Brown saviors and their others: Race, caste, labor, and the global politics of help in India By ArjunShankar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 336 pp.

In 2013 Arjun Shankar had gone to Karnataka, a state in South India, as a volunteer for Sahaayaka (lit. “auxiliary,” “assistant”), a huge education NGO, to work in rural schools. His intent, mentioned in response to a query by Nagraj, a curious, ninth standard student, was to study this NGO “from the perspective of those who were at the receiving end of their interventions” (p. vii). Shankar's engagement and rapport with Nagraj (and his cohort) impelled him to change his focus. The experience of loss and trauma at an early age had turned Nagraj into a resilient, recalcitrant subject. He preferred to rely on his own experience as a guide to future goals and aspirations, and refused to be the helpless and needy student who had to be “looked after” (p. 2), “motivated,” and “saved.” Indeed, totally unmoved by Sahaayaka's uninformed efforts, he preferred to remain a silent specter. Registering the complicity of his research with the designs of the NGO, and respectful of subjects who express resistance through silence and “shadows” (pp. xv–xvi, ix–x), Shankar went on to produce a “nervous ethnography”—ever edgy, always reflexive—focused on the “brown savior,” understood as an analytical category (p. xi). Shankar's “brown saviors” consist of globally mobile, Indian-origin technocrats who have “garnered excess racialized value for their technological capacities” and “marketable skills” to be deployed in “help economies” (p. viii). Many of them are of savarna lineage (sa: “with”; varna: “calling,” “occupation”), meaning Hindus who belong to any of the four varnas of the varna-jati caste order. They are distinct from (and supposedly superior to) the casteless avarna (Dalits). The book offers a consciously political, self-critical, restless, sweaty ethnography of self-appointed “saviors” who deploy their monetary capital accrued from living, learning, or working abroad by starting and running organizations intended to “help” those they see as “less fortunate” in India and elsewhere (p. 4). Recognizing the “cunning” of “racial compulsions” and “hemo-political” sentiments that drive and justify help work, Shankar seeks to lay bare the “neocolonial capitalist regimes, racialized global histories, and graded caste stratifications that shape the politics of help in India” (p. xi). He also comments on the impact of “racial compulsions” in consolidating “racial common sense” about the bodily traits of peoples and the materiality of spaces they inhabit, reproducing and perpetrating human difference as irreducible and incontrovertible (p. 4). His piercing ethnography of “saviorism” and his historical genealogy of the brown savior strives to unsettle the project of global help. By interrogating “the foundation of late liberalism's version of the moral good,” the author hopes to open a space for “a different way of relating to one another” (p. 27). The book is developed in four parts across 17 chapters. The introduction sets out the different connotations and racial-spatial-epistemological dimensions of “brown” and “browning,” indicates the “coloniality” of brownness, and underscores “brown” as a fraught category while outlining the enmeshment of brown saviorism with “regionally specific forms of racialized power” and racial-gendered-caste capitalism (p. 13). The four interlaced, overlapping parts—“Theorizing Saviorism,” “Neocolonial Saviorism,” “Urban Saviorism,” and “Digital Saviorism,” based on long years of research—take us on a probing journey of Sahaayaka's ideologies, institutional arrangements, actions, actors, and praxis. The book highlights how, in distinct and discrete ways, the NGO's elements reproduce and perpetrate neocolonial, racial-caste capitalism and casteist-racist stratification, even while eliding caste, race, and religion. Ambitious and wide ranging in intent and scope—as well as prolific in its resourceful deployment of research literature—the book intervenes in several “conversations.” These draw in and turn on expropriation and dispossession; caste, blood, purity, value, and cultural capital; race, racialization, religion, colony, and nation; the paternalist feminization of “care”; liberal-nationalist constructs of poverty and illiteracy, and programs of development and population control; economic liberalization and farmers’ suicides; intersections of help economies with development and humanitarian agendas; Sahaayaka's collusion with hegemonic discourses on women's empowerment, particularly in the Global South; the veil of secularism in the saviors’ agenda; the push and pull of urban expansion and rural dispossession; NGOs’ negotiation of dispossession through the creation of “jobs”; and, finally, the accumulation of capital by the “savior”—the male, Brahman