Shankar, Arjun. 2023. Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478027119.

Notes

In-text annotations

". Because it is located only forty kilometers from Bangalore city, some of Adavisandra’s agricultural land has already been bought up by the savarna global-urban middle class, who were taking advantage of the fact that many in the village were being forced to sell their land. For example, one Kannadiga brahmin family who had worked as engineers in Virginia for twenty years had purchased land in the village as a vacation home but had also started a “healthy, organic, sattvic” food business on their new property.6 At the same time, five diferent ngos were working in the village to support all those “in need.” Based on these clashing phenomena alone, it seemed that Adavisandra was the right place to study the interventions of an ngo." (Page viii)

"“How did the thought of help come into your minds?” he asked." (Page xi)

"who the individuals working for Sahaayaka actually were and why they were doing this form of help work in the first place." (Page xi)

"Worse yet, our nerves constantly fly out of control when we wonder to ourselves whether we might be loving and valuing all that which upholds this violent system." (Page xii)

"These days I recognize myself as an embodied reminder that caste does not vanish in the United States. Instead, it travels with us, no matter how much some of those within our ranks would like that not to be so." (Page xvii)

"India now has the largest number of ngos in the world, double the number of schools and 250 times the number of hospitals." (Page 2)

"Now, as I look back, there was and is something quite striking in the fact that those who were doing this help work were all “brown” people from the global savarna class.6 Moreover, during the entire meeting, there seemed to be a clear, if implicit, assumption that everyone in the room had a special “primordial” knowledge of how to save those in rural communities in India, even if many of us had spent the majority of our lives in the United States or the United Kingdom." (Page 3)

"Over the past fifty years, the question “Who is in the room?” has become one of the key representational vectors on which global multicultural, late liberal social change agendas have been constituted, assuming that those inhabiting particular racialized positions will solve the problem of global inequality by" (Page 4)

"their very presence in positions of decision-making power regardless of their class position, political interests, or specific training and skills." (Page 5)

"In particular, the help industries have sought to replace white people with people “of color” as a primary strategy by which to rectify the historical legacy of colonial racial capitalism’s structuring of help in the Global South." (Page 5)

"In this case, my critique focuses specifically on the institutional politics of an Indian education ngo with US economic, political, and cultural linkages, which serves as a very specific form of liberal intervention with extremely unique implications vis-à-vis the rise of the Hindutva state. For example, during the early period of Hindutva ascension (2014–19), Sahaayaka actually prospered, expanding into more schools, creating partnerships with states beyond Karnataka and even beyond India, implementing its digital intervention strategy, and accruing more funding from donor agencies. This was at least in part because Sahaayaka’s particular version of “liberal” intervention did not challenge state ideologies at all: it was an ngo populated by those who were" (Page 7)

"perceived as “native” Indians, who efectively “browned” neocolonial technocratic development strategies even as they maintained strategically useful transnational connections to the United States. In fact, by 2018, shortly after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BjP) regime initiated the Digital India campaign, with its rabid emphasis on digitized solutions for India’s future change, Sahaayaka would be hailed by Karnataka state and in India’s national news media as the future “iT backbone” of Karnataka’s education system. In this way, the nation-state was able to mask its fascist visions by leaning into a seemingly altruistic, apolitical, nativist technophilia." (Page 8)

"Importantly, these racialized caste capacities for afective labor were also situated within a system of patriarchal capitalism, masculinizing the technocratic “rational” digital work of the brown savior while feminizing the relational, afective work of the mentor, rendering it less valuable and less translatable into monetary terms." (Page 10)

"In this sense, Sahaayaka’s praxis perpetuated a neocolonial form of stratification that allowed those with technical skills to accrue excess global value at the expense of all those people who performed the relational forms of afective labor that were necessary for organizations like Sahaayaka to subsist and grow in the first place." (Page 11)

"Here I lean on Lisa Lowe’s excellent characterization of racial capitalism, which suggests that “capitalism expands not through rendering all labor, resources, and markets across the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for exploitation and still others for disposal.”36" (Page 12)

". In the Ambedkarite tradition, caste is understood as a precolonial system of brahmin supremacist legalreligious justifications for a hierarchic gradation of laborers codified in Hindu" (Page 20)

"religious texts, maintained through hyperendogamy, and rooted in the exclusion and persecution of Dalits, especially through ritual untouchability." (Page 21)

"In works such as Wilkerson’s, caste is used to evoke an invisible foundation for intransigent and inheritable hierarchies within national boundaries." (Page 21)

"The British in India determined which communities would play specific roles in the colonial bureaucracy based on what they perceived as the immutable labor capacities of diferent castes, efectively “racializing caste.” Moreover, the word caste is a colonial term derived from the Portuguese term casta, which was used in the seventeenth century to describe the system of social stratification the Portuguese encountered in India." (Page 22)

"Srinivasan’s paternalist vision of help reminded me of Cynthia Enloe’s argument that “later is a patriarchal timezone,” in which those men with power make decisions based on the rhetoric of immediate need, which ultimately devalues issues related to gender, race, caste, and capital and therefore leaves the redress of these issues suspended in a time always yet to come.5" (Page 33)

"Perhaps this is why the same students who are eager and ready to learn about and critique racial, caste, and gendered capitalism’s devastating efects in housing, education, health care, citizenship, incarceration, and the like many times freeze when I level these same critiques at the help economies." (Page 34)

"The sheer scale and emotional stakes associated with the help economies make critiques of them exceptionally fraught, despite the fact that all of this attention to helping Others has made almost no perceptible dent in global poverty and inequality.7 Currently, nearly one in three people worldwide give to a philanthropic organization, taking for granted that providing aid is a necessary social good." (Page 34)

"We are, for better or worse, in the age of the nonprofit-industrial complex, an entire economy of help that requires funds, labor, and new subjects who are deemed in need." (Page 34)

"But the help economies are, like any other institutional arrangement, political, and regardless of any emotional attachments, there is utility to interrogating the relations of power that produce their conditions of possibility." (Page 34)

"These kinds of psychological impulses are part of what Savannah Shange terms a “libidinal economy” because they discipline “the desire for freedom into a quantifiable goal” and short-circuit more difficult forms of critical questioning regarding the material conditions that produce social sufering in the first place." (Page 34)

"While there are many diferent types of ngos with diverse practices and goals, I am primarily concerned with the ngos that draw funds from multinational corporations, include transnational actors, and therefore function as nodes along which “global capital flows.”14" (Page 35)

"Statistically, the shift from public to private education has been striking: now almost 50 percent of school-age students in India go to a private school, double the percentage in 1978.18" (Page 36)

"Moreover, such critiques do not ask how ngo labor exploitation, and the crisis of surplus labor more generally, might actually be linked to historical and contemporary forms of land expropriation and dispossession rooted in settler colonial praxis and ongoing strategies of primitive accumulation.19 Attention to racial capitalism can provide some answers to these questions." (Page 36)

"development and humanitarian intervention—two of the most well-known forms that the help economies have taken—ought to be characterized as “colonialism in disguise.”" (Page 36)

"These critiques revealed the way that highly technocratic language and moral claims to alleviate sufering obfuscated the reality of norms and value judgments that largely amounted to a new form of Western cultural and economic imperialism." (Page 37)

"In turn, postdevelopment critics, Arturo Escobar in particular, called for a resistance to Western interventions in the brown world and argued that “local agency” should be allowed to assert itself to solve their own problems." (Page 37)

"31 Kalyan Sanyal, for example, has argued that neocolonial capitalism cannot include all people as formal workers because of the strain this would cause on capitalist economies and the curtailing on accumulation this would mean." (Page 39)

"Diferentiating these surplus labor populations within the help economy requires the production of a necessary antirelationality between “saviors” and their “Others.”" (Page 39)

"For example, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa situates the ideologies of development within the global imperial regimes of extraction that have produced so much global poverty." (Page 40)

"While Rodney is speaking about the specific historical processes by which Europe enslaved people and expropriated resources from the African continent, his monumental work sets the foundation for a broader understanding of the ongoing neocolonial developmentalist project and the way that this project produces inter- and intranational racialized diferentiations tethered to the need to accumulate." (Page 40)

"Within this regime, ideas of self-reliance, sustainability, capacity building, added value, and empowerment draw together development and humanitarianism and become, in the words of Jemima Pierre, part of the implicit “racial vernaculars of development,” organizing bodies into those who can provide aid and those who cannot." (Page 40)

