Narrating the “Indian Origin”: Musealization and Racialization of the Romani Identity

This paper examines how museological curation, understood as a historically contingent regime of knowledge production, mediates the racialization of Roma identity through the “Indian origin” theory. Focusing on the Museum of Romani Culture, a state‐subsidized organization, Czech Republic (MRC), and its permanent exhibition The Story of the Roma , I analyze how the chronicling, mapping, and visual narration of the Roma's putative Indian heritage are shaped by the intertwined histories of Czech nationalism, racialized whiteness, and minority governance. While Critical Romani Studies has traced the genealogy of the “Indian origin” trope across philological, ethnographic, and later serological and genetic paradigms, its musealization has remained largely unexamined. I argue that the MRC's curatorial voice simultaneously reproduces colonial epistemes and stages the Roma as both internal European minorities and externalized, civilizational “others.” Drawing on critical race theory, scholarship on musealization and racialization, and raciolinguistics, the paper shows how museum practices rearticulate Roma identity through Orientalist genealogies while displacing the epistemic violence embedded in these frameworks.