The Making of the "Brown Savior" Race, Caste, Class, and India's (Global) Help Economy

This article offers a theoretical excavation of the brown savior, a figure that has taken on a critical role in the newly reconstructed help industries in India. Brown saviors help us to think more critically about the global help industries, an area in which racializing processes have been relatively understudied despite the fact that, historically, nearly all help interventions have focused on previously colonized peoples. I suggest that the brown savior is a figure that reveals the contradictions in the contemporary help economy, which reproduces forms of racialized difference and hierarchy by conscripting new actors who can ascend to the role of savior and, therefore, continue the project of racial capitalist accumulation. I specifically place the category of "brown" in relation to "savior" in the Indian context to draw attention to how a particular class of savarna (dominant-caste) Hindus was historically constituted and actively reproduces colonial-era racialized values through twenty-first-century help economies tethered to their economic, political, and social capital in both India and the United States.