"the nonprofit-industrial complex, which works in parallel to the carceral state, managing and controlling dissent" (Page 40)

"by channeling activism into careerist projects that work at the behest of the state apparatus and by allowing the veil of philanthropic altruism to remain intact." (Page 41)

"“white men save brown women from brown men.”" (Page 41)

"Here Mosse is pointing to the fact that dominant-caste communities who work for ngos are much less likely to discuss caste and, when they do, are likely to experience nerves. Nerves," (Page 42)

"one of the largest collections of human crania in the United States, gathered by the racist scientist Samuel Morton in the early 1800s. Morton is considered one of the founding members of the phrenological school of racist science. He measured crania and falsified craniometric data to prove his theories of polygenesis" (Page 47)

"It’s hard to describe the feeling of being surrounded by human remains. On the one hand, most of us postcolonized subjects have been trained to think of the dead as “not living,” as “of the past.” This distancing allows researchers to justify the study of the dead. But if you let your mind wander ever so slightly out of the colonial imaginaries of life and death and learn from the many Indigenous scholars who tell us quite diferently, you remember that you are seeing people’s ancestors and that many people experience these ancestors as still living lives." (Page 47)

"But Morton also brings together two other critical elements in the racialization of the Hindu. First, he locates the essential quality of the Hindu in their “love of the marvellous,” linked to their “fantastic religion.” As I argue, the idea" (Page 50)

"of the Hindu as exceptionally religious, superstitious, and/or spiritual would continue into the twenty-first century. Importantly, this Hindu brahmin figure, as Patel writes, was “constructed as genteel and honourable in opposition to barbaric Muslims” and the “loathsome” Ethiop, which allowed Europeans to valorize their encounters with this supposedly mild, industrious, and hyperspiritual group of Hindu Indians, while maintaining their anti-Muslim and anti-Black cosmology.15" (Page 51)

"While anticaste leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar argued that caste should not be seen through this racial logic, many savarna nationalists took up the idea that one’s caste reflected biologically immutable capacities and proved savarna" (Page 51)

"racial superiority." (Page 52)

"Romila Thapar further elaborates on how the Aryan myth translated into the savarna-led nationalist movements, writing: These views coincided with the emergence of nationalism in the late nineteenth century in India, articulated mainly by the middle class, which was drawn from the upper caste and was seeking both legitimacy and an identity from the past. Origins therefore became crucial. To legitimise the status of this middle class, its superior Aryan origins and lineal descent was emphasised." (Page 52)

"class, race, and caste were linked in the Indian nationalist project, creating an alliance between white colonizers and savarna elites, which ultimately allowed for the upward mobility of savarnas in binary opposition to everyone else, including Dalits, Muslims, and the rural poor." (Page 52)

"In opposition to the rights-based approach espoused by Ambedkar, elite Hindu reformers saw the issue of caste oppression as a spiritual and cultural problem that could be rectified only through the paternalistic “uplift” of Dalits, which had the advantage of drawing them into the Hindu fold during the nationalists’ fight for independence." (Page 54)

"Practically, this approach to service required patronage, and Gandhi advocated for “trusteeship” as the solution, in which the rich became trustees who would paternalistically watch over the poor. Gandhi himself garnered funds from several rich businessmen, including the billionaire G. D. Birla, for his uplift initiatives, causing the activist Arundhati Roy to facetiously remark that Gandhi should be considered India’s earliest “corporate sponsored ngo.”28" (Page 55)

"Savarna migration was facilitated by mid-twentieth-century immigration reform in the United States—most notably the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act—which allowed for the integration of high-skilled educated technocratic workers from the subcontinent, a self-selection bias that furthered the racialized caste-colonial history that privileged brahmins, and savarnas more generally." (Page 55)

"This seemingly preternatural capacity for nonviolence, also linked itself to the perceived excess spirituality and duty-bound service of the brahmin, a perception that was amplified as a group of spiritual gurus—including Osho, Baba Ram Dass, and Paramahansa Yogananda—moved to the United States and began proselytizing to (mostly white) Americans." (Page 56)

"India’s liberalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s only enhanced the savarna Indian subject as the model brown subject.39 India as the so-called largest democracy in the world—a framing of the nation-state that was saturated with global value—also became one of the largest and most aggressive advocates for free-market capitalism, boasting the largest number of billionaires while consistently maintaining gross domestic product (gdP) growth rates of over 6 percent during the early years of economic liberalization." (Page 56)

"In turn, (mostly savarna) Indian Americans have the highest median household income in the United States, an astronomical $116,000.40 This excess accrual of capital became fur" (Page 56)

"ther associated with Indian American “genetic” dispositions for “knowledge,” even linked to things like prowess in the US Spelling Bee.41" (Page 57)

"In turn, savarna men were able to convert their caste capital into modern forms of global “casteless” capital while reproducing the racial myth that savarna Hindus had the unique cognitive capacity to fix any of society’s ailments through their technological capacity. This technological ascendance coupled with the hyperendogamy characteristic of caste created what Michiel Baas has termed the “iT caste.”" (Page 58)

"These racializing processes came together with the global help economies through the proliferation of global icT4d (Information Communication Technologies for Development) initiatives, which became the technological answer to the problem of poverty in the brown world, especially in places like India." (Page 58)

"understanding the help economies requires an attention to savior/saved binaries not as obvious, taken-for-granted, ahistorical slots but instead as a by-product of situated histories of encounter." (Page 59)

"In Malthus’s reading, the greatest threat to the elite classes was the latent revolutionary potential of the poor, who might recognize the ills done to them and overthrow those exploiters in power." (Page 66)

"Importantly, in the Malthusian framing, the latent capacity for uprising is not primarily based on the experiential knowledge that comes with facing injustice but is actually more akin to a racialized characteristic of the poor, a capacity that cannot be easily expunged from their blood." (Page 66)

"As such, Malthus’s ideas reinforce the fact that colonial racial capitalism as a system began with the project “to diferentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical diference into ‘racial’ ones within European states.”5 At the same time, these ideas were also emplaced in the colonies: for example," (Page 66)

"7 As Kalpana Wilson has written, “Colonial officials like Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India during the famine of 1876–1879 in which up to 10.3 million people are estimated to have died, invoked Malthusian principles to justify his refusal to prevent these deaths.”" (Page 66)

"Despite all its obvious antecedents in eugenicist histories, the move toward population control continues to be viewed as a compelling solution to the world’s poverty problem. For example, population-control initiatives are encouraged by global development agencies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and through the 2020 un Sustainable Development Goals, which argued that overpopulation is one of the key issues contributing to environmental degradation and global climate change." (Page 67)

"This naturalized distinction, in other words, allows the liberal agent of change to maintain their comfortable and powerful position as savior by locating the problem in those who purportedly need to be saved through the disciplining of their sexual urges." (Page 67)

"Yet liberal saviors’ moral conviction that such policies are the solution to the problem of poverty clashes against the actuality that human beings, rich or poor, should not be compelled into following other people’s rules as to how they use their bodies. In fact, for the liberal savior, forcing people to do what is “in their best interest” is too distasteful, too obviously colonial, and therefore the savior cannot rely on force without losing their moral superiority and turning into what they see themselves in opposition to: the fascist. Therefore, the liberal savior chooses to toe the tricky line between convincing and compelling, and in many cases it is quite hard to tell the diference. This, I argue, is the liberal savior’s conceptual double bind when it comes to the problem of poverty alleviation." (Page 68)

"The liberal savior is constantly seeking the key to beget this afective change, what Michel Foucault might have termed a “technology of the Self,” which would unlock the poor’s capacity to plan their families, imbibe the right educational ideologies (especially pertaining to literacy), and mimic the values of those in power unquestioningly." (Page 68)

"“Empowerment now exemplifies neoliberal ideals of personal capacity building and self-governance. . . . Currently, empowerment is a mainstream, transnational development strategy widely used by ngos and states alike. This translates into a problematic bureaucratization, hierarchization, and professionalization of empowerment as an expert intervention, which can work against the very spirit of equality and justice that empowerment is supposed to connote.”" (Page 69)

"empowerment can serve the purpose of seemingly promoting agentic possibility and future self-realization, while also ultimately bureaucratizing the problem of poverty and linking the problem to market expansion without addressing the many systemic bases for economic inequity or providing government-led social welfare schemes." (Page 69)

