Scholars of caste in India have long observed a central paradox: even as caste appears to weaken as a ritual hierarchy, it has become ever more publicly visible and instrumental in shaping access to resources and opportunities. This is especially true for upper castes, for whom caste has remained a durable basis of economic advantage. How are caste and capitalism co-constituted as socio-economic forms in India? How is value created and circulated under caste-based capitalism? This dissertation situates credit cooperatives as ethnographic objects to study how caste becomes valuable and exclusionary in everyday economic life. Cooperatives have been globally envisioned as alternatives to state- and market-led models of the economy, premised on mutual aid and democratic ownership. Yet they have also been central to community-based projects of capital accumulation. In India, cooperatives are a crucial part of the story of how castes have been materially and symbolically constituted as economic actors. My research draws on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork at five credit cooperatives and an agricultural market in Ahmednagar, a small town in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra.
Cooperatives emerge as sites where the pursuit of caste power and social mobility coincides with capital accumulation. In small-town India, they enable caste elite men — particularly among upper castes — to constitute the caste as a private site of belonging, protection, and mutual aid, and to access credit on terms more open to negotiation than formal banking. They are also significant arenas for projects of recognition, where being known and becoming well-known function as productive economic motivations. Thus, cooperatives allow upper castes and caste-elite men to convert social recognition into economic gain, while simultaneously foreclosing that same capacity for lower-caste women and men.
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