The episteme(s) around Roma historiography: Genealogical fantasy reexamined

Abstract

Since the 18th century, scholars have been claiming that Romani people originated from India. Folkloristists, ethnographers, linguists and demographers alike have sought to identify, classify and characterize the ‘Roma traits’ and map them onto an imagined notion of Indian-hood. Meanwhile, India has reappropriated the originary claim and started to embrace the Roma community as one of their ‘own’. This paper focuses on the epistemic and political implications of ascribing an ‘Indian origin’ to the Roma. How do scholars and savants seek to understand Roma populations with reference to their purported Indian origin and what does it entail epistemologically? To what extent is the ‘scientific’ legibility of the Roma’s origin structured around ideologies of the prevailing episteme? Here, I situate the theory of the Indian origin as a ‘field’ and argue that its foundation has revolved less around the question of ‘scientific’ methods and their validity than around reinforcing the episteme in question.