"That is, students would learn the appropriate skills and dispositions without building new schools, adding more teachers to classrooms, providing more curricular tools, or requiring any of the other educational resources that have traditionally been viewed as the primary method by which those who were underachieving might be helped. In this sense, motivation, like many of the discussions of empowerment, was completely abstracted from questions of inequity and was therefore an ideal intervention mechanism within development’s “anti-politics machine.”" (Page 70)

"This meant that all of this afective intensity toward student motivation was not a way to get students to think more critically about what they were learning, about whether it was relevant to their lives in villages in Karnataka or not, or about the system they were in. In fact, that kind of free thinking was detrimental to their motivation, “pulling” them in a direction that might beget some questions regarding whether or not learning these skills would actually allow them upward mobility." (Page 72)

"a brief scan of job possibilities revealed that if every single child in India completed tenth standard, less than 10 percent could get jobs. This structural constriction meant, in fact, that questioning the system in which they lived and/or finding alternative livelihoods was a rational choice. Yet value was placed solely on a singular math and literacy education, which drove them further away from their families’ traditional agricultural occupations and lands." (Page 72)

"Antonio Gramsci, for example, argued that capitalist production required moralizing cultural frameworks for how men should comport themselves inside and outside of work, in their consumption (of alcohol, food, etc.), the nuclear family systems they upheld, and their sexual practices." (Page 78)

"While these travels were predicated on his caste capital as a brahmin technologist, this global exposure and cosmopolitan travel also did the work of diluting the" (Page 79)

"brownness of his blood: he was still brown, of course (as will become clear in the next part of this chapter), but not quite in the same way as these headmasters who had never gotten the chance to travel outside of India." (Page 80)

"This particular approach to our relationship was fraught, as on several occasions Srinivasan asked me to help validate the organization’s impact on children. It was the difficult position that I, like other anthropologists working in the development space, found myself nervously navigating: How was I to maintain my scholarly integrity while I was developing relationships that had moved far beyond mere participant observation, afectively entangling me in the inner needs and desires of the organization and its members?" (Page 81)

"These global caste networks have, in turn, been largely exclusionary, limiting the ability of those who are not savarna to access" (Page 85)

"such networks and, therefore, find means of mobility both in India or as they travel abroad." (Page 86)

"While these constitutional requirements have been absolutely necessary for redressing the ongoing legacies of caste atrocity, they have increasingly and explicitly been reframed as “antimeritocratic” to bolster the Hindu supremacist crackdown on anticaste struggle." (Page 86)

"“There is no question that many upper castes think of themselves as modern subjects, or at least as subjects with sincere commitments to universalistic ideals of equality, democracy, and rationality. At the same time, they are able to inhabit a universal worldview precisely because of a history of accumulated privilege, a history that allows them a unique claim to certain forms of self-fashioning.”7 In the help economy, part of savarna self-fashioning was the ability to invisibilize their caste position while deploying the neocolonial liberal ideals of universality, equality, and paternalistic care they had inherited." (Page 87)

". In this rhetorical move, what all in India ought to want is to uphold “universal” liberal values, even if these values have rarely, if ever, protected those facing atrocity." (Page 89)

"“As a rule, I do not like to take any part in a movement which is carried on by caste Hindus. Their attitude towards social reform is so diferent from mine that I have found it difficult to pull on with them.”14" (Page 89)

"Shiva admitted that he had poked fun at another mentor because of his dress and eating habits, though he refused to go into more detail and claimed that mostly he was trying to educate his fellow mentor, only “trying to give him tools that would make him more efective.” In his articulation Shiva was explicitly mapping caste embodiment with one’s potential to be an efective member of Sahaayaka. In other words, Shiva’s story tangibly revealed how participating in the help economy’s form of mobility was “characterized by an ‘expanded reproduction’ of caste prejudice.”" (Page 91)

"Ranga was also mimicking conservative discourses on caste that suggested that it was the continued emphasis on caste—and not historically produced caste capital—that had maintained caste inequity." (Page 92)

"Clearly, as Ambedkar teaches and as the examples above reveal, invisibilizing caste while benefiting from the capital of caste networks did nothing to reform “the sentiments and mental attitudes” of these men as they traveled abroad or when they came back home to help in India.23 This is why I see Sahaayaka and the brown savior more broadly, not as an abstract, universal, Western form of masculinist savior discourse, but as one that intersects very clearly with the emergence of globalized brahminism." (Page 93)

"In the past twenty years, scholars (almost always working under the sign of woman within the unstated division of gendered academic labor) have focused on and critiqued this construction of the fundable empowered girl in contemporary global help economies and have shown how girls and women have been characterized as the ideal groups to change families, communities, and nations as a whole." (Page 96)

"Somewhat paradoxically, women’s ability to sustain environmental change in this cosmology is conflated with their ability to learn how to accumulate wealth—as if the environment, which has been decimated by the excesses of colonial masculinist extraction, will now be saved using the same logics as long as these logics are proliferated by women." (Page 96)

"The undertaking seeks, then, to socially engineer girls who will want to beget the appropriate types of economic and environmental change when they are women (with funds delivered by Dell, of course)." (Page 96)

"Moreover, the savarna women from other development organizations who worked with Sahaayaka were also well traveled and well educated in technocratic fields, influencing how they understood their special roles as change agents." (Page 97)

"Mayo used these claims to argue that India should not be given independence and that the only way to save these poor, oppressed girls/women was through continued British rule. In this racialized gendered politics, the white woman, while understood as inferior to her white male companions, could still demonstrate her supremacy across racial lines (both intra- and internationally). Mayo’s book was iconized by many development agencies and organizations in the United States, producing the interlocking frameworks for US global developmentalism, poverty alleviation, and girls’/women’s empowerment, even becoming required reading for the Peace Corps in India for a large portion of the twentieth century.8" (Page 99)

"At the same time, they also eschewed the coldness and misery of the pure masculinist profit motive for a softer version of accumulation that sought to produce social impact." (Page 102)

"Of course, she finally said, she would not go back to a profession in which her work was poorly compensated even if her impact was greater. Social reform was great but only if it fit the appropriate confines of her class position." (Page 103)

"Second, and by extension, this version of women’s empowerment also rendered impossible any conversation regarding material wealth redistribution or labor revaluations that could emphasize the importance of social reproductive work over productive work and might therefore challenge the logic of racial and gendered capitalist ordering." (Page 103)

"When I asked Madhu about her life, about why she ended up in the help sector, she began with her time as an engineering student. “You know,” she says, “I was a good brahmin girl . . .” She laughed, and I, too, laughed nervously as I acknowledged that I knew exactly what she meant: a good brahmin girl marries a good brahmin boy, gets a white-collar job in engineering or medicine (or maybe in education), and maintains her caste-cultural identities by remaining (sufficiently) vegetarian, while participating in the brahmanical art forms (Bharatanatyam, Carnatic music, etc.). Madhu had followed through on this particular ideal, marrying a brahmin man who worked in software engineering and becoming an engineer herself." (Page 104)

"This universalizing method of neoliberal intervention only served to reproduce structural inequities tied to a racialized Hindu supremacy because the brown savior’s refusal to explicitly recognize social stratifications of power also rendered them completely unable to address similar questions within their organization. For example, I had always been baffled that Sahaayaka had not hired even one Urdu-speaking Muslim from around Karnataka to join their intervention, especially given that the organization’s strategy had always been to partner with communities and intervene with the help of those mentors who had a stronger understanding of particular “local” contexts." (Page 110)

"Even as Sarathi was reproducing racist anti-Muslim stratification in his interventions, the brown savior could persist in an ignorance facilitated by the neoliberal impulse to quantify, remain neutral, and unmark their interventions." (Page 114)

"I have also tried to show how these ongoing neocolonial labor diferentiations actually challenge Sahaayaka’s organizational rhetoric as working as part of the “anti-politics machine” in which interventions are apolitical, technocratic, and unmarked. In some ways, my analysis here further substantiates work like that of Lisa Lowe, who shows us that liberalism, despite its guise of universality, requires exclusion." (Page 116)

"I draw here on Leya Mathew and Ritty Lukose’s work on “pedagogies of aspiration,” which “proposes that liberalisation [in India] has generated an expansion of aspirational trajectories that require and necessitate forms of self-fashioning [which] must be understood in terms of the uncertainties and precarities of generating social reproduction and mobility.”15" (Page 117)

"What we understand today as globalization . . . has been facilitated by the reconfiguration of capitalism and by the transmission and reproduction of deeply embedded social hierarchies and prejudices rooted in a past characterized by territorial concepts of belonging and notions of civilization that both generated and were generated by racial inequalities.—deBorah ThomaS and m. kamari cLarke, “Globalization and Race”" (Page 119)

