On the Economies of Brown Salvation: Impoverishment, Assimilationist Imaginaries, and Dominant-Caste Capture

This essay tackles the ontological distinctiveness of brown/ness by locating it within the (neo)colonially emplaced "economies of salvation." Although it is an underacknowledged aspect of the coloniality of power, colonial racial capitalism actually required an economy of salvation that demarcated racialized and gendered difference and hierarchy along the savior–saved binary. The essay elaborates on three ways that the economies of salvation structure the multivalent racial politics of brown/ness for dominant-caste Indians, both on the subcontinent and in its diaspora: (1) as impoverishment, (2) as assimilability, and (3) as (caste) capture. The "as" evinces the degree to which these three dimensions constitute the ontopoetic state that is brown/ness, producing some of its multivalent and contradictory affective intimacies.