technocrat, that is, the “preternatural” possessor of technical-digital capacities—by means of offering digital solutions to poverty, illiteracy, and lack of student motivation. Such solutions convert “students” into digital data. The author concludes with an intense and impassioned denunciation of saviorism. The most attractive part of this ethnography is how it ties ethnographic analysis and affect together with the ethnographer's experience and emotion. In doing so, it offers access to the variety of subjects who people it. The preface begins with Nagraj and his fertile experiments with using a camera, learned from the author. The first three parts introduce us to the founder of Sahaayaka and its board members, executives, funders, and “mentors”—South Indian fieldworkers from dominant landowning castes who do the work of visiting, “motivating,” rewarding, and checking on students. The fourth part introduces the reader to “digital experts” involved in programming Sahaayaka's educational intervention through apps and digitizing the massive amount of data collected by the “mentors,” and developing a phone app to collect data on clean schools and clean students (in tune with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Swachch Bharat/Clean India campaign). Shankar's arguments are driven home by his agile interweaving of the actors’ voices, actions, and desires with his own “nervous” analysis of their visions and practices. The seductions of help work are revealed in several ways. First, in the students’ understandings of poverty, injustice, and corruption; their aspirations for change; and their despair at the current state of things (chap. 3). Second, in the muddled hopes and frustrations of the “mentors”; their wariness at being overworked within Sahaayaka; their despondency about the absence of possibilities for upward economic mobility; and their longing to start their own NGOs (narrated across different chapters). Third and finally, in the Sahaayaka founder's piqued surprise at being called to the police station on charges of caste discrimination (chap. 5); his indignation at the “money-mindedness” of the mentors (chap. 9); and in the experience of loss and trauma by a quiet and “serious” mentor (chap. 10). These scenes offer vistas of life-worlds shaped and structured by hierarchy, inequity, and discrimination, all variously colored by confused and contradictory hopes and struggles, ideas, and visions. Brown Saviors is commendable for the significance of its theme, the newness of its approach, the freshness of its orientation—each sustained by rich, textured, and sensitive analysis. The work offers an excavation and location of genealogies of the savior and saviorism in caste and racial capitalism at the core of colony, nation, and religion. It follows that the author's imaginative articulations of brownness as tinged with different shades of brown (including, I would submit, as “muddy” and “muddled”), as well as the echoes capturing the “jangling” of the ethnographer's nerves and those of his diverse subjects, are equally impressive achievements. At the same time, all this arouses expectations of ethnographic portrayals of the tousled and contradictory worlds of the “brown saviors.” But these figures appear in the account as somewhat singular, principally all of a piece, shortchanging this reader's anticipations. Arguably, much of this has to do with the author's well-meaning politics. In a word, the drive to expose the neocolonial, casteist, “racial capitalist,” paternalist, and gendered assumptions and practices of the upper-caste male savior rests on Shankar's glossing and conflation of Brahman and savarna, a conflation unexpected in a nuanced ethnography. The issue warrants elaboration. The term savarna that has come into prominence over the past two decades is charged with and beset by tensions. Here, the coalescing of Brahman and savarna not only overlooks the intricate, changing, conflicting politics of innumerable groups and subgroups of castes (jati). It also elides the contradictory politics of the huge Sudra varna conglomerate that has aligned at once with “dominant castes,” Dalits, and “backward castes/classes” in their mobilizations supporting or opposing “Reservation” (positive discrimination). Even as Brown Saviors points to tensions among the savarna, as reflected in the interaction between the global saviors and the local, “knowledgeable” mentors, it also oscillates between using a conflated and a graded construct of savarna in its affirmations and arguments. Does this jumbled assemblage of the Brahman-savarna savior poised against his lesser Others inadvertently endorse the binarism that the book sets out to query? Is there a detraction here from the author's critique of “irreducible human difference” (p. 4) as well as of his aspiration to open a space for “a different way of relating to one another” (p. 27)?