"At the same time, focusing energy on the cultural politics of naming merely submerged and did little to address the material conditions that continue to dispossess the poor, especially the rural poor.9 As such, in my own text, I have maintained the usage of Bangalore to recognize that the city has actually only continued to function as a neocolonial city, rife with expropriation and exploitation." (Page 123)

"for farmers.12 Infrastructure projects in liberalized India are connected to earlier colonial land-use policy, which also focused on a solution to the agrarian question in India.13 As David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe argue, new modes of accumulation heralded under neoliberal privatization “emerged from an earlier moment of enclosure and dispossession” marked by British colonial strategies of land commodification and settlement.14 The British, realizing that most of India’s population lived in agricultural communities, recognized that their extractionist interests required a reengineering of India’s agricultural laborers’ relation to the land. The oft-discussed colonial zamindari, ryotwari, and mahalwari tax revenue systems were attempts by the British to unleash the productivity of the land by conflating the natural right to property ownership with the commercializing of agriculture." (Page 124)

"Infrastructure projects in liberalized India are connected to earlier colonial land-use policy, which also focused on a solution to the agrarian question in India.13 As David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe argue, new modes of accumulation heralded under neoliberal privatization “emerged from an earlier moment of enclosure and dispossession” marked by British colonial strategies of land commodification and settlement.14 The British, realizing that most of India’s population lived in agricultural communities, recognized that their extractionist interests required a reengineering of India’s agricultural laborers’ relation to the land. The oft-discussed colonial zamindari, ryotwari, and mahalwari tax revenue systems were attempts by the British to unleash the productivity of the land by conflating the natural right to property ownership with the commercializing of agriculture." (Page 124)

"the nice road project and the expropriation of agricultural land hinged on the continued application of these colonial logics, specifically a reading of eminent domain in the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, originally written under British colonial rule. Eminent domain laws are a classical example of primitive accumulation, allowing the state to expropriate land from those who are not producing the highest-possible value from the land and therefore are not working toward the goal of accumulation." (Page 124)

"White skin or brown skin, the settler has never left India." (Page 125)

"In postindependence India, the Indian state continued to focus on the “agrarian question,” as the Indian peasantry’s use of agricultural land was still perceived as unproductive and wasteful, marking India’s premodern, backward past and preventing it from developing the Nehruvian vision of a technocratic future.18 The green revolution in India, for example, released the surplus value of agricultural land by integrating technological tools into farming, including high-yielding-variety seeds, tractors, irrigation facilities, pesticides, and fertilizers.19 However, as the agrarian question continued into the postliberalization period, two primary changes occurred: (1) unleashing surplus value required the agricultural sector to further integrate into circuits of global capitalism; and (2) using land for agricultural purposes was now no longer seen as the most productive use of many of these lands, especially those closest to rapidly expanding urban centers. The results of these changes were the kinds of state-corporate land grabs that farmers have been protesting.20 In some sense, as Utsa Patnaik has written, the postliberalization period in India has actually reverted to a more draconian form of land expropriation because now, as with the nice project, the state “enters into collaboration with the giant transnational companies in this new process of primitive accumulation.”" (Page 125)

"The Mentor, the Crisis of Surplus Labor, and the Racialization of Rural Diference" (Page 125)

"In this case, the ngo played a critical role in the project of accumulation as it addressed the problem of overeducated rural surplus labor that was “waiting” for jobs that did not exist." (Page 126)

"However, the mentors’ incorporation into the ngo sector was also limited by their racialized, casteized, and gendered positions, all of which relied on historically situated ideologies regarding rural peoples’ capacities for labor. In the colonial period, for example, the determinations of the value of land, wasted land, and permanent settlement also required distinctions among those who were living on the land, valuations that invariably naturalized diferences and determined who had the right to land and who were considered disposable surplus populations." (Page 126)

"The village became the locus for authentic cultural knowledge that had not been sullied by the vagaries of colonial encounter, globalization, and economic change, as evidenced by the many anthropological village studies in the postindependence period, which reified Indian society as a system of rurality and caste.25 The village in some sense became the locus of Bharat, “the Sanskrit term for nation as ancient soil but also referring to the masses of ‘real India’ as both locus of cultural diference and developmental problem.”26 This imagined rural India was a racial imaginary, in which the village and the villager were static, unchanging, untouched by the benefits of economic transformation. At the same time, under the technocratic vision of Jawaharlal Nehru, the village (and the villager) was also seen as the site most in need of paternalistic development, given their perceived backward practices and incapacity for technological, modern techniques. In this sense, the Indian state inherited the racial politics of the British colonial civilizing mission in their approach to rural development." (Page 127)

"The brown savior was, in some sense, the next inheritor of this racialized view of the village, primarily because rural India continues to have a special place in the hearts and minds of the diasporic and bourgeois savarna Indian elite because they, too, have imbibed the nostalgia for rural India as authentic India, while also imbibing the view of rural India as outside of the sphere of economic productivity and technocratic capacity." (Page 127)

"This was an imagined set of authentic ethnoracial identities related to Kannada, Hinduism, caste, and agricultural work that stood in binary opposition to the position of the brown savior. In this sense, the fieldworkers were being produced as racialized subjects in relation to the managerial, modern, mobile, technocratic brown savior class. As important, it was assumed that this ethnoracial, primordial knowledge was an essential source of exchange value for fieldworkers, and therefore objectifying themselves became their most precious source of potential value.28" (Page 128)

"For the mentors, their shifting occupational aspirations were never without ambivalence and/or misgivings, as I would hear from the Sahaayaka mentors who would rue that they had been forced to work away from their families and in environments that looked little like the open, green, quiet landscapes of their youth. They would complain about their long hours on the road, in buses, on motorbikes, or, if fortune was in their favor on that day, in a car, traveling back and forth between Bangalore and villages in other parts of Karnataka" (Page 128)

"However, what they complained about most was a seeming cap on their ability to move up in the organization. They constantly wanted more authority, more training, higher salaries, and larger roles in Sahaayaka, which they were somehow unable to get despite their best eforts. These were the contradictory “feelings” associated with urbanity: the feeling of loss of land and livelihood, hopes for a better future, aspirations just out of reach. For the mentors, the city became a place of constant toil; never-ending, interminable movement; new life possibilities and slow, smoggy deaths." (Page 129)

"Gendered Labor and Mentor Mobility Regimes" (Page 129)

"Perhaps more important, Lakshmi’s aspirations also reflect the way that her participation in the ngo and her exposure to the brown savior had cultivated her “entrepreneurial citizenship.” She had, as Lilly Irani argues, “become an ‘agent of change,’ an ideal worker, an instrument of development, and an optimistic and speculative citizen. This citizen cultivates and draws what resources they can—their community ties, their capacity to labor, even their political hope—into the pursuit of entrepreneurial experiments in development, understood as economic growth and uplift of the poor.”32 Becoming an entrepreneur seemed as if it might be Lakshmi’s way to tap into the road to accumulation even as she helped those in her village, a way of bridging her economic ambitions and her social obligations. But Lakshmi’s aspiration for entrepreneurial uplift was far more precarious because she was not already comfortably situated within the circuits of capital. The question, then, was whether this imagined entrepreneurial future was actually attainable or whether this cultivation of aspiration was merely a way of preventing Lakshmi from joining those, like the protesting farmers, who had decided that these oferings of upward mobility were but a dupe." (Page 132)

"urBan aLTruiSm/urBan corruPTion" (Page 133)

"Srinivasan would remark that the mentors from North Karnataka, associated with a higher degree of rurality, had not yet “been corrupted” like their counterparts from South Karnataka, who spent more of their time in and around Bangalore city. In this imagination, ideas about corruption and altruism were spatialized, mapped onto region and proximity to the city, which, in turn, spurred on Srinivasan’s own anxieties regarding his personnel." (Page 134)

"Mentors were slotted into a graded hierarchy that valorized those mentors who labored altruistically for the good of their native village people, mimicking the figure of the idealized caste laborer who did their work unquestioningly because it was their duty and role in society." (Page 134)

"The irony was, of course, that the fieldworkers’ “demands for economic development and equality [were] delegitimized” even though the brown savior’s entire value was accrued because of the economic and physical mobility that allowed them to take on the role of saving Others." (Page 134)

