136 Arjun Shankar On the Economies of Brown Salvation: Impoverishment, Assimilationist Imaginaries, and Dominant-Caste Capture in this ArticlE, I draw out some critical dimensions of the racial politics of brownness that emerge when analyzing from the vantage point of India and its diaspora. e study of global brownnesses is especially complicated because of a lack of recognition that “brown” as a racialized category is operative in places outside of the United States. In fact, controversies over brown, especially with regard to who is brown, continue into the present precisely because the term is tethered to German, Spanish, Portuguese, British, and American strands of racist discourse that have brought much of the colonial world under their remit in contradictory ways. At the same time, places in the brown world tend to be characterized through neo- Orientalist analyses that focus on “primordial” ethnic, linguistic, caste, or tribal identities. For example, in the case of India, Western scholarship has tended to fetishize the ancient Sanskrit texts and developed analytics tethered to a static understanding of caste and Hinduism. In e Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz (2020) sets about trying to capture the affective intimacies related to this vast and contradictory brown world. He writes, “Brownness . . . is the ontopoetic state . . . of a majority of those who exist, strive, and flourish within the vast trajectory of multiple and intersecting regimes of colonial violence” (122). 1 Muñoz is describing a capacious sense of the brown world that reflects a racialized affective geography associated with the social, cultural, economic, and political “intimacies” of those living on continents touched by colonialism. As importantly, this sense of brown is regionally specific, historically situ- ated, and shaped by particular migratory patterns. 2 erefore the brown