Shantanu Vidur Nevrekar

SHANTANU NEVREKAR, then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Banking on Community? Cooperative Banks, Caste, and Politics in Small-Town India,” supervised by Dr. Sharika Thiranagama. Cooperatives are economic associations based on democracy and collective ownership, often seen as alternatives to state and market-based economic institutions like corporations. However, in India, cooperatives — particularly credit societies and banks — have emerged within both state and non-state projects of development and financial inclusion. Even when formally democratic and open to all, cooperatives in urban India have emerged as aligned with particular caste and class networks. However, can forms of economic organization like cooperatives not just reflect, but also reconfigure, caste identities and class relations? Using data from 15 months of fieldwork in the small town of Ahmednagar in the state of Maharashtra in India, this dissertation interrogates how cooperatives negotiate identities and relations around caste and class in India. Analyzing data from interviews, participant observation, reports, documents, and other textual data, alongside photos and videos, the dissertation examines how identities and relations around caste and class have been formative to political economy, civil society, and development in India.