to but not the same as Indian.

Some regions however have higher, or have had historically higher, populations of Romani and they are at times misattributed to these regions, for example Egypt where the term "Gypsy" is derived from, Romania because of a phonetic similarity and fairly large amount of Romani who inhabited the Balkans and Eastern Europe whose regions are also sometimes associated as a Romani homeland by outside observers, but these are all of course incorrect assumptions based on a variety of stereotypes and misinformation.

WWII was a time of persecution for the Romani similar to what happened to other ethnic groups such as the Jews but it had been the case for much of Romani history and continued after WWII in Europe and anti-Ziganist sentiments had a resurgence in Europe and the Czech Republic especially beginning in the 1970s which including the Czech Republic forcing sterilization on Romani women in the mid -70s and discrimination in Europe which has continued until modern times and is being tackled by the EU, but that is a bit too recent to get into.