"On the Reengineering of Mentors and the Doubling (and Doubling and Doubling) of Labor" (Page 135)

"There was a hypervisibility and surveillance of the mentors that came with this dual scrutiny, and it was reflected in these types of social spaces that kept the mentors in ready reach of Bangalore-based Sahaayaka administrators, donors who wanted to know what their funds were being used for, and government officials who wanted to make sure that Sahaayaka never overstepped its agreements." (Page 137)

"While Srinivasan was supposedly asking mentors to develop their skills and take on more proactive decision-making, he was actually asking them to reassess their values. By mapping English onto “the technical domains of society and economy,” he was implicitly producing a neocolonial division of labor that mimicked a program of civilizing.7 Srinivasan knew that the mentors did not read or speak well in English, and therefore his ask would be difficult for them, especially because their day-to-day jobs in schools actually did not require the use of English since they were mostly speaking to teachers, headmasters, and students in Kannada- or Urdu-medium schools. This meant that they were expected to learn these skills in their free time, outside of their time in schools, doubling their labor while also diminishing the value of the essential labor they were already doing in schools despite the fact that their culturally specific knowledge was why they had been hired in the first place." (Page 139)

"Yet civilizing did not just begin and end with the forceful request to learn technical skills in English." (Page 139)

"On Economic Need, Moral Obligation, and Impossible Dreams of Saviorism" (Page 140)

"“The pay is only 18,000 rupees, and it’s not enough. When I was a bachelor, it was fine. But now I have my wife and also a child. It is much harder for me now. I don’t know what job I can find.” When I asked him why he didn’t just change jobs entirely and leave Sahaayaka, his response was direct and, to my surprise, more confrontational than I expected. “I’ve made a commitment. For at least five years I want to do my work and improve schools. I cannot leave it just like that. They have made me the coordinator for all of Pune as well, and that is a big thing. I don’t want to leave just like that.”" (Page 141)

"This was the perplexing dilemma that I found many of the Sahaayaka mentors facing. Suresh was completely invested in the cause of educational change as a moral prerogative, without which his past seven years of work were rendered meaningless. This unquantifiable feeling of moral responsibility to the cause, the organization, and the schools and communities he worked with overshadowed his financial hardship. Moreover, being “from there,” that is to say, from a village like those he served, doubled the moral obligation, merging the obligation to the organization with the obligation to his native fellows. This produced a Sisyphean paradox, at least for those mentors who bought into this vision, pushing toward utopian goals that were never achievable but so ethically binding that mentors kept working toward them." (Page 141)

". For Suresh, freedom was tethered to an imaginary of economic independence, whether that were because one owned enough land to grow crops for oneself or because one owned an ngo that allowed one to accumulate enough to live without worrying about risk.8 However, Suresh’s idea of freedom also required the ability to accrue wealth while maintaining one’s sense of altruism in the process, crystallized in the aspiration to create his own ngo." (Page 142)

"Suresh’s argument makes clear the ngo’s function within India’s current version of primitive accumulation, fusing expropriation and exploitation in a way that relies on the fact that those who experience its harshest conditions still must believe in the system. Such an interpretation is not meant to blame or place responsibility on those like Suresh who are struggling to find a means of mobility in a system that is designed to produce dispossession. Instead, as I have argued, processes of expropriation require the simultaneous cultivation of particular types of aspiration and labor expectations within organizations like Sahaayaka." (Page 143)

"a gLoBaL deaTh" (Page 145)

"But understanding why social sufering occurs, including tragic events like suicide, matters. Why matters because attending to the material conditions of social sufering helps us to dislodge the incessant need to individualize, pathologize, and locate blame in those who are experiencing sufering and instead pushes us to think about sufering as rooted in political, economic, and historical phenomena. Why matters because it shifts our temporal analysis away from thinking about a tragic event as an end in and of itself, instead leading us into the past and, as important, into the future, broadening our gaze to recognize the complex ways people weave new forms of life after death.3 Such an excavation requires a sincerity and honesty that does not valorize or vilify the choices of those who are making sense of and coping with tragedies that might be beyond our own comprehension. Exploring the why of social sufering should produce, as Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange write, a kind of “thick solidarity that is, a kind of solidarity that mobilizes empathy in ways that do not gloss over diference but rather push into the specificity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialized experience." (Page 147)

"In Manoj’s case, tragic death is linked to a devaluation of agricultural labor that produces in Manoj an impulse to separate himself from his village community and find ways to link himself to “global” communities—a process that also requires him to valorize those like the brown savior." (Page 147)

"Primitive Accumulation and Farmers’ Suicide as Social Pathology" (Page 147)

"Utsa Patnaik has argued that farmers’ suicide is the starkest reminder that India’s market liberalization of the 1990s was actually a continuation of earlier colonial strategies of primitive accumulation. She writes that farmers’ suicides recall: the primitive accumulation of capital . . . in Europe during the 16th and 19th centuries. . . . But the 21st century is not the 18th and 19th century: the peasantry of the global South has nowhere to go if it is dispossessed, in contrast to the dispossessed peasantry of the North, which migrated in vast numbers to the New World. . . . No mass peasant suicides owing to debt took place before 1991. . . . [I]ndebtedness-driven farmer suicides started from 1998. Total recorded farmer suicides between 1998 and December 2008 were 198,000; specifically debt-driven suicides have claimed over 60,000 peasant lives over the last decade.6" (Page 148)

"Her argument hinges on the fact that the surplus peasants in Europe during the years of industrialization, while dispossessed in large numbers, were able to migrate out of Europe, thus solving the crisis of surplus labor in early modern capitalism. However, unlike in these earlier colonial-industrial years, even as Indian farmers are driven ever more into debt, they have virtually nowhere to go. The result is the massive number of farmers’ suicides in India, now counting more than a quarter million." (Page 148)

". Rather, it creates graded stratifications that produce some possibilities for mobility for surplus populations based on their ability to internalize neocolonial values. Here material changes brought on by economic dispossession, including the loss of life, might also facilitate psychosocial changes for those left behind, in what they aspire for and dream about.7 These types of changes work not on the intellect but on the afective level and have the potential to further ossify the social stratification produced by expropriation.8" (Page 149)

"Lakshmi and Manoj had grown up in neighboring villages just kilometers apart. Lakshmi, like Manoj, had struggled and, like Manoj, had used her job with Sahaayaka as a means for economic mobility. However, Lakshmi’s aspirations were quite a bit diferent from Manoj’s, and her joke revealed the way that neocolonial capitalist aspiration was and is inherently gendered." (Page 149)

"Entrepreneurial Virility and Distancing from Agricultural Labor" (Page 150)

"Manoj diferentiated himself when he talked to me about his village and his community, referring to “they” or “them” rather than “we” or “us.” Here, distinguishing himself from his fellows was the psychological efect of these neocolonial processes of dispossession. Primitive accumulation required not just the expropriation of land but the internalizing of neocolonial values, specifically through valorizations of one’s capacity to change and leave behind those who supposedly did not possess the appropriate kinds of values to change their circumstances. Manoj made this claim quite explicitly, characterizing his fellow villagers as unchanging and static." (Page 151)

"In other words, Manoj’s socially situated theorization did not actually produce a sense of resistance to the economic, political, and social processes that facilitated dispossession." (Page 151)

"I realized later that I had inadvertently facilitated this framing through my form of questioning, by asking him why it was he and not others in his village who had somehow made it “out,” reflecting my own colonized valuations of life and labor. This persistent need to know why Manoj had striven to achieve upward mobility was itself a neocolonial haunting, what Elizabeth Povinelli argues is “a way of holding those who sufer accountable: ‘Look, this one had the will to lift herself up by her bootstraps.’”12" (Page 152)

"In asking the question of labor, his friend recognized the impossibility of finding adequate compensation for one’s labor in a global elsewhere that systematically devalued their lives and work." (Page 152)

"He, unlike Manoj, did not want to spread a lie to younger children, a dupe propagated by those with power that made people believe that following the expected educational trajectory within the system would result in global mobility. Thus, framing Manoj’s story as one of success and willfulness occluded the real structural inequities that shaped both Manoj’s life and the lives of those in his community." (Page 152)

"A Thesis on a Valuable Death and the Imaginaries of Travel" (Page 152)

"This framing also revealed the class-based inflections of such moral economies, taking as a given that access by a global digital public was of more import than access by those who lived only walking distance away." (Page 155)

