In Brown Saviors and Their Others Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period, while masking other operations of power behind the racial politics of global brownness. In India, these operations of power center largely on the transnational labor politics of caste. Ever attentive to moments of discomfort and complicity, Shankar develops a method of “nervous ethnography” to uncover the global racial hierarchies, graded caste stratifications, urban/rural distinctions, and digital panaceas that shape the politics of help in India. Through nervous critique, Shankar introduces a framework for the study of the global help economies that reckons with the ongoing legacies of racial and caste capitalism.

"Brown Saviors and their Others will appeal to scholars and students of development studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and of critical race studies. The nervous ethnography that characterizes it is sure to enrich ongoing debates about what it would mean for ethnography to truly break from its colonial and white supremacist past and about what it would mean to address social inequality outside of a savior mentality and within a framework that seeks to undo the racial and caste hierarchies that are facilitated by our current global capitalist system." - Ethnic and Racial Studies