Shantanu Nevrekar

Shantanu Nevrekar is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. His research is based on an ethnography of credit cooperatives in the state of Maharashtra in India. Cooperatives are associations based on the principles of membership, democracy, and collective ownership. Credit cooperatives can be exclusively governed and used only by the shareholders/members of these associations. In India, credit cooperatives have been integral to diverse projects of development and financial inclusion. Often, they operate along existing social networks, like caste, workplace, and neighbourhood/village.

Shantanu explores how these member-owned organizations negotiate caste, occupation and identity in contemporary India. Engaging with the directors, employees, and members of these cooperatives, and tracing their work and life more broadly, he studies how they each approach debt, markets, and social life. Analyzing the legal and bureaucratic frameworks within which cooperatives operate, he examines their place in the cultural milieu and political economy of contemporary India. With this, Shantanu is broadly interested in studying the intersecting lives of community and economy in India

His theoretical interests also include histories of capitalism and economic thought, colonialism and postcolonialism, anthropology of state and bureaucracy, and caste studies. Before coming to Stanford, Shantanu completed an M.A. in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and an M. Phil. in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. 

His doctoral research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Stanford King Center on Global Development, and Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He was formerly co-founder and co-coordinator of the South Asia Working Group at Stanford. You can find more information about it here.