"This globally circulating valorization of the Indian abroad is also one of the reasons the brown savior is recognized not only by those in power but also by those whom they hire for fieldwork positions." (Page 155)

"Manoj’s struggles for international mobility also take me back to Utsa Patnaik’s attention to the diferences between colonial and current forms of primitive accumulation. As she noted, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the expropriation of agricultural land was premised on the fact that the white working classes could move elsewhere because the world had been rendered largely borderless to European subjects within the racist political economy of empire. Now the nation-state functions as the major fulcrum for expropriation; passport regimes allow the citizens of former and current imperial regimes in Europe and United States to move freely while binding and holding the expropriated classes of the brown world in place. As such, neocolonial passport regimes maintain the separation of the brown world from the rest, allowing for people like Manoj to travel within it—in this case from India to Thailand—while making sure that the white world is not contaminated by their brown presence (unless, of course, the white world suddenly has a need for a cheap and unprotected labor force).17" (Page 156)

"At the same time, Manoj’s story reveals the way that internalized value hierarchies are required for the subsistence of the saviorist racial capitalist project, specifically as these hierarchies pertain to the value of agricultural labor and rural life. In the next chapter, I provide a further elaboration of how graded stratifications and hierarchies get reproduced by mentors at the village level as they participate in the brown saviorist project." (Page 156)

"The inSuLT of PrecariTy (or “i don’T give a damn”)" (Page 157)

"“Everyone in India wants to start their own ngo.”" (Page 159)

"The Racialized and Gendered Image of Social (Media) Mobility" (Page 161)

"Shiva had recognized that his upward mobility was less about the actual impact or outcomes in these schools and far more about his ability to make his work visible beyond the classroom." (Page 163)

"Global Hierarchies of Disposability and the Reentrenchment of the “Backward”" (Page 164)

"Ragu’s critique bundles the undesirability of Bangalore city with the overreliance on technology, accumulation, and US imperialism. Those with power in Bangalore were facilitating environmental decay and human disposability, inhabiting a particular slot in the global racial capitalist apparatus, which determined whose bodies were valued and whose bodies were deemed disposable.8 Ragu had witnessed how American drugs were tested on brown Indian bodies, which he understood had been deemed an acceptable human cost given the potential for corporates in both America and Bangalore to accumulate wealth. This racialized disposability sat in almost direct contrast to Shiva’s near-utopic pleasure at forging global connection, revealing those attempts at mediatized visibility and mobility as a mask for massive inequities." (Page 165)

"For however much Ragu had critiqued and sought not to participate in the exploitative global racialized capitalist order he had seen in Bangalore, he, like Shiva, could not help but resort to the insult as a way to claw himself up a value hierarchy when his status had been so thoroughly undermined." (Page 166)

"how difficult it is to change our strategies for dealing with a world that we recognize as deeply unfair." (Page 166)

"that saviorist interventions seem to do less for those who need help than for those who do the helping." (Page 166)

"ac carS and The hyPerreaL viLLage" (Page 167)

"As inciTe! has argued, funding is and has been the Trojan horse within the ngo sector. The ngo as a partner got corporate funding that allows “corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through ‘philanthropic’ work." (Page 168)

"It is Srinivasan’s last phrase, the visceral emotional response to the continued relationship with ndTv/Coca-Cola, that I cannot forget. No matter the benefits of getting funding through the program, Srinivasan was unable to set foot in schools that he had spent the past seven years cultivating relationships with because he could not face the contradictions inherent in Sahaayaka’s changing priorities." (Page 168)

"Simultaneously, these kinds of extractive interventions are also meant to emplace new “hyperreal” aspirational trajectories on those at the receiving end of these interventions. These cycles of imagined, yet materially negligible, impacts place the mentors in contradiction, wanting to do real social change work while knowing that these kinds of interventions are nothing but optical illusions." (Page 169)

"Hyperreal Philanthropy and Savarna Benevolence" (Page 169)

"At the same time, this nostalgic idea occluded the fact that the savarna classes had absconded from the government school system in India at precisely the time when Scheduled Castes were joining public institutions en masse and when the state had begun to neglect government schools with the rise of the privatized school system." (Page 172)

"hyperreality is “a phantasmic creation of the means of mass communication, but as such it emerges as a more authentic, exact, ‘real’ reality than the one we perceive in the life around us." (Page 172)

"In this instantiation, the telethon was intended to “liberate” the viewer from necessary action in social justice endeavors beyond the donating of funds." (Page 173)

"They Came, Then They Went” and Hyperreal Aspirations" (Page 173)

"At the time, I did little to reflect on the unequal labor relations that had facilitated my research, insistent as I was on getting as much information as I could during my time in the field. Whether or not the mentors wanted to spend time with me, in almost every case, my presence and research produced another layer of work for them, more time on the road, more questions, more tasks that had nothing to do with their jobs. At the same time, the mentors had no choice but to comply, given that the Sahaayaka leadership had requested that they assist me. In retrospect, perhaps I should have decided not to pursue the “valuable” information I had so eagerly sought." (Page 173)

"Vishnu explained the problem with the ndTv/Coca-Cola campaign in two sentences, emphasizing his earlier comments. “See,” he said, “if the school was already good, then they maintain the new infrastructure. If not, then they don’t.” He continued, telling me that the school we were at was, in fact, already a good school. Yet, even at a school that aimed to maintain its infrastructure, there was only so much that could be done. For ndTv/Coca-Cola, “revitalizing” a school meant coming for a few days, making it over by dropping of a few shiny new toys, and leaving, none of which allowed for sustainable change, which would have included, at the very least, check-ins with the schools and educational programs that could help schools understand how to sustain the new infrastructure. In contrast, these few hours of celebration were suspended in time on their website, a moment of joy produced for all potential donors to witness and facilitating the accumulationist projects of ndTv/Coca-Cola." (Page 174)

"I love table tennis, and I wanted to play, so I asked a few of the students if they would like to join me. They moved gingerly, eager but also hesitant. I held a racket expectantly until I realized that no one would join me. When I asked the headmaster why no one would play, he told me simply that they did not know how to and that they had never been taught. It dawned on me then that the table tennis table was set in place by brown saviors who had imagined what should be useful and fun to those at this school based on what they themselves found useful and fun. They, like me, must have loved table tennis." (Page 174)

"AC Cars and Breaking with the Altruistic Impulse" (Page 175)

"I could see his eyes burning with hurt as he spoke: “These people in their ac [air-conditioned] cars don’t care. They are always telling this and that, but they don’t do anything. They sit there and talk and talk and talk, but have they seen what we do? I told them this is wrong approach, this won’t work. But they will not listen. They will not come down. They will not understand.”" (Page 176)

"As he spoke, Vishnu no longer distinguished between Sahaayaka’s leadership and the ndTv/Coca-Cola campaign. For Vishnu, the ac symbolized those who sat in Bangalore, unwilling to come anywhere near the schools unless they were comfortably driven in cars with ac. It symbolized elitism, lack of understanding or care, even incompetence, linking these traits to upper-class, urban, cosmopolitan caste elites. These brown saviors liked to “talk and talk and talk” about the problems facing people and about how to change them, while safely and comfortably separated from their actual experience of daily life." (Page 176)

"Part III Is Done: In Sum and What’s to Come" (Page 177)

"brown savior complex seems to extract exceptional amounts of labor value from those marginalized individuals within its ranks even as it purports to lift the same marginal communities from their supposed economic servility." (Page 177)

"Indeed, one premise of this part of the book is that the help economies function as one solution to the crisis of surplus labor. However, I have shown that functioning as the conduit for surplus labor requires that those who join the help economy imbibe the value hierarchies that produce their dispossession in the first place. This contradiction is what so many of the mentors struggled with and negotiated." (Page 178)

"digiTaL SavioriSm" (Page 179)

"digiTaL SaviorS" (Page 181)

". The California I drove through looked nothing like the California of my youth. If, way back when, I grew up in a nearly all-white middle-class neighborhood on the peripheries of the Silicon Valley boom, now everywhere I looked, I saw brown savarna families enjoying the fruits of their technocratic educations as they or someone in their families worked at Facebook, Uber, Google, Apple, Yahoo, or any of the other technology companies that have taken over the Bay. From their midst, ever more brown saviors will emerge." (Page 182)

"At the same time, Krish was able to imagine solutions to the problem of brown poverty without reckoning with regionally and historically specific systemic forces because he understood technologies as apolitical, neutral fixes. This conceit of neutrality allows those who build such technologies to see these universal tools as a panacea to solve any problem, sidestepping the more difficult task of challenging racial and caste capitalist systems on the basis of historically emplaced and reproduced inequity." (Page 183)

