Digital Saviorism

Part 4 focuses on brown saviorism at the interface of digital proliferation. Each chapter in this part focuses on the ways that digital integration functions to (re)produce racialized division and allows brown saviors to accumulate ever more capital as they intervene in rural communities. Sahaayaka's excess value emerged as part of the powerful and totalizing imaginary of the digital as the solution to poverty in India. At the same time, the savarna diasporic Hindu has been perceived as having a preternatural capacity for technological innovation and therefore has taken on a leading role as the appropriate savior in this push toward digital versions of poverty alleviation. As Shankar shows in each of these chapters, Sahaayaka's digital solutions were never divorced from their historically constituted position. In fact, the digital future they anticipated had the potential to reinforce colonial, racial, postcolonial, postliberalization, and postautocratic structurings of help.