Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9781478025092.
This book is based on Arjun Shankar’s long-term fieldwork with an educational NGO, Sahayaaka, in the Indian state of Karnataka. Shankar highlights the blind spots of India’s “help economy” (9), drawing on the work of this NGO led by “brown saviors” (13), the dominant/upper-caste Hindus (diasporic or India-based) with credentials, privilege, and capital. Shankar’s argument is that NGO interventions perpetuate race, caste, and gender-based inequalities through a politics of “brownness” (11–15), embedded in the logic of global racial capitalism. Further, Shankar suggests that the “brown savior” armed with a “savior complex” (34–35) and economic, digital, and social capital leverages multiple hegemonies and resources to chart developmental pathways that do not decentre dominant-caste ideologies and values (2–5).
The book is divided into four parts, with saviorism as the connecting thread. Part 1 offers a conceptual and methodological grounding, while part 2 deals with the “interface of neocolonial race, caste, and gendered relations as they influence Sahayaaka’s praxis” (25). Part 3 details “racializing processes produced as the brown savior travels along the urban-rural interface” (26), and part 4 focuses on “brown saviorism as the interface of digital proliferation” (26). Throughout the book, Shankar’s writing is accessible, and the ethnography conveys the conundrums and contradictions of economic mobility, agricultural land dispossession, farmer suicide, educational justice, and upward social mobility in India. With a sensitive authorial presence, and a courageous divulging of his own background, Shankar shares the narratives of his interlocutors (students, NGO fieldworkers and mentors, as well leaders both male and female), who articulate their life experiences against a backdrop of historically produced and persisting structural inequalities. I appreciated Shankar’s honest reflections about the challenges of ethnographic research, mediated by his self-identification as a savarna anthropologist
I am in agreement with Shankar’s broader conclusion that it is limiting to imagine our present as being free from caste and race ideologies. I would add that where caste, race, and subjectivities and capital associated with these are consequential, it is vital to theorize the economic and socio-political circumstances under which these matter. Admittedly some dimensions of help economies in India and elsewhere (supported by global players, both Indian and others), are marked by deficiencies and failures, paradoxically entrenching existing structural inequalities, including caste-based ones in India. Further, as Shankar rightly notes, the reductionist binary of those in need of help versus those with capacity to help, emanating from the colonial, racialized logic of othering, is deeply flawed. I agree that this problematically constructs “recipients” of help as passive, lacking agency and ambition, outside the narratives determined by the logic of help economies.
However, I end this review by observing a moment of disquiet and a missed opportunity in the book. The former speaks to the strong homogenizing impulse that marks the book’s narrative, both ironic and impossible to overlook. Some examples are references to “the white people” (xv), “the white anthropologists” (xv), “savarna anthropologists” (xvi), “savarnas” and “brown saviors”—invocations which regrettably produce caricatures and erase critical internal differences. A careful unpacking of the category of “brown saviors” would have nuanced the book’s arguments about how dominant caste values and ideologies persist through their visions and mediations. Ironically, this essentialism extends to the NGO sector in India. Observations about the role of Sahayaaka’s savarna leadership in reproducing raced, gendered, and caste-based ideologies come across as the norm here, though without the requisite substantiation. Unfortunately, this flattened discourse does a disservice to the diversities and complexities of India’s NGO universe, not to mention the productive work that has been done/is being done in this domain.
The missed opportunity relates to key methodological and conceptual issues Shankar raises in the book. Shankar offers “nervous ethnography” as a methodological stance that privileges the affective dimension of fieldwork and the ethnographer’s lived experiences: the frustrations and discomforts (material, emotional, ethical, and political) and his or her “complicity” (12, 43) with the very power structures being critiqued. Notably, for at least half a century, anthropologists have problematized (not just aesthetically, but also rhetorically and performatively) the reflexivity, positionality, and complicity of ethnographers. The lived, embodied, emotionally charged nature of fieldwork (feminist scholarship being a forerunner here) has been problematized and acted upon, transforming ethnographic practices. Thus, while the descriptor “nervous ethnography” is Shankar’s invention, what this actually translates to is far from new. Also, the note that savarna anthropologists do not critique their “own” community is part of the larger problem of anthropological resistance to “studying up,” an issue that received attention from early on (Laura Nader, “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up,” US Office of Education 1972), including in feminist and decolonial scholarship. Shankar observes (xiii) that anthropologists need to be mindful about those being studied “returning [the] gaze and talking back” (Lanita Jacobs-Huey, “The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among ‘Native’ Anthropologists,” American Anthropologist 104(3): 791–804, 2002). But this is not a new problem tied to the context of a digitally connected world. A famous early example from 1955 saw Lepani Watson, a Trobriand Islander, challenge Bronislaw Malinowski’s research on the “system of clans and chiefs” in the Trobriand Islands. Privileging his membership in the community, Watson noted that “Malinowski was in error,” offering an alternative “account he had written himself,” sharing “the facts as they really are” (Murray Groves, “Correspondence: Trobriand Island Clans and Chiefs,” Man 189–91: 164, 1956). Given that the issues raised by Shankar have a long history of visibility in anthropological scholarship, I would have liked to see how Shankar’s own interventions might reconfigure these debates further and lead to even more edified practices.
The book will certainly inspire impassioned debates, and perhaps even produce polarized responses. Precisely for this reason the book holds intellectual and pedagogical value, especially in anthropology and South Asian studies. It can stimulate much-needed debates around the book’s arguments about India’s help economies being driven by “brown saviors” who are key actors in the larger global, racial, capitalist universe, and how their work entrenches casteist agendas and power asymmetries.
Vineeta Sinha
National University of Singapore, Singapore