genfromtxt has an additional skip_footer argument but you need to know total number of lines in your file.
Or you could read the whole file and then slice over the portion you want:
M = loadtxt (filename, delimiter=delimiter) [R1:R2+1,C1:C2+1]
Or
M = loadtxt (filename, delimiter=delimiter, usecols=range(C1,C2+1)) [R1:R2+1,:]
Update:
Following hpaulj suggestion you could also define a custom iterator and use that with genfromtxt (in which case you don't need to know the total number of lines in the file and you don't need to construct a bigger matrix first). For example:
class file_iterator ():
    def __init__ (self, filename, begin, end):
        self.file = open (filename)
        self.line_number = 0
        self.begin = begin
        self.end = end
    def __iter__ (self): return self
    def next (self):
        for line in self.file:
            self.line_number += 1
            if self.begin <= self.line_number <= self.end:
                return line
        raise StopIteration
And then use:
M = genfromtxt (file_iterator(filename, R1, R2), delimiter=delimiter, cols=range(C1,C2+1))