"If the global brown underclasses were at the receiving end of these kinds of infrastructural innovations, it was the technological overlords who decided what problems ought to be solved and what “fixes” would solve these societal ills." (Page 183)

"These powerful decision-makers, as Ruha Benjamin warns, “are erecting a digital caste system, structured by existing racial inequities that are not just colorblind. . . . These tech advances are sold as morally superior because they purport to rise above human bias, even though they could not exist without data produced through histories of exclusion and discrimination.”" (Page 183)

"Technophilia, Technopanacea, and Solutions “Imagined in Their Heads”" (Page 184)

"Notice that Modi uses the metaphor of the highway—the road to accumulation—to make sense of digital connectivity." (Page 184)

"In the case of rural India, Zuckerberg is assuming, like Modi, that technological connection will lead, by definition, to rural uplift. Here, again, a digital solution to the problem of rural poverty need not reckon with more difficult questions of land speculation and expropriation, debt economies, and the like." (Page 185)

"These schools, which were implicitly marked as having more resources, status, and affluence, which also likely meant they were marked as whiter (or at least more white adjacent), had the power to refuse the advances of Gooru’s digital saviors. In turn, Krish hinted, Gooru moved to less affluent schools in the brown world that were perceived as “without agency and capacity to change their situation” and therefore were more susceptible to Gooru’s control." (Page 187)

"Producing Techno-afective Communities and Anticipatory Nostalgia" (Page 187)

"That he and other digital brown saviors had been allowed to join and change education without having had any training in educational systems, pedagogy, or any similar area of study had always made me nervous, even angry, but was also an indicator of the exceptional global value that digital saviors had." (Page 187)

"Krish exhibited what Christo Sims calls a “disruptive fixation,” in which “reformers and designers who meet moral calls to improve the world for others manage to produce and maintain their idealism despite having some knowledge of recurring failures.”11 Each time a project fails, the newest technologist believes that they have identified the problem with the last intervention and that this time they will be able to solve those problems. This fixation drives digital saviorism even though the saviors themselves are faced time and time again with the fact that “an app will not save us.”12" (Page 188)

"Yet, as Kimberly Christen has noted, information freedom and open access are not outside of the political.13 That is to say, calls for open access require questioning who information is open to, how it is open to them, and what ideological constructs are reinscribed in the call for open information." (Page 188)

"In response to Krish’s post, the teacher, Shambu, replied, “I miss my guru Ganesh sir. . . . Can I have his contact details.” As Shambu’s nostalgic words and Gooru’s name reveal, these types of Hindu metaphors were part of the production of a global Hinduism: the “guru-shisha” (teacher-student) relationship being perhaps one of its most ubiquitous and generic markers. This ideology of Hindu teaching had been encoded in these open-access technologies, providing the foundational structuration of feelings for global savarna edtech creative makers, ngo personnel in Sahaayaka, and many teachers within Sahaayaka’s network of Karnataka schools.16 But what was most important about Shambu’s statement was the way he situated himself vis-à-vis his “guru Ganesh.” Shambu maintained the hierarchy between himself, a teacher in a Kannada-medium school, and Ganesh, a Tamil brahmin Sahaayaka board member who was a computer scientist by training." (Page 189)

"Here the guru-shisha relationship mimics the relationship between the savior and the saved, mediated by one’s capacity to code and one’s position within caste hierarchies." (Page 189)

"What he wanted to do, he told me, was find a way to make an app that would be accessible all over the world so that anyone, anywhere, could fund a school, taluk, or district of their choosing. In one sense, Krish’s ideal felt like a more sophisticated, digitized form of Save the Children or the aforementioned Support My School campaign." (Page 189)

"digiTaL Time (and iTS oTherS)" (Page 193)

"6 Historically, the ability to manipulate time has been a central tenet of accumulation, and the ability to determine temporal regimes and regulate how people should orient toward time has been a key mechanism by which to divide those with power from those without." (Page 195)

"Transaction Time and Lag Time" (Page 195)

"The Mentor’s Labor, White Noise, and the Wasting of Time" (Page 198)

"Here the task of data collection revealed the neocolonial stratification in labor value, in which the brown savior’s capacity to innovate, create, and manipulate was juxtaposed with the “degraded” labor of the mentor, who was now forced to do robotic tasks that took them away from hands-on, face-to-face relational interactions.10" (Page 198)

"which Amit Rai argues is a unique form of Indian hacking that challenges patterns of casteized, classed, and gendered relations of labor: “Jugaad . . . as the idea of working around the point of sabotaging what’s given as fixed, normal, formal, propertied, suvarna (upper caste), appropriate and right . . . destabilizes not only the value-form of commodity production of monopolistic control, but also the enforced dichotomy between intellectual and manual labor in" (Page 199)

"several caste and class hierarchies.”13" (Page 200)

"digiTaL audiT cuLTure (or meTadaTa)" (Page 203)

"The brown savior was the perfect conduit between the white British subject and the Black Ghanaian subject, who were slotted into the most well-trodden global racist discourses of who could help and who was most in need." (Page 204)

"As I looked at this list, created to make sure that all of the teachers in nali kali schools were implementing the curriculum, I almost forgot that the nali kali program was actually about active, joyous learning. Instead, I was transported to a world steeped in the bureaucratic, neocolonial practices of categorization, a world in which even play must be divided into neat and isolated compartments and objectives." (Page 205)

"Monitoring the Monitors and Technologies of Antirelational Relationality" (Page 206)

"The language of “monitoring the monitors” describes a classic form of audit culture, a never-ending need to create new dimensions of accountability that layer on top of one another, creating ever more centralized and “meta” surveillance and control mechanisms that might, eventually, lead to the perfect system in which every human being follows the rules just as they are supposed to." (Page 206)

"Audit culture has been a global “culture on the make” for a large part of the past two hundred years.4 Historically, the audit’s roots have been as a colonial technology of governance that was intended to help manage colonial populations by classifying them and then determining how resources ought to be allocated and extracted from the colony for the metropole." (Page 206)

"Those with power are seeking to help, but they cannot help if they cannot surveil. The audit, in other words, is premised on questions regarding who needs to be surveilled because they need to be helped, who is trustworthy to surveil/help them, who is rendered transparent, who is rendered opaque, and, most important, how these binary relations allow for particular people to accumulate ever more control and power—all questions that reproduce a version of the audit as a quintessential neocolonial technology of power that “actively document[s] and produce[s] . . . risks, problems, and uncertainties.”8" (Page 207)

"These interactions seemed to be creating large impacts, yet Sahaayaka struggled to communicate this to their funders, who wanted to know how exactly these very small interventions were producing such a large impact. The organization needed “hard” data (read: quantitative, metric-based data) to prove the impact of their programming." (Page 207)

"At the same time, Krish’s interpretation of what he had witnessed seemed to almost completely erase the relational aspects of Manoj’s story. Manoj had forged complex and long-lasting personal relationships, even friendships, with parents that produced and sustained these secondary digital relationships, all of which were eliminated in Krish’s version of the phone app." (Page 208)

"racial capitalist systems require technologies of antirelationality, that is, technologies that reduce collective life to the racialized categories, demarcations, and divisions that sustain capitalist accumulation." (Page 209)

"Metadata, Metasurveillance, and the Question of Who Can Think" (Page 209)

"This idea of “who can think” was steeped in neocolonial ideologies, which troped on the past idea that colonizers were the only ones capable of thinking but now incorporated those brown caste elites who possessed the perceived cognitive capacity to diferentiate themselves from their fellows." (Page 210)

"digiTaL ScaLing (or aBnormaLiTieS)" (Page 215)

"Testing, QR Codes, and Datafication" (Page 218)

"6 In printing, the stereotype was a solid plate of metal that allowed for the consistent reproduction of typeface and images, not unlike how Ranga described his use of LaTex earlier." (Page 221)

"In some sense, this was precisely what the digital savior sought: a technocratic solution that erased the complexity of the past and the social stratifications that produced current inequities, while being able to determine and anticipate the categories through which to save those in need in the future." (Page 221)

"The Abnormalities of the Start-Up State" (Page 221)

"Krish was explicitly producing an imaginary in which two diferent ideas of reproduction are placed on opposite sides of the normal/abnormal divide: it was abnormal to have seventy-two Supriyas in a database, but it was not abnormal to have ten thousand students stereotyped to be in need of more math worksheets." (Page 223)

"But what struck me when hearing Krish was how he was building his own digital platform with Amazon Web Services functioning as its “backbone.” In some sense, Sahaayaka’s version of the help economy reproduced technocapitalist domination on a global scale, reorganizing how the help economy must function in the process. While Krish was concerned about ghost students and open-source software, he seemed completely unconcerned about the ghost of global cloud computing that underlay the entire process and perhaps subverted the moral efficacy of doing “help work” under the premise of digitally scaling." (Page 224)

"In this case, converting and privatizing the data appropriated from student work is understood as the best and most efective means for Sahaayaka and the state together to better the lives of children who otherwise would be left behind. However, the very process of datafication actually creates a situation in which the students who are generating so much data have almost no rights or control over their data. In fact, the only people who benefit from this data collection are those given the powerful role to implement change and intervene. What is “normalized,” then, is a global-digital neocolonial order that requires student data for the accumulation of ever more power to save." (Page 225)

"The Feeling of Cleanliness and the Measurement of Colonial Reproduction" (Page 230)

"In practice, the Swacch app also reproduced the category of the impoverished as those responsible for the lack of environmentally sustainable practices and as the core group that needed to be socially reengineered. As D. A. Ghertner has argued, the poor, lacking in social infrastructures (housing, sanitation, and so on), are the visible and obvious markers of uncleanliness.8 Even if their actual energy consumption in India is less than 1 percent of total energy consumption, they are considered a “nuisance,” aesthetically displeasing to the middle-class eye because they look “unclean” and practice such things as open defecation.9 If the poor would just learn to be clean, the logic goes, then India would be clean. It is not surprising, then, that a phone app on cleanliness was targeted at relatively poor rural children." (Page 231)

"Katherine Mayo’s (1927) Indophobic and racist Mother India, a text I have mentioned before. Central to Mayo’s critiques were the filthiness of Indians and Indian society: “How perfectly the habits of the Indian peoples favor the spread of the disease. . . . [D]irt, bad sanitation, confinement, lack of air and exercise, make a perfect breeding-place for the White Death. Between nine hundred thousand and one million persons, it is estimated, die annually of tuberculosis in India.”12" (Page 233)

"Caste Society and the Digital Politics of Purity and Pollution" (Page 234)

"Part IV Is Done: In Sum and What’s to Come" (Page 237)

"It’s worth a reminder that these types of technological innovations and integrations in the nonprofit sector are assumed to be ideal and important forms of care. But when we excavate under the surface of the screen, what becomes clear is that this kind of datafied help work can be far more fraught than meets the eye. Even as technologically mediated forms of help are seen as the only way to get the impoverished the help they need, in actuality, tech solutions are a process of neocolonial predation that relies on massive quantification, abstraction, and the ongoing categorization and movement of people’s data into the cloud. Those who stand to benefit from this kind of datafication are those we might expect: ngo leaders, state bureaucracies, and the big tech companies that need to make sure that everyone’s data continues to be under their control. Here it becomes more and more evident that the nonprofitindustrial complex is tethered to the big tech and national security apparatuses that shape current imperial relations." (Page 238)

"Endings make me nervous because I know that there is some expectation that I will end with a way forward and an answer to some version of the question of “Well, what, then, should we do?”: What should we do, for example, if the help economies are so profoundly colonial? I wish I knew. The fact that I don’t know frustrates the would-be savior in me. That person wants to be able to say with moral certitude that there is a “right” way forward. That person even wants to provide a five-part program that might save us partially because he knows that deep down inside it will give him pleasure and will massage his masculine ego." (Page 239)

"Conclusion: Against Saviorism" (Page 239)

"Neocolonial-cum-Neoliberal-cum-Neofascist Salvation" (Page 240)

"For me, these are the kinds of insights that ethnography, and a nervous ethnography especially, can reveal if we are willing to be so brave as to follow our nerves and excavate those everyday conditions of nervousness that aren’t already at the level of catastrophe but that can nevertheless lead to the places where we don’t want to go." (Page 242)

"Nearly every member of Sahaayaka whom I met on this journey came to work every day wanting to change India by figuring out better ways to help rural children. None of them is trying to do harm, and therefore this book is centered less on any individual person’s morality and more on the systems that produce them. In other words, the problem with Sahaayaka’s personnel is not really about some internal psychological state of extreme villainy; rather, they, like so many others I have met, have imbibed the illusion of (neo)liberalism’s promise of salvation." (Page 242)

"If Frantz Fanon recognized that a diferent, more humane future in the brown world required a form of extreme expunging of the values, ideologies, practices, and people associated with colonization, the liberal midcentury compromise promised that the brown world could find salvation and ascend if it just learned from, assimilated into, and embodied their masters’ technocratic teachings." (Page 242)

"But Ambedkar’s story also teaches us how nervousness is built into the liberal reformist efort because reformers refuse to reckon with or even acknowledge the material destruction and reconstruction required to produce a more equitable society. The result, inevitably, is instability, tension, nerves." (Page 243)

"“The joke I always make is that techno-capitalism puts people who have never taken the humanities in charge of humanity.”" (Page 243)

"Abdurahman’s joke takes me to Sahaayaka’s leadership, all of whom came from the world of computer science and engineering, had no training in any social science or humanities field, but had been given the keys to solving the problems of poverty through education." (Page 243)

"This turn to digitized technophilia is one of the sinister tricks of neocolonial modernity’s nervous condition because it at once promises salvation from its past colonial violence, while hiding so many neocolonial reconfigurations behind the slick veneer of the screen. This problem looms especially large because digital projects also double down on a (neo)liberal version of “equality for all” that invisibilizes all those power asymmetries that precede the moment of digital encounter." (Page 243)

"As such, the case I have presented here pushes against any simplistic “nationcentric” story by forcing us to see the Indian diaspora and those within the borders of the Indian nation-state within the same frame, as connected and shaped by intimate histories of, at minimum, India as a caste-colonial society, the United States as a settler colonial and imperial society, and Britain as a franchise colonial society growing out of the transatlantic slave trade.10" (Page 244)

"Annihilationist Impulses" (Page 245)

"Okay. We are at the end. What, then, should we do? When I try to answer this question, I think about my classroom and my students, both in India and in the United States, especially those who want to join an ngo. I think about this book and what they might take away from it if they read it. What I want them to take away is that there is no time to give up or be frozen in guilt. I want them to be able to sit with discomfort and recognize that their discomfort is a call to action. Whether they work within the help economies or not, they will still be living in a racial, gendered, and caste capitalist" (Page 245)

"world. There is no “outside,” and there is no “pure” position, and there will be work to be done no matter which life path they choose. What I want them to take away is that whatever their position is within this system, the system itself requires annihilation and a radical reimagining. Most important, I want them to extend their imagination beyond the very limited confines of the nonprofitindustrial complex to engage with the vast number of radical solidarity movements that already recognize the inseparability of (neo)liberalism and fascism and are working to create futures that don’t yet exist." (Page 246)

"I want my students to slowly but surely cultivate their annihilationist impulses. An annihilationist impulse refuses any romantic mythologies regarding salvation and embraces the labor-intensive, fraught, and ever-expanding solidarities and coalition building that might push us toward a world as yet to come." (Page 247)

"Therefore, what I think we require, as students and as people, are strategies to keep questioning our assumptions, to make us radically curious, and to unsettle the categories that we take for granted to characterize ourselves and Others.20 Here I am drawing on Yarimar Bonilla’s excellent insight that because we are all touched by colonial legacies, there is no way of finding our way to the pure “outside.” Instead, our task is to constantly denaturalize the colonial categories, logics, and institutions we have inherited and to use this process of unsettling to imagine something diferent." (Page 249)

"“it is good to think of life as always potentially in crisis, to keep asking the question: how to live?" (Page 250)

"This is why questions like how to live are questions that we cannot ask alone and that we cannot know the answers to already. Instead, such questions require collective study, collective questioning, collective learning, collective challenging of one another outside of the confines of our colonized institutional frameworks.25 This slow, hard work gets easier when we start to cultivate our annihilationist impulses and recognize that many more of us feel the agitations that come with the oppressive system we live in than we originally thought." (Page 250)

"“The more the people understand, the more vigilant they become, and the more they realize in fact that everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their solidarity, in recognizing their interests and identifying their enemies. The people understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the spoils from an organized protection racket.”" (Page 250)